Penn National wins first auction for Pennsylvania satellite casinos

Pennsylvania’s first satellite casino auction winner is the same company suing to overturn the law authorizing those mini-casinos.

On Wednesday, the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board announced that Mountainview Thoroughbred Racing Association, a subsidiary of regional casino operator Penn National Gaming (PNG), had won the auction for the first of 10 possible Category 4 casino licenses.

PNG paid $50.1m for the license, an eyebrow-raising premium over the minimum starting bid of $7.5m. The fact that PNG participated in the auction in the first place is equally surprising, given that it opposed the satellite casino plans from the start and filed a lawsuit this week seeking to overturn the gambling expansion law the state passed last year.

PNG’s opposition to the mini-casinos is that the law prohibits them from being built within a 25-mile radius of any of the state’s existing 12 brick-and-mortar casinos. PNG’s view is that these overlapping buffer zones shield the other operators from Cat 4 competition, while PNG’s Hollywood Casino at Penn National Race Course is isolated and exposed.