Atlantic City region has lost 9,900 jobs this year

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — The Atlantic City region lost 9,900 jobs over the past 12 months, battered by the closure of four of Atlantic City's 12 casinos.

The decline announced Tuesday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics was the largest non-farm job loss of 318 metropolitan areas studied by the bureau.

The next greatest loss was in the Davenport, Iowa area, which lost 2,200 jobs over the same period.

The Atlantic City area, which includes Hammonton, also had the highest percentage of job losses at 7.3 percent. Ocean City was down 3.4 percent.

A fifth casino, the Trump Taj Mahal, is scheduled to close Dec. 20, putting an additional 3,000 people out of work.

So far, the casino closings have accounted for 8,000 lost jobs this year.

Patrick O’Keefe, the director of Economic Research at CohnReznick says the impact of these job losses to south Jersey is devastating.

"Our jobs growth statewide and in that region has been subpar for a number of years," O'Keefe said. "This has statewide implications and state government will have to mobilize substantial resources."

To make sure those who are displaced have a continuing stream of income, a strategy will have to be developed to put the region back on its feet for the long-term, O'Keefe said.

O'Keefe said this is just making a challenging situation a lot worse because the demand for labor statewide continues to run less than our supply of labor. The individuals who are directly affected by the Atlantic City job losses have skills and experience that are not going to be in heavy demand.

However, New Jersey isn't giving up on its effort to attract small new casinos to Atlantic City.

The state Legislature plans to water down the requirements of a 2011 law designed to attract developers willing to build up to two new, smaller and less costly casinos with as few as 200 hotel rooms.

A bill to be debated Thursday by a state Senate committee would remove the requirements that they be new construction and that one of the projects eventually expands to 500 rooms. The new bill would let casinos be established in existing buildings.

No one has built one of the new casinos since Gov. Chris Christie signed the bill in January 2011. Florida's Seminole Indians, through their Hard Rock International franchise, proposed one but pulled out soon afterward.

Four of Atlantic City's 12 casinos have closed this year, and a fifth, Trump Taj Mahal, is scheduled to join them on Dec. 20. So far, 8,000 casino workers have lost their jobs this year.

The boutique casino plan was seen as a way to entice developers into the market at a much lower price than the $1.5 billion to $2 billion the city's higher-end casinos cost to build. Revel, which closed in September after less than two years, cost $2.4 billion and never turned a profit.

The most successful of the city's 11 casinos have 2,000 rooms or more.

The new bill is sponsored by state Senate President Steven Sweeney, who last week introduced a series of measures designed to help stabilize tax bills for the city's eight surviving casinos and help Atlantic City pay down its municipal debt.

David Matthau contributed to this report.

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