The casino town hall is now history. Here's what went down and how it may affect Petersburg's future

PETERSBURG – Now that the five developers bidding for Petersburg’s casino business have pleaded their cases in the court of public opinion – also known as Sunday’s town hall meeting at the Petersburg Public Library – it's time to look back and assess the takeaways from that three-and-a-half-hour session.

What questions were answered? What did we learn? What light did they shed on the role Petersburg would play in Virginia’s burgeoning casino? Is a Maryland-based grocer really going to be the anchor of Sycamore Grove?

Well, maybe not that last point, even though it was a clear mic-drop moment and led to almost instantaneous denial by the city as to its credibility. Still, let’s hit some of the high points of Sunday’s town hall, both intended and unintended:

South Petersburg could be very casino friendly

Up until Sunday, everyone seemed to focus on Wagner Road as being Ground Zero for a casino. It’s wide open, it’s shovel-ready and you can throw a rock from it and hit Interstate 95. Wagner Road had been Petersburg’s casino calling card ever since former Sen. Joe Morrissey launched Petersburg’s flirtation with the industry after Richmond voters tanked a 2021 referendum.

The Cordish Companies, Petersburg’s vendor of choice last year, based its $1.4 billion mixed-use development proposal on that property. Based on its presentation Sunday, Wagner Road continues to be the one Cordish is content to dance with.

But did you know there are several other prime locations in that end of town on which the other vendors are willing to wager?

Bally’s Corporation thinks Rives Road at Interstate 95 is a great place to have a casino. Petersburg already is looking to reboot already busy traffic patterns on both sides of Rives Road’s bridge across I-95. What better way to christen that infrastructure improvement than with a multi-million-dollar investment such as the one Bally’s could make, right?

Penn National Gaming thinks its Hollywood Casino brand would go nicely along a stretch of Frontage Road between Rives and Wagner roads because after all, it’s called “Frontage Road” for fronting I-95. It screams “visibility.”

Rush Street Gaming believes a location on County Drive is a great spot to put its second Rivers Casino in Virginia. The location is very close to County Drive’s intersection with Wagner Road, which has a cloverleaf interchange off I-95. It’s also about a mile from a cloverleaf interchange with Interstate 295. It also carries the southeastern portion of U.S. Route 460, an important corridor between Petersburg and Tidewater ... and a solid link to Portsmouth, the site of Rivers’ inaugural venture into Virginia gambling.

The Warrenton Group is attracted to South Crater Road near Walmart as the “southern gateway” for its two-pronged proposed development. Walmart is a proven traffic-driver for just about any locality where a store resides. South Crater Road returned to business prominence in Petersburg after so many years of dormancy once Walmart set up shop. It only makes sense to put two proven traffic-drivers together, right?

If anything, the presentations showed us just how valuable the southern end of Petersburg can be from an economic standpoint. While we all know that only one location will be chosen, Sunday’s town hall unlocked many possibilities for other major businesses to consider when looking at Petersburg. If it was good enough to be considered for a destination entertainment resort, imagine how well it would do if, say, Buc-ee's were to go there.

If slots don’t go there, some other business could be slotted in.

Related: Here is a timeline of Sunday's casino town hall meeting in Petersburg

Pride in local ownership

One of the common themes among each presentation Sunday was enhancing pride in Petersburg. Each vendor spoke of community involvement, of community stakeholding, even community ownership.

A casino for Petersburg would not bring a Las Vegas or Atlantic City feel to the city. That casino would reflect the fabric of Petersburg, its history, its culture.

Each vendor promoted ties to Petersburg. Warrenton Group touted its 100% minority-owned status as the perfect complement to Petersburg’s almost 80% minority population. The president and CEO of Southlands Casino in West Memphis, Arkansas, talked about how West Memphis mirrored Petersburg demographically and how the mayor of West Memphis told him that his city basically “rebuilt” around the casino.

