Developments Worth Watching

Editorial

There’s a new pastime in the City of Homes these days — watching the South End of the city become transformed before our eyes as the $950 million MGM Springfield takes shape.

It’s hard to take your eyes off it, really, and the scene changes almost every week and certainly every month. Those working in the office towers with windows facing south — especially those in the upper floors — have it better than the rest of us, obviously, but even the views from ground level are captivating.

As intriguing as this development is to watch, there’s another one to keep your eye on, at least figuratively, because it’s happening roughly 100 miles away in the city of Everett.

This would be Wynn Development’s $2.5 billion casino also starting to take shape. The story there, though, is whether that ‘Wynn’ name will actually appear on the tinted glass hotel tower (odds are it certainly won’t), and if not, what name will.

In case you missed it, Steve Wynn is the now former CEO of Wynn Resorts. He stepped down amid sexual harassment allegations and sold all his stock in the company. That development is bad enough for the company, but it seems that there may be other shoes still to drop — including speculation that such claims of harassment were dismissed or ignored by leaders at the company.

A state investigation is pending, and there is already speculation that Wynn Resorts may not wait for that probe to play itself out before attempting to sell the Everett casino to another player within the industry.

And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what the most logical candidate would be — MGM Resorts. In fact, the Boston Globe reported recently that MGM has approached Wynn officials about buying not only the Everett casino but the entire company.

Like we said, this is a development worth watching, and for many reasons.

The most obvious is that state law does not allow a casino company to own two licenses in the Commonwealth. So that might put MGM in a position where it may be deciding between a Springfield casino and a Boston casino.

Logic dictates that the one in Boston, further from the Connecticut casinos and closer to larger population centers, would be the more lucrative option for the casino giant.

Mayor Domenic Sarno told the Boston Globe that he is confident that the city has “protections” in its agreement with MGM, but that he didn’t want to speculate on what the company might do.

Let’s hope these protections are real and substantial, because while what’s being built in Springfield’s South End is impressive it’s the name behind it that is far more so.

Yes, another casino operator could acquire the Springfield property and operate it in an effective profitable fashion. But the city would likely lose something real and substantial if there was another name over the door to the property.

All of this is speculation, of course, but ever since Steve Wynn got caught up in the #MeToo movement, there has been no shortage of that in the Bay State. And there will be more of it in the weeks and months to come.

Like we said, this development, like the construction in the South End, bears watching.