The Nassau County Legislature’s Rules Committee on Monday voted in favor of allowing Las Vegas Sands to operate the Nassau Coliseum for the next 42 years and approved the start of an environmental review for a possible casino resort on the property.

The committee’s vote came days after the Nassau County Planning Commission voted unanimously Thursday in favor of the lease.

Both votes came amid protests in favor and against the lease needed for the Nevada-based corporation’s has planned $6 billion project for the 72-acre, county-owned Coliseum site in Uniondale.

The full project requires the Las Vegas Sands to win one of three state gambling licenses next year.

The 42-year lease, which still requires approval by the full county Legislature and County Executive Bruce Blakeman, gives the Sands control of the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum. This includes booking events and maintaining the property but not the right to develop the site.

In addition to approving the lease, Rule Committee members agreed to be the lead agency on a state-mandated environmental review.

Once the environmental review is complete, a separate 99-year lease that would allow Sands to build on the site would be presented to legislators for another vote.

Labor activists with green signs reading “Say Yes to Sands” gathered at the Theodore Roosevelt Executive and Legislative Building in Mineola to support the county’s move forward with the plan in anticipation of Las Vegas Sands potentially winning a state contract.

“The casino has no implication on what we’re doing today,” Grant Newburger, director of communications of the AFL-CIO-affiliated Building and Construction Trades Council of Nassau and Suffolk counties, said Friday. “Sands is the employer who is going to keep paying for our people that are unionized, local Long Islanders. This is the entity that is trying to take over the Coliseum right now. We all live on Long Island. And we just want to feed our families and I want to make sure they can go to work tomorrow.”

Anti-casino advocates rallied outside of the building as well, stressing the need to consider the long-term implications of building a casino in Nassau.

“The change in the culture [with a casino] is going to be profound,” George Krug, Garden City resident and member of the Say No To The Casino Civic Association said. “What this does to parents looking at Hofstra as a prospective school for their kids, when they’re driving up, to check out the school that they might want to send their son or daughter to and they see there’s a Las Vegas-style casino right next door literally across the street, and they learned that it’s the second largest casino in the country bigger than any casino in Las Vegas, they’re going to be looking at other options, right? I firmly believe that years from now if this casino gets built, people are going to think of Nassau County in terms of before the casino and after the casino.”

Since the New York Islanders left the Nassau Coliseum in 2015 – playing at Barclays Center in Brooklyn for a few years with a brief return to the coliseum before eventually settling at UBS Arena in Elmont – questions have lingered about the coliseum’s status, and many plans for its future have fallen through over the years.

“Before Bruce Blakeman became county executive, there was the Rechler plan for mixed-use,” Krug said. “This one was gaining traction and gaining approval and had widespread support until County Executive Blakeman brought everything to a halt.”

The Village of Garden City voted unanimously in 2023 to condemn any plans for the casino.

Village Mayor Mary Carter Flanagan spoke at the rally, echoing Krug’s sentiment on the effects it could have.

“The serious security issues that surround casinos are well known, including DWI, prostitution, drugs, sex trafficking, compulsive gambling, and moreover, a severely negative impact on our village roadways, which are already overburdened with traffic,” Flanagan said. “The [Village] Board urges the Nassau County Legislature and the Nassau County IDA to actively seek out development ideas which will enhance our communities.”

The Rules Committee’s decision came fter a lengthy public hearing that included over 100 speakers – largely consisting of anti-casino advocates and pro-Sands labor organizers.

“This is not about a casino, this is about an integrated resort,” Matthew Aracich, president of the Long Island Building and Construction Trades Council of Nassau and Suffolk Counties, AFL-CIO, said,.  “The casino is about 10% of this whole project. The idea is that building this creates all that economic wealth, it gets people out of poverty, it gets them to go ahead and become middle class, it gets them to go ahead and ensure that all of the events that will happen will transpire from those people coming over to Sands as well. So it’s it’s not just those 400 people, it’s expanding those 400 people.”

The vote will now go before the full County Legislature Aug. 5.