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October 29, 2007

Forest City in the News

PITTSBURGH
In a backroom vote, Forest City and rival bidder Isle of Capri lost out to Majestic Star Casino, despite a report concluding that Majestic Star owner Don Barden had a "history of operating with a very high-risk financial profile."

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Casino hopefuls were all financial risks, documents show

All of the Pittsburgh casino applicants were "high risk" financially, state Gaming Control Board internal documents show.
...
Combined, Forest City and its proposed casino operator, Las Vegas-based Harrah's Entertainment Inc., are worth more than $22 billion and have a history of urban developments, Forest City said in a statement.

Forest City owns Station Square, where it wanted to put the casino, and it planned the largest investment among the three applicants, the statement said.

"We remain perplexed as to how the Gaming Control Board staff did their analysis and drew their conclusions," the statement said.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Pittsburgh casino license process cloaked in secrecy

Meeting secretly in December before awarding casino licenses, state gambling regulators took up Pittsburgh first and agreed on Don Barden with almost no discussion.
...
At the start, a majority of the board members leaned toward either Forest City or Isle of Capri, giving Barden's company little chance.

But as they started looking at the applicants' traffic reports, board members realized PITG Gaming had a legitimate chance, Rivers said. The casino would sit on 17 acres west of the Carnegie Science Center.

"People are looking at each other like, 'Do you believe this?'" Rivers said. "It was amazing, and all of a sudden, people are going, 'I never thought Barden had this much going on for him.' That was the comment."

Members worried about traffic access to Station Square, where Forest City wanted to locate.

FLORIDA
Forest City continues the malling of America:
St. Petersburg Times, New store just in time for shopping season

Steel has gone up at the Shops at Wiregrass, a $105-million project backed by Forest City Enterprises and the Goodman Co.

Jim Richardson, Forest City's vice president, said Wednesday that he expects groundbreaking to take place soon, as the mall works to close tenancy contracts with its slate of tenants. But Forest City won't confirm a date before the deals are signed.

ILLINOIS
After Pfizer closed the former G.D. Searle & Co. facility in Skokie, IL, several former employees started their own businesses. Some of them are back at the old site in Skokie, being renovated by Forest City Enterprises as a state-of-the-art biotech facility.

Chicago Tribune, Searle closing spawns biotech start-up firms

The work isn't much different from what Schlosser and his colleagues once did for Searle and its successors. Indeed, Midwest BioResearch operates in Searle's former property, now the Illinois Science + Technology Park in Skokie.

That property, purchased two years ago by Forest City Enterprises, now houses eight companies with a total of 700 employees, said Michael Rosen, a Forest City vice president.

The newest of the former Searle buildings is operating and three others are being renovated, Rosen said. The site has about 670,000 square feet of space suitable for biotech firms and will eventually have 2 million square feet, he said. One constraint on Chicago's growth as a biotech center was a shortage of wet lab facilities that start-up companies could lease. The operating building contains space for wet labs as do the three being renovated, Rosen said.Another company started by former Searle employees is Networked Robotics Corp., an Evanston firm with 10 employees that automates monitoring for refrigerators and freezers used by hospitals, biotech start-ups, food processors and others in need of constant monitoring to assure their cooling systems don't fail.

Posted by lumi at October 29, 2007 6:55 AM