On his last day in office, Everett’s outgoing mayor signed a deal with the company that owns Encore Boston Harbor.
Carlo DeMaria had run Everett for seventeen years and had just lost an election in which the state inspector general had called on the city council to claw back $180,000 in bonus payments he should never have received. Hours before handing the keys to Robert Van Campen, he inked a memorandum of agreement with Wynn Resorts.
Two hundred miles west, Springfield spent this month suing MGM over its casino agreement, and in doing so demonstrated exactly what a Massachusetts host community can and cannot do to a casino operator.
Everett’s new mayor is now sitting on an inherited deal, a live strike, and a question worth asking out loud: what leverage does a host city actually have?
First, the thing that is not true
There is no public evidence that Encore Boston Harbor is in breach of its host community agreement with Everett, and it is worth saying that plainly before going further, because the assumption gets repeated.
The original agreement obliges Wynn to pay Everett a $20 million annual payment in lieu of taxes plus a $5 million annual community impact fee, both escalating at 2.5 per cent a year, on top of a $30 million payment made before the doors opened. Those payments have been made and have grown. The combined figure was about $25 million in the city’s 2021 fiscal year and roughly $26.9 million for 2024.
The 2024 fight people remember was not a breach. Wynn suspended a planned $400 million expansion in May of that year during a dispute with the city over how much it should pay above the host community agreement. That is a negotiation over new money, not a failure to pay old money. Different thing entirely.
What Springfield actually did, and why it is not what people think
Springfield’s suit against MGM Resorts International and Blue Tarp Redevelopment, filed at the start of September, is the most instructive document in Massachusetts gaming right now.
Mayor Domenic Sarno’s complaint is not vague dissatisfaction. It points at specific, countable promises in the host community agreement and says MGM did not keep them:
- employing no fewer than 3,000 people
- keeping no fewer than 2,800 to 3,000 slot and video machines and 75 to 100 table games on the gaming floor
- refurbishing 101 State Street
Those are enforceable because somebody wrote numbers into a contract. You cannot litigate a vibe. You can litigate 3,000 jobs.
And here is the part that matters most, because it is the actual mechanism: MGM wants to sell its interest in MGM Springfield to a Canadian investment firm, and Springfield’s host community agreement gives the city approval rights over that transfer. Sarno is refusing to approve the sale until the compliance issues are fixed. MGM has called the litigation frivolous and says it is being used to delay consideration of the sale.
So Springfield is not revoking a licence. Springfield is a contracting party withholding a consent that the other side urgently needs.
No mayor in Massachusetts can pull a casino licence
This is the correction that has to be made every time this subject comes up.
Casino licences in Massachusetts are issued, renewed and revoked by the Massachusetts Gaming Commission under G.L. c. 23K, the Expanded Gaming Act. A category 1 licence costs $5 million, and renewal after five years costs another $5 million. The commission decides suitability. A mayor is not in that chain.
What the statute does give host communities is the agreement itself. The Expanded Gaming Act requires an applicant to produce a signed host community agreement before it can be licensed, setting out the community impact fee and the responsibilities running in both directions. That contract is the leverage, and its strength depends entirely on what was written into it.
A host community that dislikes an operator’s behaviour has three realistic moves. Enforce the agreement in court, which is what Springfield is doing. Withhold a discretionary approval the operator needs, which is what Springfield is really doing. Or send information about suitability to the commission’s Investigations and Enforcement Bureau, which any community representative may do.
None of those is a licence revocation, and pretending otherwise sets up a fight the city loses.
Everett’s problem is that the leverage was probably spent in January
Springfield’s position works because MGM wants something. That is the whole engine.
Everett does not obviously have an equivalent. Wynn already completed its big transaction: a $1.7 billion sale and leaseback of the Encore real estate to Realty Income, announced in February 2022 and closed that December, with an initial annual rent of $100 million on a thirty-year lease. That deal is done and was approved years ago.
What Everett has instead is the memorandum DeMaria signed on his way out the door. It allows up to two third-party hotels on Wynn-owned land along Lower Broadway. In exchange, Wynn committed up to $25 million toward a long-sought commuter rail stop on the Newburyport and Rockport line, and another $15 million for transportation and infrastructure work including expanded bus service, bike lanes, and a pedestrian bridge over Route 99.
Those are real numbers and a real benefit to a city that badly needs the transit. But the timing is the story. An outgoing mayor, repudiated at the polls weeks earlier over a payment scandal, locked in the terms of a major development agreement in the final hours of a seventeen-year tenure, binding a successor who had campaigned on accountability.
Van Campen’s response at his first press conference as mayor was measured. He said he supports the core of the agreement and pointed to the economic effects and the infrastructure. He also said he is concerned about traffic, congestion, and the location and feasibility of the proposed commuter rail stop.
That last item is not a small reservation. The rail stop is the single largest public benefit in the deal, and the mayor is publicly unsure it can be built where it is meant to go.
Which is where the leverage actually is
A memorandum of agreement is not the same as a completed permitting process. Hotels on Lower Broadway will need approvals that run through Everett: zoning, site plan review, licensing, construction. A commuter rail stop needs the MBTA and the state, and a city that is unenthusiastic about a location is an obstacle rather than a partner.
If Van Campen wants to reopen any part of what he inherited, that is the pressure point. Not the gaming licence, which is not his. Not the host community agreement, which is being honoured. The approvals Wynn still needs for the thing it has not built yet.
That is precisely the shape of the Springfield play, transposed: find the consent the operator needs next, and decline to give it until the conversation improves.
The strike changes the arithmetic too
About 1,300 Encore workers walked out on 4 September, represented by UNITE HERE Local 26 and Teamsters Local 25, after their contract with Wynn expired on 31 August. They are seeking increases of $10 an hour over three years for non-tipped workers and $5 for tipped workers. The casino has stayed open.
Van Campen has come out for the workers.
That is a mayor of a host community publicly siding against the operator that pays his city roughly $27 million a year, while holding open questions about a development agreement that operator wants completed. Whether or not it is a deliberate strategy, it is leverage.
What to watch
Three things, and they are all checkable rather than speculative.
Whether Springfield’s suit survives a motion to dismiss, because a ruling that host community agreements are enforceable on their specific terms is useful to every host city in the Commonwealth, Everett included.
Whether Everett’s own agreement contains a transfer-approval clause of the kind Springfield is using. That is a public document, archived by the Gaming Commission, and any resident can read it.
And whether the hotels on Lower Broadway actually enter the permitting pipeline, because that is the moment the new administration finds out how much of the last one’s deal it is really bound by.
Chelsea residents have a stake in this too. The city sits a mile from the property, went to arbitration against Wynn as a surrounding community rather than negotiating, lost, and receives $650,000 a year under terms it did not choose.