Our main role is to change perceptions of the city. We can't do 12 different things.

We want them to be regular customers of Atlantic City before slot machines come into Pennsylvania.

Certainly, events like Miss America are valuable to the community. But overall, I think we've moved on.

Again, we knew they were in default, but it wasn't something we were going to blow up the contract for. We thought we could make it work.

We were not going to go there. We know it would have put them under.

Going into (Thursday), I - we all - thought that's what we're going to be hearing, that they had a date for us.

Yes, we were all shocked. I don't think anybody really knew it was coming.

We were all caught off guard a little bit. One question I never got to ask Art (McMaster) was 'when did you come to this conclusion?' In hindsight, maybe the fact that we hadn't gotten a date yet should have suggested something. But I think we all thought we were working to keep it here.

I look at the list of headliners and I don't even recognize most of these names.