Casinopocalypse Never: Developer Denies Interest in Reston, Herndon Casino, Nosiree Bob! (Simon)

 

No one:
Absolutely no one:
Comstock: We never wanted to build a casino in your stupid town anyway.

The fancypants casino bill has been dead (for now) for almost a month, and developer Comstock just issued a public statement saying nosiree, we never thought about building a giant casino entertainment project in Reston or Herndon, why would anyone think that, silly rabbits?

To be fair, Comstock probably felt compelled to issue the statement because an Action McNews teevee story conflated two unrelated events in our neighbor to the west, Herndon. At the same time as town officials were considering tweaking zoning requirements to make it difficult to build a casino there, ultimately deciding to try to simply prohibit them outright, they were dealing with another Comstock-related issue: Herndon is suing the company to get back the land for a fancy downtown development project the company backed out of in 2024. And the teevee people combined the two into one story, as they often do given the limited time between mattress commercials, and hence the public statement.

Give us some good public statement blockquote:

Contrary to what has been reported or speculated, Comstock has never pursued the approvals necessary for a casino development anywhere on the Silver Line outside of Tysons. The reason is straightforward: our concept for what this type of destination development should look like, what it should include, and how it should function is simply not compatible with a residential neighborhood.

Alrighty then! We'll give them the benefit of the doubt, but let's be perfectly clear, as the kids politicians said as recently as a decade ago: While Comstock didn't author it, the language in the original casino bill proposed back in ought-twenty-three by Sen. David Marsden (D-Burke) and Del. Wren Williams (R-Stuart) that Comstock supported included some very specific legalese about the location of any proposed casino that was still somehow nonspecific enough to make both Tysons and Reston possibilities, though that later got narrowed to Tysons (and then expanded back to include just about anywhere) during this year's legislative deliberations. So another company, if not them, could have built it here if that language had held and the bill passed. 

But we're glad that Comstock put their commitment to keep casinos away from residential neighborhoods in writing for all to see. If only some other equine-adjacent developers could do the same thing instead of poking around some moldy sixty-year-old property plats, we'd all be a lot happier, the end.