Fight for a Citi Field casino heats up, as a state Senator stands in its way

NEW YORK — Billionaire New York Mets owner Steve Cohen wants a metaphorical license to print money by snagging one of the state’s available casino licenses. A left-leaning state senator is standing in his way — even helping craft a recently-released poll that reflects poorly on the gaming bid.

The feud between the hedge fund manager and Jessica Ramos escalated this week, with the Queens Democrat criticizing how Cohen has tried to win her support. Meanwhile two polls offered conflicting accounts of local support for the proposed gaming facility.

“It’s hard to just allow a billionaire to prance into my district and decide what goes on our public land,” Ramos said in an interview with POLITICO.

Cohen needs Ramos to sponsor a state bill handing over city parkland — which the parking lot around the Mets’ Citi Field technically is — for private development. But he and Ramos are nearing the politician’s self-imposed mid-May deadline to make a decision, and the dueling polls suggest they are far from a deal.

On Monday, Ramos promoted an anonymously-funded private poll that showed 75 percent of her constituents don’t want a casino in their neighborhood. The poll was first reported on by news outlet THE CITY, and Ramos declined to share its full results with POLITICO.

She refused to say who funded her poll, just describing it as “an anonymous donor of mine” that paid the polling firm Slingshot Strategies directly. She said she “approved of the questions.”

So Cohen’s team is countering with its own private poll, conducted just days after Ramos’ in mid-March, which claims to show that 75 percent of her constituents actually want the casino development once they hear positive things about the bid.

Ramos said she wasn’t aware of Cohen’s poll — which also asked her constituents if they’d be less likely to support her in an election if she opposed the project. “Now you can add the poll that you just told me about [to] the things that they do wrong,” Ramos said.

Slingshot Strategies lists two competing casino companies, Resorts World and Bally’s, among the ''past & current clients'' on its website, as well as Metropolitan Public Strategies, a political strategy and communications firm with a lobbying component that is working on both bids. The firm’s CEO Neal Kwatra didn’t respond to a request for comment.

That poll’s questions seemed worded in a way to maximize opposition against “lucrative private development for billionaires,” as it tested messaging for Phoenix Meadows, a longshot proposal to build a grassy park on the parking lot, rather than a casino.

While other local politicians back the casino bid, Ramos has withheld support, saying she wants more input from residents of her district, which includes the lot and nearby neighborhoods.

“This is such a consequential decision. … It’s about generations and generations of neighbors to come,” Ramos said. “And I want to be able to have all the information that I can.” But Cohen’s team, she said, “they haven’t wanted to be my partner in that.”

A spokesperson for the bid pushed back, saying the team has done more than 15 community workshops and has offered a $1 billion community benefit package, if the casino bid gets picked and built.

"For more than three years, we've been working closely with local leaders and the community to solicit input to create a shared vision for Metropolitan Park,” a spokesperson said, referring to the casino development’s name. “This project represents the feedback we’ve received over the course of hundreds of meetings and thousands of conversations and is why the more the people who live and work in Queens see and hear about Metropolitan Park, the more supportive they are."

The bidders recently won over New York City Council member Francisco Moya, whose support is also critical to the project. But Ramos bristled after Moya announced it in a press release, it was seen as an effort to pressure the Senator to follow him.

Cohen’s team has been working to appeal to her for years, in part by getting labor unions to pressure Ramos to support the bid. Lately, that lobbying has “toned down,” Ramos said. “I don’t know. I think they’re figuring out their strategy.”

Ramos’ support for the parkland is not the only major hurdle.

Eleven bidders in the city and its suburbs are competing for three gaming licenses. State regulators announced last month they won’t start accepting formal bids until at least 2025, but failing to secure Ramos’ support for a parkland bill before the legislative session ends in June would be considered a near fatal blow to the Queens bid.

Ramos is still talking to Cohen’s team — she and her two children accepted an invite to be on the field before the Mets’ home opener last week, for example. But that doesn’t mean a deal is done.

“I’ve been in situations where you know the member is playing hardball but they’re going to get to the finish line,” said an operative familiar with the conversations between Ramos and the casino team. “But that’s not it with her.”