Revel owner fined $1,000 a day for ignoring fire code

Atlantic City is fining the owner of the Revel Casino Hotel building $1,000 a day for ignoring the city’s fire code.

Revel owner Glenn Straub stopped employing union engineers. And acting Atlantic City Fire Chief Scott Evans said it’s a hazard not to have trained personnel in the building’s fire command center.

“They need to know how to control the smoke-evacuation systems. They need to understand the fire pumps, how to shut the sprinklers off, how to shut the fire pumps off, to be able to monitor the elevators,” Evans said Thursday. “There’s a lot more to it than just sitting at a desk looking at an alarm panel.”

Revel has been closed for more than a year.

Roger Gros,  publisher of casino industry trade magazine Global Gaming Business, said Revel isn’t important for the revitalization of Atlantic City and should stay closed.

“There’s already too much capacity, Bringing this back on line would simply renew the difficulty that Atlantic City had last summer and probably result in a casino closing other than Revel if it reopened,” Gros said,

After a spate of casino closings last year, Gros said Atlantic City is going in the right direction and has bright future.

“The remaining casinos have been profitable for at least a year since the other casinos closed, so I think it has right-sized itself,” he said. “The big question right now is if the city can stabilize the tax rate because until they do they won’t get any more investment in the city in the non-gaming amenities which they need so desperately.”