Bruce Smith – Norfolk native, NFL Hall of Famer and a co-developer with Cordish – promised that 50% of the ownership of Cordish’s casino development would be minority. "Let's score a win together,” he told the audience.

Ameet Patel, a Bally’s senior vice president, spoke over a PowerPoint presentation of what Bally’s envisioned its Petersburg property to look like. Patel said that while it may resemble some of the company’s other locations, “if you look into every corner, you will see Petersburg.”

Things get a little chippy

There indeed was an underlying theme of community prosperity and a dose of self-congratulations from each of the vendors toward the others for expressing interest in a smaller Virginia city such as Petersburg.

However, when it was Bally’s turn at the podium, you could sense a paradigm shift in the tone – less cordial, more competitive.

Christopher Jewett, Bally’s senior vice president for corporate development, threw down the gauntlet without specifically naming his counterparts.

“We’re not in the business of selling pretty pictures of pipe dreams,” Jewett said. He then went on to say that of the five vendors, Bally’s was the only one who could prove it was not coming to Petersburg to supplement close-in operations.

“We will have direct local ownership,” Jewett said. “We will have no conflict-of-interest nearby. Petersburg deserves an asset that put them on the map.”

That “conflict-of-interest" appeared to be a dig at Rush Street Gaming, whose Rivers Casino Portsmouth is 76 miles away from Petersburg. But Jewett later expanded that to include the others and their relative proximity to Petersburg – Rush Street and Penn National Gaming in West Virginia, Cordish in Maryland and Warrenton in Washington, D.C.

“We have no properties within a four-hour drive of Petersburg,” Jewett said.

Later in the presentation, Patel continued that competitive tone.

“We’re not telling you what we will do for Petersburg. We’ll tell you what we have done [in the industry],” he said.

The chippy talk spilled over into the question-and-answer session with residents.

After Warrenton Group chief of staff Bandele McQueen responded to a query about what the group planned to do for its northern gateway of Pocahontas Island, Cordish’s director of diversity, equity and inclusion took the mic to offer "a slightly contrary view” as he called it.

“When you’re looking to do a development within a city like this, you must create a critical mass of energy,” Ed Evans said. “By splitting your project over two different areas, you know, that would make me nervous. What we’re proposing on that 90-acre site is creating a whole retail-residential-casino entertainment district destination in a location that is not going to drive people through back yards or residential communities or high schools or churches.”

What’s next?

With the town hall in the rear-view mirror, the onus of the casino future now shifts into the hands of state and local lawmakers.

Sen. Lashrecse Aird, D-Petersburg, who hosted the town hall, told The Progress-Index she will carry feedback from the meeting into Wednesday’s reconvened session of the General Assembly to take up Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s vetoes and amendments to the more than 1,000 bills legislators sent him in the 2024 session.

One of those was Senate Bill 628, Aird’s legislation setting up the casino referendum in Petersburg for this November. Youngkin wants House of Delegates-generated language removed that would require a second Assembly vote on the referendum either during a regular or special session. Aird has endorsed the recommendation and said she will include town hall feedback to persuade her colleagues to sign off on Youngkin’s amendment.

Should that happen, the burden shifts totally to Petersburg not just to choose a vendor but to get the referendum ready for the ballot and the political debate over its pros and cons to begin.

City Manager March Altman told The Progress-Index that while the city has each proposal spelled out in the bids they submitted, that does not mean City Council would come back at its April 16 meeting with a choice.

“This is the first time we are hearing what they have to say, and obviously we have questions that will need to be answered before making the decision,” Altman said.

No commitment to a timetable was given, but council should be picking the vendor sometime in the coming weeks. A sooner-than-later choice would also help drive the narratives of support and opposition heading into November.

Bill Atkinson (he/him/his) is an award-winning journalist who covers breaking news, government and politics. Reach him at batkinson@progress-index.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @BAtkinson_PI.

This article originally appeared on The Progress-Index: Takeaways from the casino town hall in Petersburg