Steve Cohen purchased the Mets not because he loves baseball but because he wanted access to the land that the team controls. He almost immediately began pushing his vision for an entertainment complex, anchored by a Hard Rock casino, next to CitiField. There is already a casino in Queens – at Resorts World – and it certainly has not done wonders for the surrounding community. Cohen’s plan would take 55 acres of designated parkland which is currently used as a parking lot and “give back” only 20 acres of developed recreation space. The rest would be for gambling, a hotel, a convention center and other non-park uses. This move requires parkland alienation. While most believe that comes with a mandated 1:1 land swap to create parkland elsewhere, that is tradition, not law. In this case, Cohen has no intention of replacing the parkland he plans to permanently alter. Yet 6 community boards voted in favor of it, the Borough President never misses an opportunity to endorse it, and our elected officials in the City Council voted almost unanimously to hand the parkland over to him (CMs Paladino and Ariola were the only “no” votes). The home rule message was the first step. The State Assembly then voted overwhelmingly in support. The one thing that held the alienation up in the Senate was that the Senator for that district, Jessica Ramos, wisely stated that her constituents would be harmed more than helped by this proposal and therefore she would not introduce legislation to convert the parkland. So, Sen. John Liu, in a neighboring district, who once expressed strong opposition to a casino, came to Cohen’s rescue and introduced the legislation instead. Maspeth’s state senator, Majority Leader Michael Gianaris, killed the Amazon proposal some years ago because he thought it was a giveaway to a billionaire, but ironically said he thinks Cohen’s project is great, signaling to the rest of his Democratic members that it was ok to ignore member deference in this instance, so they did. Money talks, and Cohen has an unlimited supply of it. Other proposed casinos elsewhere in the city died because of community and elected official opposition, but it seems we can always count on the powers-that-be to sell out Queens. If a parking lot is no longer needed, it should be turned into usable public parkland, just as what was done with Juniper Valley Park’s parking lot decades ago.