Tony Hanna

My name is Tony Hanna, and I am the Executive Director of the Redevelopment Authority of the City of Bethlehem and have been for the past eight years. Before that I spent 12 years as Director of Community and Economic Development for the City, as well. I’ve got about a 20-year career here in the City.

I think the debates about the casino were really centered around 2 things. What Bethlehem was, how everyone perceived the city, with its religious founding. People felt that introducing something like gaming was almost anathema to the community's soul. The city administration, the mayor, myself, and others who 00:01:00were involved in the community development, felt that if preservation goals really wanted to be maintained at the Bethlehem Steel site, this thing had to be placed in the context of not just the city of Bethlehem, but also the context of redeveloping and preserving some of the history of the former Bethlehem Steel site; there was a lot of debate about that as well. There were some people who said just tear it all down, it brings back bad memories, that it's just a symbol of a failed company- despite the fact that it was a company that had been around for almost 100 years and was an integral part of what made Bethlehem, Bethlehem.

Back in 1999 the Bethlehem Steel Corporation helped the city of Bethlehem to 00:02:00craft something called a Tax-Incremental Financing District (TIFD). You take your base real estate taxes, and in our case it was almost zero because Bethlehem Steel was closed, and then any new increment of real estate tax would be thrown into the fund and could be used for reinvestment.

Infrastructure certainly is one of the key things in tax increment financing districts. They have to be created with a reason: number one, it was site remediation because it was a brownfield site. The second reason was that there was no infrastructure there because it was an industrial site that didn't have a road network. It did have an internal road network but not one that you could then introduce the public on to. As part of the redevelopment we built a new road network, created a new street, First Street, recreated Second Street, and 00:03:00then redid Third Street, added new parking lots, lighting, power, sewer water, and all the other infrastructure that is necessary.

Instead of having zero taxes generated where the casino sits, it's almost 16 million dollars a year in taxes and 85% of that has stayed in the fund and the redevelopment authority administered the TIFF fund, and used the money to invest in infrastructure and in the BethWorks site in the form of SteelStacks and the creation of this cultural campus that could essentially balance off what was happening at the Sands Casino.

We believed that we needed more. More than just a gaming site there. It’s a large site. And so the other aspects of the site plan were to try to introduce housing, other commercial uses, obviously arts and culture. We wanted to create a sense of place, and I think in SteelStacks we really started to use some of the lessons of placemaking. And when you really look at the successes of the campus, we really did create a sense of place between arts, culture, music, retail that’s coming along the way on 3rd Street. Obviously we shouldn’t forget about Northampton Community College, which was an early investor in the Bethlehem Works site by putting in their Fowler Campus, their South Side campus. They sort of helped to create a place where people could be trained, where the neighborhood could come for an education. It was very walkable. I think there's some really interesting lessons and some really interesting the benefits from not only the casino, but then what the casino revenue did to help us create some other things there.

We also built some public facilities that you could treat like public parks; the Levitt Pavilion is a public venue that is operated by ArtsQuest even though it is a public venue that the authority owns, and we built that with TIFD funds. Also, the Hoover Mason trestle which is almost like the pièce de résistance in terms of the creation of a public space. Ultimately, we would like to have it connect to the Sands building. Through that, we created another public place to essentially allow people to learn about the site and to access history a little better than they were able to access it, get closer to the blast furnaces and it's a public park that is 40 feet off the ground.

The original master plan for Bethlehem Steel for that site as part of the act 2 thing was the ore yard, probably one of the more compromised, dirtiest portions of the brownfield where the ore was stored. There's a big ore crane that used to load up cars, take iron ore, coke, limestone and move that on the ore cars and take it down to the blast furnaces and turn it into steel. Essentially, the plan was to take that site and turn it into a parking lot and then run shuttle buses that would service the BethWorks site. That was the cheapest and simplest way to 00:07:00remediate what was one of the most compromised portions of the site. To make a long story short, what the redevelopment authority convinced Sands to do was to consider that site for the casino. While considering it, they had to invest an excessive amount of money in cleanup and something called dynamic compaction because they had to compact the soil enough to build a hotel, retail center, and casino on it. They took one of the worst portions of the Bethlehem Works sites and turned it into the casino allowing the rest of the site to essentially be developed the way it's getting developed now. The Sands invested about $800 million in the development of the casino and probably 10 or 12 percent of that money was just site prep, site remediation, and just getting it ready for the development. Instead of it being a parking lot it's now the tax generator for 00:08:00economic development engine for the whole site.

I think the Sands lost interest in Bethlehem, and obviously they lost it enough to want to sell the casino, but I think they lost interest in Bethlehem and I think the Bethlehem model. We were an outlier for them when they first developed this. As an outlier I think they looked at it as an example of what you can do in terms of industrial redevelopment and use casino gaming as a way to redevelop a property. I think that they thought that was going to be their model maybe in Eastern Europe, where there were a lot of closed industrial facilities and other parts of the United States. And then for them Asian gaming came along and I think their interests really started to focus much more on the Far East, much 00:09:00more in China, Macao where gambling was exploding and their investments. They probably made the most significant investment in Macau in comparison to other casinos when it became available for outside investment. Once they did that I think between their investment in Las Vegas and obviously their investments in the Far East, Bethlehem became not just an outlier but became this, almost an anomaly.