August 5, 2008 Declining revenues threaten area casinos Play video

(Peter Howe, NECN) - After booming for years, New England's once hot hot casino industry is seeing the wheel of fortune turn now they're facing something alien.

Declining revenues and even a threat of bankruptcy for Twin River in Lincoln, Rhode Island. Experts blame the price of gasoline. It's costing people more to drive to casinos, and leaving them less to gamble away.

Mohegan Sun and the other Indian casino in Connecticut, Foxwoods, have also seen their revenues slip this summer.

Just like Twin River ... where the license plates tell the story they depend on out-of-state visitors who may now be staying home or gambling less.

Six Flags is another company dependent on people driving a long way to spend lots of money. It's also struggling, its stock roller coasting down 90 percent in three years as visits drop.

At Twin River, which was formerly the Lincoln Park greyhound track and expanded into a 4,700-machine slot parlour, plus virtual reality blackjack, it's even more dire. They're in tense negotiations this month to stave off a threatened bankruptcy.

Twin River executives wouldn't talk on camera but issued this statement: while profitability has modestly improved in recent months it is still not sufficient to support the level of debt currently in place. We now have a narrow window in which we hope to find mutually beneficial ways of enhancing our cooperative relationship with the state and avoiding chapter 11 filing.

Twin

River's fundamental challenge is that renovations it completed last Christmas wound up costing 100 million dollars more than first budgeted. And while they say they are making more money now than they did last year, comparisons are tricky because this spring they started staying open 24 hours on weekends, and till 3 am instead of 2 am weekdays.