Batavia Downs President Henry Wojtaszek said he's hopeful Governor Cuomo will announce this week that casinos and racinos can open up sometime this month.

What You Need To Know

  • Governor Cuomo is expected to make announcement about casinos and racinos soon
  • Batavia Downs said it could be ready within a week of the OK
  • About 25 percent of customers say they'd come back right away
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The gaming floor at Batavia Downs has been closed since mid-March because of the coronavirus pandemic. Wojtaszek said it won't take long to open once the state says it's OK.

"It's probably going to take us about a week to make sure that we have everything in order so that everybody's going to feel comfortable and clean and sanitized here," he said.

He said maintenance and custodial staff has been in and out of the facility. Batavia Downs has purchased all the sanitizing and cleaning products it needs, software and hardware for contact tracing, and installed new air filtration technology at the state's recommendation.

"They do a little better job of making sure that the air is cleaner as it circulates through," Wojtaszek said.

He said the public benefit corporation intends to bring back nearly all of the roughly 450 employees who have been furloughed and he expects quite a few of the customers back too. He said they surveyed about 9,000 customers and at least a quarter of them said they were ready to return right away.

"We do have a lot of people that have inquired," Wojtaszek said. "We have a lot of people excited. We definitely have a demand for our business and so we think we'll start off with a pretty decent crowd and we'll see if we can satisfy them that we've kept this place clean and safe and yeah, we think that we'll be coming back in pretty good numbers."

He expects capacity to be limited to either 25 or 50 percent and the plan Batavia Downs submitted suggests every other machine be offline.