The Town of Tyre levied $12,883 in real property tax in 2023, after cutting its levy by 87.1 percent in a single year. The money behind that cut comes from a building on Route 414 near the Thruway: del Lago Resort & Casino, whose state gaming tax is partly passed back to the Seneca County town that hosts it.
This summer, two events half a continent apart put that arrangement in a different light. On July 13, Alberta opened a regulated market for online casino play, after its government acknowledged that unregulated online gambling was already widely available across the province. About two weeks later, Churchill Downs Inc. told investors it was exploring a sale of del Lago and eight other regional casinos.
New York hasn’t made Alberta’s choice, and its online casino bill hasn’t left committee since it was introduced in 2025. Seen from the Finger Lakes, Alberta’s move to put casino play on regulated screens works less as a preview than as a test of a rival design. The gap between them matters most in places like Tyre and Farmington, where a casino floor or a racetrack’s machines help fund tax relief, parks and public works.
Tyre Built Its Budget on a Casino That Never Hit Its Forecast
When the state’s siting board picked del Lago, it projected the casino would gross $282.0 million in 2019. The actual figure was $157.3 million, and in 2022 it was $161.3 million, according to a 2023 report from State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. By 2022, the report found, three of the four upstate casinos, del Lago among them, were producing only 50 to 60 percent of the local gaming tax first projected for them.
Even at that level, the money remade a small town’s books. Tyre cut its property taxes by 42.1 percent between 2016 and 2017 and by another 64.2 percent the next year. Summarizing a 2019 audit, the Comptroller’s office said the gaming tax had “more than tripled the Town’s annual budget” and that Tyre “lacked both multiyear financial planning and a formal reserve policy.”
Then 2020 showed the other side. Del Lago shut down and later reopened under restrictions, and in 2021 the town overrode its tax cap and raised property taxes 243 percent for a year to cover the shortfall. The levy returned to its pre-pandemic level in 2022 before the deep cut of 2023. That fall, FingerLakes1.com reported, the Town Board applied $2.4 million of casino revenue so that residents would get no town tax bill in 2024.
Those years hold the whole local stake in the online debate. Tyre’s budget tracks the play inside one building, and the town has already lived through months when that play stopped.
Alberta Asked Gray-Market Operators to Go Legal
Alberta started from the other end. The provincial government’s iGaming strategy presents its regulated market as an opportunity for operators “to shift from the grey market to legal status.” The Alberta iGaming Corporation, known as AiGC, oversees the market for the province, and Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis serves as its regulator.
For a New York reader, the striking detail is that Alberta’s roster also includes operators licensed in New York. Seven of the nine mobile sportsbook brands that report monthly figures to New York’s Gaming Commission appear in AiGC’s directory of registered sites, DraftKings and FanDuel among them, and each of the seven has a casino listing there as well. In New York, the figures the commission publishes under those seven brands cover sports wagering alone.
Will Alberta’s casinos and racetracks lose play to those sites? Twelve weeks of a new market can’t settle that. What can be laid side by side is the setup itself, and the online casino alberta guide on Bonus.com covers both halves of it: the online market that opened July 13, with its operators and their status, and the land-based side, where the guide counts more than 30 gaming facilities licensed by AGLC.
New York’s Bill Would Book Every Online Bet at a Casino Address
Senator Joseph Addabbo Jr.’s S2614, matched in the Assembly by A6027, goes the other way. It treats an online wager as made at the licensed gaming facility that receives it, wherever in the state the player is. It also makes housing the online operator’s server a condition of every casino license, with the casino paid its costs for the space.
The reason is constitutional. New York’s constitution allows casino gambling at no more than seven facilities, and the bill’s findings argue that a bet accepted by equipment inside one of them stays within that limit. The same findings, drafted in 2025, describe casino play in New York as permitted only in person.
That design puts the Finger Lakes in the middle of the map. The bill’s qualifying entities begin with destination resort casinos such as del Lago and video lottery terminal facilities such as Finger Lakes Gaming & Racetrack, then add tribes with ratified compacts and the state’s mobile sportsbook operators. Each licensee could run one branded site after a one-time $2 million fee, and a platform company putting its own brand on that site would pay $10 million.
Where Alberta invited gray-market operators in, S2614 would shut them out. Any unlicensed company that offered games needing a commission license in the three years before the law took effect would be ineligible.
The tax would be 30.5 percent of gross gaming revenue, deposited in the state lottery fund for education aid. The bill carves out $11 million a year for problem gambling education and treatment and at least $25 million a year for a training and health fund open to unionized casino workers.
