Ohio close to naming a new date for casinos to open but which will be first Cleveland or Toledo?

COLUMBUS, Ohio - We should know within two weeks when Ohio’s first casino will open, what we don’t know is which casino it will be.

Ohio Casino Control Commission Executive Director Matt Schuler said they have been working closely with representatives of Toledo’s Hollywood Casino and Cleveland’s Horseshoe to make sure everyone’s on the same page when it comes to the operational aspects, and he says they appear to be neck-and-neck heading towards their respective project completion.

On the question of who will be first though, Schuler says "That determination has not been made and it will be up to the commission based on who will be prepared to open first and I think both casinos are from my point of view are moving along parallel tracks."

They may be ready at the same time, but they’ve already been told they can’t open at the same time.

“We said the minimum time that they need to have between openings is two weeks for us to be able to manage the openings,” said Commission Chairwoman Jo Ann Davidson, who hoped the casinos would settle the matter on their own.

“We told them if you’re going to have dates out there, you could determine these dates and give us a two week span in between, but they declined the honor of doing that,” she said.

The original dates called for Cleveland to open March 26 and Toledo to open a week later. The state’s gaming consultant though recommended those dates be pushed back in the neighborhood of eight weeks to allow enough time for background checks of employees and vendors.

"We're doing everything we can to make sure this is a matter of weeks not months,” said Schuler. “We are trying to make up that ground and I believe that we can.”

The background checks are only part of the process that caused the commission to slow the road towards the opening.

“All of these other things need to go on too, shipping of slots, acceptance of slots, completion of our rules,” said Davidson. “There are certain things that they have to file with us in internal control systems 60 days from the date that they have to open so all of this begins to back up a little bit.”

Schuler added setting up every individual game takes it's fair share of time.

“One of the major operational challenges is to bring in 2,000 slot machines, bring them across the border, set them on their bases prior to any installation of gaming software, and then go through and add all of the mechanical components, bill changers, canisters, software into all of those machines. 

“Then you have to test them to make sure that every machine that’s there matches up exactly as the initial program was tested by our independent testing lab, and then to go through and make sure that it’s reading every denomination correctly. If the accounting system is counting every dollar that comes in properly and that all the books are reconciled,” he said. That’s for each single machine.

Still he says he knows that jobs and tax dollars ride on their word.

“There’s certainly a lot of expectation to get these open especially in the cities in which the casinos are located so we’re on an aggressive plan to try to meet that.”