Genting's NY casino plans upset environmental/local activists

Malaysia’s Genting Berhad has got itself in strife over plans for a casino and entertainment complex in a woodland area outside New York City.
A New York Times story says conservationists are in revolt over the damage they fear such a huge gambling mecca would do to the pristine, publicly owned woodlands surrounding the Tuxedo site.
The site is 44 miles up state from Manhattan in the middle of a forest area which became a state park after a long battle by environmentalists and local activists. Genting plans a complex “with 1,000 hotel rooms and over-the-top entertainment for every taste and season: theaters, restaurants, ski runs, formal gardens, zip lines — even a refurbished Renaissance village,” the paper said.
According to the NYT, the company has committed to invest at least US$1.5 billion in its development. “It has offered the state government a lump-sum license fee of US$450 million — more than six times the US$70 million requirement. It has promised to build a US$30 million highway interchange to bring visitors to its front doors.
It adds that Genting’s plan for a complex in the Tuxedo area, a “$1.5 billion proposal for a resort employing 4,000 people, surrounded on three sides by Sterling Forest, is $500 million bigger than the second-largest bid out of the 16 received by the New York State Gaming Commission. That $1 billion bid — in another Orange County municipality, Montgomery, to the north of the forest — is also backed by Genting.
Residents and environmentalists from Tuxedo, have organized opposition claiming “it’ll be the undoing of a lot of our work,” said Mary Yrizarri, 82, widely regarded as the matriarch of the decades-long movement to turn what was once a privately owned forest, where developers wanted to build housing, into a 22,000-acre state park instead., the NYT report said.
Environmentalists have filed a lawsuit claiming that the town improperly rezoned the area for a casino.
The Natural Resources Defense Council and the New Jersey Sierra Club have come out against the project, saying it threatens the watershed that supplies drinking water for both states. “It’s inappropriate to now say that they’re going to put the equivalent of a new city in the middle of the forest,” said one critic.

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