Big price revealed in Coliseum buy

Daily Point

Sands pays $241M for Coliseum

Las Vegas Sands paid a total of $241 million to take control of Nassau Coliseum, The Point has learned.

Sands made the payment to Nassau Live Center LLC — the entity controlled by Nicholas A. Mastroianni II — according to Sands' quarterly report to investors, which said the deal on the Coliseum closed as of June 2.

Mastroianni served as the middleman in an EB-5 investment deal that produced the money that was used to renovate the Coliseum in 2015. The deal gave foreign investors the opportunity to obtain visas in exchange for their money. As a result of that deal, Mastroianni held a $100 million loan on the Coliseum — and that loan had become an albatross in any effort to get the land around the arena developed.

But Mastroianni and his investors, it seems, ended up with far more than just getting the loan covered.

According to the Sands report, known as a 10Q, Sands first paid Nassau Live $20 million in 2022 as a “deposit” — long before the Nassau County Legislature even considered transferring the lease to Sands.

Then, in June, Sands paid Nassau Live $221 million to close the deal.

Sands is already utilizing the Coliseum, including for a cocktail hour event Wednesday night for about 500 small business owners interested in the company’s procurement process. Sands has begun to replace and add signage to the arena, even as remnants of the NYCB Live signage — and photos of past New York Islanders’ triumphs — remain in some spots.

For accounting purposes, Sands classified $92 million of the purchase as “goodwill” — the premium above the property’s true value that’s often associated with brand recognition and other intangibles.

In the 10Q, Sands also outlined details of the lease agreement with Nassau County, noting that the lease officially commenced on June 2, for a 99-year term. Sands confirmed that it made its initial $54 million payment to the county, adding that its minimum rent payments will amount to $1 million by the end of this year, followed by $6 million annually in 2024, 2025, 2026 and 2027 and a total of $1.77 billion “thereafter.”

In its filing, Sands put numbers to the value of the land and the lease itself, noting that its “right of use asset” — basically, the value of obtaining the lease — was $279 million, while the company’s liabilities on the lease stood at $201 million.

The revealing information comes as Sands is working its way through the state’s gaming license process. After the filing emerged, Sands chief executive Robert Goldstein emphasized the importance of its Nassau County plans for the company as a whole, noting that Sands is already beginning the Hempstead Town zoning process and taking it “very seriously.”

“We’ve never been more excited about any opportunity than New York,” Goldstein told CNBC in an interview. “The people of Nassau have been great to us. We’re very happy to be welcomed there.”

Goldstein said Sands hopes to build “a top tier resort of the highest order.”

“This is meant to be a very, very extravagant proposition,” he said. “This will be one for the ages and something I think people in New York will be astounded by.”

— Randi F. Marshall randi.marshall@newsday.com

Pencil Point

Big shoes to fill

For more cartoons, visit www.newsday.com/nationalcartoons

Reference Point

The learning curve on LI's schools

The headline could have appeared at various times in Long Island’s history. Its message was stark: “Crisis in Our Schools.”

It ran in the newspaper of Oct. 26, 1955, and Newsday’s editorial board was sounding an alarm — several alarms, in fact.

The first warning shot had to do with the region’s explosive growth. The school-age population on Long Island was expected to double in the next 15 years to 650,000, which the board said would put a tremendous strain on the education system.

“No one — in any community — can escape that tremendous growth and its effect,” the board wrote.

That led to the second problem — the quality of education in the region.

“There is an ugly by-product of the growth: one of the most difficult school problems in the U.S.,” the board wrote bluntly. “Long Island schools are spotty. Their topsy-turvy growth, like the growth of Long Island, has been unplanned.”

And that quickly fed into the third issue, to which the board — like subsequent generations of Long Islanders — devoted most of its attention: the financing of Long Island schools.

“School districts levy their own taxes,” the board wrote. “Industries that draw on all Long Island for their employees and their business, pay taxes only to the locality where their plant happens to be. In some districts school taxes are inordinately high; in other areas they are unfairly low. In some parts of Long Island schools are models; in other parts they are a disgrace.”

The board had in mind one measure it deemed “essential as a start.”

“Both Nassau and Suffolk need county-wide taxes to wipe out the inequities and inequalities that exist from school district to school district,” the board argued. “One obvious advantage to county-wide taxes is that all Long Island industries would then contribute to all Nassau and Suffolk schools as they should.”

And the editorial board concluded its argument by stressing the consequences of inaction.

“On its 170th anniversary the New York State Board of Regents summarized the problem well: ‘No community … will have better schools than it wants. The ultimate accomplishment rests with the people in our state.’ If Nassau and Suffolk want good schools — or want what good schools they already have to stay that way — they had better act now,” the board wrote. “It is getting very late.”

Sixty-eight years later, Long Islanders know how it all worked out. The school-age population did indeed continue to increase rapidly though it never quite reached that projection. No countywide tax was ever instituted to distribute funding to schools more equitably. Tremendous taxing disparities still exist. And, most profoundly sad of all, some schools on Long Island still are models and some still fall short.

— Michael Dobie michael.dobie@newsday.com, Amanda Fiscina-Wells amanda.fiscina-wells@newsday.com

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