The Region Has Already Watched a New Channel Pull Play Away
The money map is where Seneca and Ontario counties come in. The four upstate casinos’ gaming taxes sent nearly $176 million to host and nearby local governments from 2017 to 2022, by the Comptroller’s count. S2614’s text sets aside no share of the online tax for host towns or counties.
The Comptroller’s office flagged the same gap in Addabbo’s 2023 version, S4856. Its report warned that “just as mobile sports wagering reduced demand for in-house wagering,” online casino play could cut foot traffic, and without a local component it “would likely reduce local gaming taxes, even if it increased overall gaming revenue for the casinos and overall taxes collected by the State.”
Del Lago’s betting counter shows what the first half of that warning looked like. Bettors placed $7.5 million in wagers there in October 2021, according to Gaming Commission reports. The commission cleared the first mobile operators to start on Jan. 8, 2022, and in October of that year the counter’s handle was $2.8 million. Across all of 2025, it took $14.4 million.
Farmington’s track posted a drop of its own after a new casino opened nearby. Finger Lakes Gaming & Racetrack, a thoroughbred track since 1962 that added video lottery terminals in 2004, saw net win fall from $125.0 million to $104.6 million in del Lago’s first full fiscal year. The commission’s figures don’t name a cause.
The track’s 1,175 machines didn’t pass the old mark until the 2025-26 fiscal year, at $126.0 million, with $58.6 million of it going to education. The town has its own stake: Supervisor Peter Ingalsbe said in 2023 that Farmington used its VLT revenue to keep town taxes low and to pay for projects including a highway garage and a new 40-acre park.
None of that proves online slots would empty a casino floor. Sports betting was a sliver of del Lago’s business, about $1.3 million of $168.7 million in gross gaming revenue in that same fiscal year, and that total was the highest since the casino opened. The slots stayed in the building. Whether they’d stay there under a different law is the one test the Finger Lakes can’t run in advance.
Venues Are on the Block in Both Places, for Balance-Sheet Reasons
Del Lago may face that test under a new owner. Churchill Downs Inc., which bought the property in 2022, said in a July 29 securities filing that it was exploring options to sell nine regional casinos and cautioned that the review might not produce a deal, as FingerLakes1.com reported the next day. In a HorseRacingNation interview published Sept. 29, chief executive Bill Carstanjen said the process was “soliciting bids and distinguishing between bids.”
His reasons were mostly about the company. “We need to slim down,” he said, and later added that the assets “continue to perform pretty well” but that gaming “isn’t as popular in the public-company investing community as it once was.” Online wagering came up as one of several forms of gaming that “probably have had some level of impact” on investors’ view of the sector.
Century Casinos moved to sell its two Alberta racetrack casinos two months after Churchill’s filing. On Sept. 28, it agreed to sell the operations of Century Mile and Century Downs, its Edmonton and Calgary racinos, to Highfield Investment Group for about US$16.4 million, subject to regulatory approvals. Its co-chief executives called the sale a step toward “concentrating our resources on our U.S. properties.” The announcement doesn’t mention the online market Alberta had opened 11 weeks earlier.
Reading either sale as a verdict on phones would go further than the companies did. The moves show something narrower: venues on both sides of the border are being reshuffled while the online rules are weeks old in one place and unwritten in the other. A buyer of del Lago would inherit New York’s open question along with the hotel.
New York’s Answer Waits on the Governor’s Race
S2614’s record so far is two referrals to the Senate Racing, Gaming and Wagering Committee, one at the start of each year of the session. Addabbo, who chairs that committee, explained this spring why he wouldn’t push it to a vote: “We could pass it in the Senate, we could pass it in the Assembly and then the governor would probably not sign it,” he said in an interview reported by Yogonet. He also said he’d keep pressing the issue every year.
The governor’s office is on the Nov. 3 ballot, and any new bill will start over when the Legislature returns next year. Two details in the next version will matter more in Seneca and Ontario counties than the yes-or-no headline. One is whether any share of an online tax follows the wager back to the town that hosts the server. The other is whether del Lago, under whatever owner, and the Farmington track would use the one branded site each could run, or leave that field to the sportsbook brands.
Alberta’s market reaches its first anniversary next summer, and the corporation’s first full-year numbers should show what its design delivered. A reader in Tyre or Farmington has a decision to make before then. The question worth putting to anyone on this fall’s ballot isn’t whether online casinos belong in New York. It’s who would replace Tyre’s tax relief and the project money Farmington has drawn from the track’s machines if more of the play moved onto phones.
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