Oneida nation to expand Point Place Casino in New York

The Oneida Indian Nation announced Thursday it will expand one of its three casinos in Central New York, amid financial struggles across Upstate New York’s non-Indian gambling industry.

Point Place Casino in Bridgeport, Madison County, will increase the size of its gaming floor and add 100 slot machines, bringing the total to 600. The expansion, which will also include a dealer school and administrative offices, is scheduled to be complete by late spring 2020, the Oneidas said.

Point Place, at 450 State Route 31 near the Onondaga County line, opened in March 2018 as the Oneidas’ third full-service casino. The others are the much larger Turning Stone Resort Casino in Verona, Oneida County, and the Yellow Brick Road Casino in Chittenango, also near the Madison-Onondaga county line.

“We are grateful to our guests and employees who have made Point Place Casino such a success, and we are excited to provide an even better experience moving forward," Oneida Indian Nation Representative Ray Halbritter said in a statement.

Point Place adds the slots to its existing array of amenities, which include table games, a recently opened sports betting lounge, plus restaurants, bars and a bakery. Its expansion comes as the new non Indian-nation owned commercial casinos that have opened across Upstate New York in the past three years have failed to meet the revenue projections they provided the state when seeking their licenses.

Three of them — del Lago Resort Casino near Waterloo in the Finger Lakes, Resorts World Catskills near Monticello in Sullivan County, and Tioga Downs west of Binghamton — have cut back the number of slot machines they operate, as reported by Syracuse. In addition, the Monticello Raceway, an older “racino” operated by the same company as the bigger Catskill casino, eliminated all of its slots earlier this year. However, they all have operated more slots than the relatively small Point Place.

Under a gaming compact it signed in 2013, the Oneida Nation pays the state 25% of its slot revenues in exchange for exclusive rights to operate casinos in a 10-county region of Central New York. The non-Indian casinos pay more: del Lago, for example, pays 37% of slot revenues, and 10% of table games and sports betting revenues. Resorts World Catskills pays 39% of slot revenues and 10% of table games and sports bets.

Del Lago has had its credit rating downgraded and been given a “negative” financial outlook by Moody’s Investor Service for two years in a row. In August, founding partner Thomas Wilmot of Rochester sold his 50 percent share of the casino to the other 50-percent stakeholder, Peninsula Pacific LLC of California.

Resorts World Catskills, the state’s largest casino, considered filing bankruptcy earlier this year before its owner, Empire Resorts, agreed to a takeover by its majority stakeholder, a Malaysian gaming and real estate group. The casino reported $400 million in debts this summer.

Many experts have said Upstate New York casino industry has become too crowded: the new commercial casinos, which also include Rivers Casino Resort in Schenectady, compete with seven full-service Indian casinos plus many racinos, racetracks and OTB parlors across the state.