Michael O’Connell,Patch Staff
RICHMOND, VA — Members of the Commerce, Agriculture & Natural Resources Subcommittee in the Virginia General Assembly voted unanimously late Wednesday to pass by the Tysons casino bill.
The Senate Bill 982 will not move any further in the current legislative session, according to Del. David Bulova (D-Fairfax).
Comstock Holding Companies, a Reston-based developer, has spent more than $1.5 million since 2023 to pass legislation allowing a casino to be built on Metro’s Silver Line outside the Capital Beltway in Fairfax County.
The project would include a 4 million-square-foot entertainment district in Tysons that would feature a high-end hotel with gaming floor, convention center, concert venue, restaurants, retail, and workforce housing. In addition, 200,000 square feet of the district would be dedicated to a casino.
After the Virginia Senate approved SB 982 on Feb. 4 on a 24 to 16 vote, the legislation was referred on Friday to the General Laws Committee. However, Speaker Don Scott (D-Portsmouth) requested that the bill be rereferred to the House Appropriations Committee.
On Wednesday, the appropriations committee referred it to the Agriculture & Natural Resources Subcommittee. Once the vote was taken, Bulova announced that this was the final time the subcommittee would meet this session.
During the 2023 legislative session, Sen. Dave Marsden (D-Burke) and Del. Wren Williams (R-Stuart) introduced nearly identical bills in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly seeking to give the board of supervisors the authority to put a casino referendum on a future ballot. The bills were quickly withdrawn following public backlash against the legislation.
Marsden reintroduced the referendum legislation as Senate Bill 675 in January 2024, but the Senate Committee on Finance and Appropriations voted to hold it over to the 2025 session. The final version bill included the following language which narrowed to location of the proposed casino to Tysons.
In January, Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell (D-Mount Vernon) introduced SB982, shepherding it through the Gaming Subcommittee and the General Laws & Technology and Appropriations Committees. Sens. Lamont Bagby (D-Richmond), Stella Pekarsky (D-Centreville) and Todd Pillion (R-Abington) served as the bill sponsors.
“We need this kind of project in Fairfax County to bring tourists, come and spend their money in our state, to support our Metro and support our economy,” Surovell told the subcommittee. “For the state in authorizing this, there’s $2.3 billion per decade of money for school construction, a lot more of that for the general fund.”
Sen. Jennifer Boysko, who spoke in opposition to the casino bill on Wednesday, issued the following statement after the subcommittee vote was taken:
“I was pleased that the House Appropriations Committee took the action to kill the casino proposal. All along it was an unvetted project. There was absolutely no guarantee that labor protections. There was not a legitimate independent study that provided analysis. And finally, forcing one specific location for a major land use with zero buy in from the community doomed the project from the start. Tysons and the Silver Line corridor have, I would argue, the most economically robust business climate in the Commonwealth and were carefully planned with community input. A casino is not an appropriate land use there. My constituents have been contacting me to say how grateful they are that the bill has died.”