Things are starting to look up in Atlantic City, and Gov. Chris Christie is embracing it.
The governor showed up to a press conference announcing the planned Hard Rock Hotel and Casino on the boardwalk, which will occupy the tower left vacant by the closing of the Trump Taj Mahal in October— the fifth and most recent Atlantic City casino to close its doors since 2014.
Hard Rock’s reopening of the shuttered tower was cited in a report last week by the South Jersey Economic Review, which said the city is “digging out from a lost decade.”
It also comes as a state takeover of the city — led by Christie confidant Jeff Chiesa and spearheaded in the Legislature by Senate President Stephen Sweeney — is underway despite fierce local resistance. The state is in court with the city’s police and fire unions over layoffs and unilateral changes to their contracts.
“Before Steve [Sweeney] and I started working together in 2010, only easy things were being done in Atlantic City. And that was not only from the state level but from the local level as well,” Christie said as Atlantic City Mayor Don Guardian, an opponent of the state takeover, looked on from the audience. “Hard Rock’s willingness now to come in and invest in Atlantic City shows you that they appreciate the hard things that have been done to restructure the city and to make it a place where investing makes sense.”
It was a celebratory atmosphere at the Hard Rock Café at the casino’s base, where a Springsteen cover band played and where E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt mingled.
“It’s always easy to say yes to people and give them what they want, and then you wind up with what we had,” Sweeney said. “We made tough decisions. We made the right decisions. And Atlantic City is alive and well.”
Hard Rock is partnering with developers who are politically connected in New Jersey: Jack Morris and the Jingoli family. Hard Rock CEO Jim Allen is an Atlantic County native. The company is promising 1,000 construction jobs and 3,000 permanent jobs when the casino is slated to open in 2018. The project is expected to cost more than $300 million.
“We recognize that there are those who are still a little skeptical about what the next step is,” Allen said. “We’ve closed on the project and funding is in place to move forward. So we are out designing, we are moving forward.”
Christie ducked out of the press conference early. As he talked to staff outside of his SUV, a reporter from a New York City television station tempered the good news by asking the governor if he had anything to say to NJ Transit commuters, who have been enduring delays since a derailment Monday at Penn Station in New York. NJ Transit has suffered funding cuts under Christie, and this was its second minor derailment at Penn Station in two weeks [the first involved an Amtrak train]. The delays have also provided a stark reminder of the state’s outdated infrastructure and Christie’s 2010 decision to cancel a new rail tunnel into New York City.
Christie ignored the reporter’s question.