To help persuade lawmakers, Genting promises it can have a casino up and running inside the Omni center by next year, resulting in 5,000 new jobs and $100 million in tax revenue. The company claims it will create 45,000 temporary and permanent jobs once the entire Resorts World Miami project is completed.
"I do support the casino resort because it will create so many jobs," Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez says. "It's a game changer."
Michael McElroy
Joe Carollo warns that Genting's plans for the Miami Herald property will gobble up public land.
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His Miami counterpart, Tomás Regalado, also backs Genting. Carollo, who ran the city from 1998 to 2001, says Regalado's recent weeklong trip to Taiwan should raise questions. For one, the trip took place the same time the deal to buy the Herald was announced. For another, Regalado was accompanied by senior policy advisor Mikki Canton.
Canton is a lawyer who worked on a failed petition to legalize gambling in 1995. Her name also came up in the corruption trial of disgraced former Florida House Speaker Bo Johnson, who was convicted in 1999 of tax evasion. During his trial, it was revealed he had accepted $250,000 to work on a gambling petition from Bally's Casino Holdings Inc., Canton's client at the time. A witness against Johnson testified that Canton was present for an after-hours meeting in Johnson's legislative office to discuss the drive.
"It seems odd that Regalado would take someone to Taiwan who knows how to get things done for the gambling industry in Tallahassee," Carollo says.
Reached by telephone, Canton says she went on the trip as part of a $3,000-per-month contract to advise Regalado on expanding trade and economic development between Miami and Asian cities. She laughs off the ex-mayor's conspiracy claim. "That is just silly," Canton scoffs. "I have never met or spoken to anyone from Genting."
Ray Mou, executive director of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Coral Gables, informs New Times that his government treated Regalado and Canton. "We covered their airfare on China Airlines and their hotel accommodations," Mou says. "During the trip, we had fruitful discussions about establishing a stronger relationship."
But Carollo is not the only community leader to raise a cautionary alarm about Genting's intentions. Supporters of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts have formed a nonprofit to develop a master plan that, if approved, would ensure that Resorts World Miami or any similar project complements the neighborhood. The group includes Regalado's predecessor Manny Diaz and Jeb Bush's former partner Armando Codina, who told the Herald the casino resort could create a traffic nightmare. He also opined that "things don't necessarily flourish in the shadow of casinos."
And former Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez, now a county commissioner, says the city would be better served by creating an open public space similar to the one along Lake Shore Drive in Chicago that would connect the performing arts center district to Bicentennial Park. "Miami will be the most exciting global city because of its natural, cultural, and human assets, not because we have casinos," Suarez says.
Of course, much of Carollo's theorizing could be apocryphal. Kuala Lumpur — site of Genting's headquarters — and Taipei are 2,000 miles apart, so Regalado's trip might have indeed been irrelevant to the casino plan. No deal for public land has even been considered. And Herald managing editor Rick Hirsch defends the newspaper's two dozen Genting stories in the past five months as fair and balanced: "There is a real spotlight on how we cover Genting. We take that very seriously."
Nevertheless, Carollo is gearing up for a counterproposal. "Why can't the city build its own casino?" Carollo says, turning away from the Omni to head back to his home in Coconut Grove. "Promise the county a percentage and put out a request for proposals. At least that would ensure that a bulk of the revenue actually stays in Miami instead of funneling back to Malaysia."
