The word most used by supporters of the $6 billion Las Vegas Sands Casino Resort project at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum site during the County Legislature hearing on its 28,000-page Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) was "transformative."

But is this the transformation we want for Nassau County?

The other key word in this environmental review process was "mitigation" of the adverse impacts of building the second largest casino in the country operating 24/7/365 on the 72-acre, county-owned property in Uniondale, smack in the middle of an already well developed suburban island that projects 10 million visitors (a number on par with Universal Studios in Orlando).

But mitigation is just a means of tempering those adverse impacts - not improving conditions for already congested traffic (23,000 visitors plus 7800 employees a day), air pollution, strained energy supply, and drinking water supply that depends on Long island's sole-source aquifer already overtaxed that will only be more stressed. And what about those tons of solid waste that will have to be hauled off the island since the biggest challenge Long Island municipalities are already confronting is that capacity being reached at landfills and treatment centers?

The most significant mitigation measures LVS is proposing include paying the cost of adding one lane (a fourth lane) on each side of a stretch of the 90-year-old Meadowbrook Parkway from the Northern State Parkway to Hempstead Turnpike; spending $20 million to build a new well to supply water to the Coliseum site and area homes and businesses; a new substation to generate power; rebuilding a bridge over the LIRR and operating a scheduled shuttle service from the train station to the resort.

But this is about "resources and priorities," Lynn Krug of Garden City and member of the Say No To The Casino Civic Association, stressed. The amount of water that Las Vegas Sands would use - 5.3 million gallons a week, would increase usage in Uniondale by 11%, and use more water than all eight other projects planned for the area would use, which includes NYU Langone Medical Center across the street. Once a well is polluted with salt-water intrusion, it can't be reversed. (Another respondent offered this solution: desalinization.)

"What if the DEC enforces its caps?" Krug asked. "You would have to forgo the hospital and other developments that provide housing, shopping to keep Sands, because they came first and paid money."

Indeed, LVS has been spreading quite a lot of it around that was clear in the comments by supporters - $54 million to the County upon agreeing to the Sands' 42-year lease (before an environmental impact study was conducted), $25 million to "community benefits" organizations and villages including Hempstead, East Meadow and Uniondale and a promise of $4 million a year once the resort is built, not to mention massive support from union leaders with the expectation of 7000 workers employed in the construction for four or five years (but then what?).

The massive spending - $6 billion project, $150 million in infrastructure mitigation, $563 million in taxes - is only a sign of how big this enterprise needs to be in order to make those numbers pay off. That figure is $2 billion in revenue (Las Vegas Sands made $5.1 billion in profit in 2023 on $10.4 billion in revenue and had $14 billion in debt.)

"LVS uses terms like 'mitigation' and 'best practices' to absolve themselves from the massive environmental damage their project will cause," stated 'Say No' lead organizer Steve Rolston of Baldwin."We demand the County shine a light on the fact that LVS' perfunctory mitigations barely dent the significant impacts."

For example, LVS projects it will dump 120,000 tons of CO2 into our air each year, after "mitigating" from 137,000 tons, which would take more than 5 million new trees to remove. "The focus should be on the massive amount of resources LVS expects to consume, not the rounding error that is their 'mitigation.'"

Mitigation is also proposed for the likely increase in gambling addiction, especially among the tens of thousands of college students in its vicinity who already show a predilection to addiction to online gambling - by building two Gambling Support and Wellness Centers in Hempstead and Hicksville in conjunction with The Family and Children's Association, at a cost of $200,000.

Sands has "gone beyond industry standards," Dr. Jeffrey Reynolds, president and CEO of the organization commented. Sands intends to take proactive steps "to identify people who struggle. No other casino is supporting problem gambling as Sands does,"

The Say No to Casino folks countered, "Sands claims to support problem gambling treatment, yet if they build, they will create an addiction crisis in our community that will put tremendous strain on our mental health and social services. Studies show that people who live within 10 miles of a casino are twice as likely to become problem gamblers; and 3-4% of all gamblers are severe problem gamblers. Of those, about 30-40% contemplate suicide every year. Why should we bear these dangerous burdens while LVS rakes in $2B in gambling losses?"

There are also legitimate concerns about an increase in drunk driving (Long Island already has highest rate of traffic deaths in the state), drugs, crime and over-taxing area police, fire and emergency responders, as well as causing a decline in home values. The likely increase in costs for these will likely exceed any reduction (or non-increase) in property taxes - concerns which Presiding Officer Howard J. Kopel kept shutting down as being "off topic" from the DEIS.

Sammy Chu, Chairman of the U.S. Green Building Council-Long Island Chapter and Chief Executive Officer for Edgewise Energy, a power systems integrator, gave his stamp of approval to Sands for proposing to build at a LEED Gold level - "remarkable for a project of this size" - and Sands' promise to build to LEED for Communities Certification, which would make it one of first projects on Long Island to achieve that status. But one could imagine at some point after construction starts that the company complains that building to that standard will be financially crippling.

These issues are detailed in the 28,000-page DEIS - considered "unprecedented" for its detail. But such voluminous documentationt is also a tactic to bury information, surely discourage actual review.

But Terry Coniglio of Hofstra University, questioned some of the assumptions and conclusions and insufficient data regarding public health, socio-economic impacts of problem gambling, and assertions like how the 20,000 cars arriving daily will not contribute to pollution because they will be EVs. "Conclusions are not supported by evidence."

In fact, the 28,000-page document was only released just before Thanksgiving for the hearing on December 9, with the deadline for written comments scheduled for January 6. (After a score of complaints, the deadline was pushed back to January 21.)

Many of the supporters made the claim that the county just had to go forward with the Sands casino as a "once in a lifetime" opportunity for economic growth, without which there would only be a dark and dismal future for Nassau County. That is a really, really sad commentary on Nassau County and Long Island, once the center of aerospace innovation and now medical research and technology.

Everyone supports economic development, but people want sustainable growth that will be positive - not bring the inevitable crime, drugs, traffic, pollution to support an enterprise which is in the business of extracting wealth, not creating it.

County legislators are clearly dazzled by the projections that the casino resort would generate $563 million in annual tax revenues (that is, until it applies for some sort of tax credit, rebate or such), of which $217 million would go to local schools; $54 million to the Town of Hempstead; $52 million to Nassau County; $27 million to Suffolk County; and $213 million to the MTA.

But while the investments were tallied, the projected receipts were tallied, what has yet to be tallied are the costs.

"Predatory gambling companies like Las Vegas Sands (LVS) have mastered the 'bait and switch' art of manipulation for profit," the Say No group stated. "In the environmental report, LVS revealed in great detail how they will co-opt, exploit, and abuse our resources and infrastructure in cynical, unabashed service to their bottom line...

"LVS used tonight's hearing as an opportunity to 'greenwash' the catastrophic impacts and gaslight residents into focusing on a few token reduction measures rather than the generational calamity that this project represents. It is a travesty that the County is still entertaining the idea of dropping a massive casino into our community."