Hollywood-themed casino for Toledo

TOLEDO, Ohio - During a post-election news conference Wednesday morning after Ohio voters passed Issue 3, Penn National Gaming said they plan to build a Hollywood-themed casino in East Toledo.

The Glass City's casino will be called Hollywood Casino Toledo and will be modeled after the Hollywood Indiana Casino in Lawrenceburg, Ind. Hollywood Casino could open as early as 2012.

Hollywood Indiana Casino is located 30 miles west of Cincinnati on the north bank of the Ohio River in southern Indiana.

"We are smiling from ear-to-ear and delighted to get to work and roll up our sleeves here in Toledo and the gateway of Rossford," said Eric Schippers of Penn National Gaming.

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The Hollywood Toledo will be built at 1968 Miami Street overlooking the Maumee River and on the Toledo-Rossford city line.

Before the facility can be built, the State of Ohio has to create laws for the new casinos to abide by. It could take six to 10 months before dirt could be moved.

"By working with the city of Toledo and city of Rossford collectively, to make you guys proud of what will be behind us in the future," said Tim Wilmott, Penn National Gaming.

The casino is expected to create 1,200 permanent full time jobs and around 600 construction jobs for the greater Toledo region. Millions of dollars will be pumped into area school districts and surrounding cities.

"We'll see a $250 million investment here that will have a ripple effect," said Toledo Mayor Carty Finkbeiner. "My understanding that it will be $300 million that will help jump start the economy."

Also jumping in the victory party was the Greater Toledo Convention and Visitors Bureau. Visitors bureau President and Chief Executive David Nolan unveiled a new campaign involving the casino.

"Starting in December, we'll be doing a year-long national media campaign," Nolan said. "And, as you can see the casino is already prominently on ads in 2010."

Besides those praising the project, there are still skeptics. Many parents and a member of the Rossford School Board who showed up at the news conference. The unidentified Rossford board member said the Rossford community is concerned about the district's students being within walking distance of the new casino.

Schippers and Wilmott said Penn National Gaming plans to have a sit-down meeting with the Rossford school board to discuss their concerns.

Penn National Gaming will also control the casino in Columbus. It's name will also be a Hollywood-themed casino and will be located in the Arena District near the Nationwide Arena. A combined investment between the Glass City and Columbus casinos will be an estimated $600 million.

Wilmott said the 300,000-square-foot Hollywood Columbus Casino site will employ 2,000. Penn National is aiming for a 2012 grand opening, the same as Toledo.

Cleveland officials are debating where a deluxe-style casino will be built. There are nine proposed sites where the Cleveland casino could be placed, including Public Square, across the street from Quicken Loans Arena and Progressive Field, on the banks of the Cuyahoga River, or on the city's near west side off West Third Street and Carnegie Avenue.

The Queen City's casino is in the Broadway Commons district, a site once proposed for the Great American Ballpark. The Cincinnati casino is expected to hold up to 5,000 slot machines in a space one-and-a-half times the size of a typical Walmart Supercenter.

The Queen City's newest planned casino will compete with three other casinos in southern Indiana, including Hollywood Indiana.

Republican state lawmakers unhappy with the vote began work immediately on a 2010 ballot measure, however. State Rep. Clyde Evans said he plans a constitutional amendment that makes changes to the terms of the casino deal, including increasing the tax rate from 33 percent to 60 percent. That measure would need approval by a Legislature where political control is mixed.

Dennis Forst, a gaming industry analyst for KeyBanc Capital Markets in Los Angeles, also predicted there will be lawsuits forthcoming that delay the plan. He expects casino operators to turn their sights now to Kentucky, a lone casino holdout in the region.

Penn National officials enthusiastically pushed the Ohio facilities' benefits. They pledged to assuage the concerns of their rivals, work cooperatively with restaurant and hotel operators worried about competition, and wow city planners with architectural renderings.

Penn National partnered with Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert in an expensive ballot campaign that touted the jobs casinos in Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo would bring to a state where unemployment has topped 10 percent.

After a campaign that topped 2008's $40 million in presidential campaign spending, the pro-casino Ohio Jobs & Growth Committee turned around an historically anti-gambling state that had rejected expanded gambling four times in the past 20 years. The pro-casino campaign spent $21 for every yes vote.

Victory came despite warnings from the opposing TruthPAC, backed by MTR Gaming Inc. chairman Jeffrey Jacobs, that the jobs numbers were exaggerated and the lengthy constitutional amendment had other problems.

U.S. Sen. George Voinovich vowed to "be their conscience" and hold casino operators to their jobs promises. He predicted casinos would take a particularly heavy toll on Cleveland, a national poverty leader and a city where he was once mayor.

"I am terribly disappointed," Voinovich said in a statement. "As a result of the passage of Issue 3, there will be a great deal of pain and suffering in Ohio. I feel for the families of those who will experience casinos for the first time in their lives and, once lured in, will become addicted to gambling."

KeyBanc's Forst said economic benefits of Ohio casinos will be mixed.

"It'll certainly help Ohio's economy, through the tax dollars and the jobs and keeping the money in the borders of the state," Forst said. "On a regional basis, I'm not sure it does anything at all, because whatever is gained by Ohio is potentially lost to Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania and West Virginia."

A newly released report by the Indiana Legislative Services Agency predicted that state would be hard hit by casinos in Ohio, losing $93 million in gambling taxes based on revenues in the first year alone. Analyst Joseph Greff at J.P. Morgan categorized the Ohio initiative as a "mild negative" for the southern Indiana casino industry.

Michigan tourism leaders were also keeping close watch on behalf of Detroit, where casinos bring in $1.3 billion a year with the help with thousands of Ohio gamblers.

MTR Gaming Inc., which operates the popular Mountaineer Casino & Resort over the border in West Virginia, was a big loser in Tuesday's election. Jacobs spent $6 million on his aggressive campaign against the ballot measure in hopes of protecting MTR's interests both out of state and in Columbus, where it owns a struggling horse track.

Gambling industry expert Jeffrey Hooke, of Hooke Associates, said Ohio casino licenses could have commanded from $350 million in Toledo to $700 million in Cleveland if they had been competitively bid. The constitutional amendment calls for collecting $50 million per license.

(AP Political Writer Mike Smith in Indianapolis and AP Writer Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus contributed to this report)