Before becoming involved with the Plainridge Racecourse harness track in Plainville, Mass., John Grogan’s game was investment banking. Grogan first met the president of Plainridge while working on a leveraged buyout and because of that relationship came out of retirement in 2009 to work as consultant for Plainridge. When Plainridge President Gary Piontkowski retired earlier this year, Grogan took over.
After years of preparing for Massachusetts’ entry into gambling, Plainridge is now considered the front-runner for the lone slot-parlor license being issued in the state. Grogan discusses his vision for Plainridge, the licensing process and his facility’s competition.
PBN: Why should Plainridge win the Massachusetts slots license?
GROGAN: We are going to build a spectacular facility – state of the art. We have a location on the intersections of Route 1 and Interstate 495. Our traffic engineers tell us 84 percent of our traffic is coming right off the highway and not touching town road. When you think of siting for all these gaming facilities, the No. 1 issue is traffic. We have just an A-plus site for traffic and community impact. And we are also a live racetrack. One aspect of the Massachusetts gaming bill was to support live racing, and we are the only category-2 license [applicant] that has a live race track.
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PBN: Paint the picture for me of what Plainridge would look like if all goes according to plan.
GROGAN: We have an existing five-eighths of a mile harness track. What we have added already is a 1,080-space parking structure and we are going to add a 106,000-square-foot gaming venue in addition to our existing 50,000-square-foot facility. … We will have a casual dining restaurant, sports bar, food court, a bar in the gaming floor and a bar in our live racing concourse.
PBN: Will it look like the casinos in Connecticut and Rhode Island, or are you going for something different?
GROGAN: It’s less of a look we are trying to convey than in terms of how this facility sits on the property. It is not a tall building, so it is meant to harmonize within our space, which is a former rock quarry that sits about 50 feet below Route 1.
PBN: Do you think Plainridge is indeed the front-runner?
GROGAN: We have been at this for a long time. We started the business 15 years ago and have been very active in moving our project along. The building is fully permitted. We are almost finished with the environmental process. Our long lead-time item, the garage, is already up. So we are poised to move ahead aggressively.
PBN: You guys recently hired Silverton Casino as a consultant, but did you consider bringing in a larger partner like some of the other applicants have?
GROGAN: Well if you think about it, most of the other applicants, with the exception of Suffolk Downs, didn’t bring in operators, they are large operators. We decided to make this a Massachusetts-centric product. This is a local business that has been here 15 years with local investors, and we are going to run this with the help and consultation of Silverton. They brought in some needed operational expertise.
PBN: What is your target market geographically? PBN: So is Twin River your main competition or Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun? PBN: How about harness racing? Does it stay if you get the license and close if you don’t? PBN: What is it like going from investment banking to gambling? PBN: If you get the license are you in this for the long haul, or would you consider it mission accomplished and turn it over to someone else? INTERVIEW
GROGAN: We have a lot of gamers in Massachusetts, and one of the points of the legislation was to recapture some of the billions of dollars that leaves Massachusetts and goes to Connecticut or Rhode Island. We are perfectly positioned to pick up that traffic that’s going by to Twin River or Connecticut.
GROGAN: It’s Twin River. One thing is we know what we are and know what we are not. We are not the largest casino in the world. We don’t have hundreds and hundreds of hotel rooms. That product is very different and Twin River’s product is very similar to ours.
GROGAN: If we get the license, it is required by statute to continue harness racing and part of the tax structure is 9 percent of gaming revenue from the category 2 licensee is going to a horse-race development fund, which is a purse fund for both standard bred and thoroughbred. … If we don’t get the license, we lose money on harness-racing business every year.
GROGAN: In some aspects it is similar. In all of these things you have a complex puzzle; you have to keep all the pieces together to put it all together. In the gaming the pieces are different and there are a lot of pieces moving together. It is fun. It is challenging. It is different in the specifics but similar in the general idea of a complex project.
GROGAN: I am here to stay. •
John Grogan
Position: President, Plainridge Racecourse
Background: A Harvard-trained Boston investment banker, Grogan put off retirement to work as a consultant at Plainridge Racecourse in its bid for a Massachusetts slot-machine license. When the president of Plainridge retired last year, he put Grogan in charge of the harness track.
Education: AB in biochemistry from Harvard University, 1979; MBA from Harvard, 1984
First job: Working the snack bar at a swimming pool
Residence: Westwood, Mass.
Age: 56
