BURKE, VA — After opposition to a Reston casino coalesced, Sen. Dave Marsden (D-Burke) said he convinced developer Comstock Holding Companies to try to build a casino in Tysons instead.
“I fought like crazy to get it into Tysons, because the developer that I was talking to owns land in Reston, right next to the metro station,” he said at a town hall meeting Saturday. “But he leveraged it. He did what I asked him to do, because that’s where it belongs.”
When Patch first broke the story in September that Comstock Holdings was planning to build casino at or near the Wiehle-Reston East Metro Station, Marsden told Patch that he thought Tysons was a better location.
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“That’s our downtown,” he repeated, on Saturday. “It’s right on the Silver Line and it could draw huge numbers of people from Bethesda, Rockville, and Gaithersburg from across the river.”
In January, the 75-year-old lawmaker introduced Senate Bill 675, which if adopted, would give the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors the authority to put a referendum on a future ballot to allow voters the power to decide whether to build a casino in Tysons.
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News of Comstock’s casino plans sparked a wave community opposition, which began in Reston and spilled over to McLean, Vienna and Tysons once Marsden’s prefered location was identified. Citizen activists traveled to Richmond to testify against bill, while others inundated elected officials with calls and emails voicing their opposition.
After SB 675 made its way through several committees, the Senate Committee on Finance and Appropriations voted to hold the bill over until next year.
If the bill had passed and voters adopted it, the plan was to create an entertainment district with a performance venue and conference center anchored by a casino.
“Not only will there be the casino but a hotel that goes with it,” Marsden said. “The operator that they’re looking at is Wynn, which is the highest-class, best-operated casinos in the country.”
Fairfax County needed to counter the drop in tax revenue caused by the decline in the commercial real estate market. For that reason, Marsden is “95 percent” sure that he will reintroduce the bill in 2025.
Marsden told the audience that Virginians were on a “sugar high” from all the federal money that was paid out to help businesses and localities weather the pandemic.
“Most of the citizens of the county think everything’s fine,” he said. “Everything’s been like it always has been. It’s not. Does anybody have a grasp of the collapse in commercial real estate that is taking place in this county right now? Tysons is 16 percent unleased, 50 percent occupied.”
When Fairfax County Executive Bryan Hill introduced his Fiscal Year 2025 Budget proposal in February, he told the board of supervisors that post-COVID recovery for the commercial market had been mixed.
“After modest increases in the past two years, non-residential values reflect a decrease of 1.24 percent,” Hill said, in his budget proposal. “This is largely driven by the fourth consecutive decrease in office elevator properties – declining over 9 percent in FY 2025 – which represent 26 percent of the non-residential tax base.”
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Not only are new leases not being signed at the same rate as before, companies need less space.
“Companies that have 50,000 square feet right now are going to come back when they renegotiate at 10,000 or 12,000,” Marsden said. “The 10,000-12,000 people are going to renegotiate it 2,000 or 3,000.”
Fairfax County leaders have only a handful of options to counter the loss in tax revenue. They can cut spending, impose a meals tax or raise the residential tax rate.
On Tuesday, the board of supervisors will vote on whether to adopt the 1-cent increase to the real estate tax rate, which Hill included in his budget proposal. If the board adopts the new 4-cent rate, the average household tax bill will increase by $524 next year.
Another reason Marsden gave for Fairfax County to build a casino in Tysons was that the FBI had chosen to build its headquarters in Prince George’s County, Maryland rather than the GSA warehouses in Springfield. That was a major loss or redevelopment for that area.
When asked why the Springfield property couldn’t be used, Marsden said it was too close to MGM National Harbor Hotel & Casino.
“We need to be on the opposite side of D.C., towards where the wealthier parts of Maryland are to do this,” he said. “This is business sense. You could put it in Annandale and nobody would come. There’s no attraction in Springfield.”
One of the criticisms of the casino plan was that Marsden and Comstock chose to introduce the bill without any prior community input. Fairfax County lawmakers and residents did not know the specifics of SB 675 until Marsden actually introduced the bill on Jan. 17.
“We haven’t got time and our Board of Supervisors does not have the political will to make this come from them to be honest,” he said. “If I do it, I get to be the bad guy. That’s what it comes down to. I’m 75 years old. I can take being the bad guy.”
Related:
Read all of Patch’s reporting on Comstock Companies’ plan to build a casino on Metro’s Silver Line in Fairfax County at Silver Line Casino.
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