Niagara Falls Mayor happy to see city’s two casinos reopen
Published January 26, 2022 at 1:49 pm
The reason that Niagara Falls Mayor Jim Diodati is happy the two casinos in town are reopening on Monday (January 31) has nothing to do with slot machines or Poker tables..
As Diodata likes to remind people, with 4,000 employees, Casino Niagara and Fallsview Casino and Resort combined are the larger employers in the Niagara Region.
“They are the number one employer here in the region with around 4,000 employees,” Diodati told a local TV station. “They’ve gone above and beyond provincial protocols, they’ve done everything humanly possible to make that place safe from any kind of germs.”
Not only that but as a casino host municipality, Niagara Falls collects quarterly dividends from the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) – pay-outs that out millions of dollars in the city’ coffers.
At the end of 2021, Diodati estimated that the casino closures during that year had cost the city $20 million in lost revenue.
Diodati said he had spoken to Richard Taylor, the president of both the city’s casinos, and that Taylor had told him it was depressing to send all the employees home when the province shut down indoor facilities on January 5 following virus case spikes from the Omicron variant.
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“All of them going home, not working, (Taylor) said it was do depressing,” related Diodati. “He is so excited to have them all back. Everyone’s really pumped.
Prior to the pandemic, an estimated 19,000 people were employed in Ontario’s casinos.
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