A proposal to allow Northern Virginia voters to weigh in on whether to build a casino in Fairfax County has advanced to the state’s House of Delegates.
And even though the latest plan doesn’t specify Tysons as the location for the project, some community members there are still skeptical.
“It’s already congested enough,” Kristin Harrig said. “There’s enough to do here. We don’t need to gamble here. You can go across the river to the National Harbor.”
Previous attempts to advance the casino project focused on the Tysons area. The new legislation, though, would allow the casino to be built anywhere in Fairfax County.
Virginia’s state Senate approved the plan Friday, 23-14, though several lawmakers representing Northern Virginia opposed it.
Some elected officials in the suburb have spoken out against the project, and with a 5-4 vote, the Board of Supervisors opted to keep it out of its legislative priorities.
“Maybe somewhere out in Loudoun County or something like that, but not in Fairfax County,” resident Jamaal French told WTOP. “But in Northern Virginia, definitely.”
Kevin Ejtemai, who owns a business in the Tysons Corner Center mall, said he has “three small children, and we don’t want this area to become inundated with gamblers and drunk people walking around the casino, around town.”
But Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell said many similar concerns are overblown. There isn’t any organized opposition to the project outside of McLean, he said, adding that he lives “closer to the MGM Casino than most of these people in McLean complaining, and it hasn’t changed my quality of life.”
“A lot of people, I think, are sort of saying the sky is going to fall, but I don’t think it’s consistent with reality,” Surovell said.
Dipen Patel said he’d support a casino project in Tysons, and “I don’t see a reason why Fairfax should not have a casino.”
“As much money is flowing from Virginia to Maryland, we’re better off doing one here,” Patel said, “because we see a lot of population coming to MGM for gambling purposes.”
Surovell said that last year, the House of Delegates didn’t really speak about the proposal: “But I’m confident that this year, the House is interested in figuring out a way to proceed on this, and I think we will get something on the governor’s desk.”
But for French, “as a resident of Fairfax County, it’s already hard enough to get around out here. I’m not for it, not right here, but somewhere close that I can still get to it.”