A bettor studies the racing sheet at the Mile High Greyhound race track in Colorado. The facility is owned by BLB Investments LLC, which also operates Twin River in Lincoln.

RMN / Ellen Jaskol

Efforts by the owners of the Twin River slot-machine facility in Lincoln to expand their gambling operations in Colorado are stalled, falling victim to the political climate out West and financial problems in Rhode Island, according to observers in the Rocky Mountain state.

Meanwhile, the owners’ efforts to build a full-scale casino in Massachusetts in conjunction with the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe are moving slowly as a federal regulatory review remains in its early stages.

BLB Investments LLC, which in 2005 bought Lincoln Park in Rhode Island and gambling venues in Colorado for $464 million from Wembley PLC, will halt racing June 28 at Mile High Greyhound Park, located in the Denver suburb of Commerce City, according to a spokesman for the Colorado Division of Racing Events.

BLB is owned jointly by Kerzner International Ltd., the Waterford Group and Starwood Capital Group.

BLB also has dropped efforts to get an initiative on the November election ballot in Colorado seeking voter approval to install video-lottery terminals at Mile High and four other racing venues it owns in the western state.

“They just stopped,” said Gary Bryan, president of the Colorado Greyhound Kennel Association. “They’re telling us it was because of the financial situation out there,” meaning in New England.

The developments come as BLB tries to find a way out of a financial box at the former Lincoln Park — renamed Twin River — where it has $577 million in outstanding loans tied to the slot parlor’s operation.

In recent meetings with Rhode Island elected leaders, BLB offered the state at least $500 million up front in return for slicing by more than half the percentage of money the state gets from the slot parlor.

The offer is part of Twin River’s plan to solve its own “dire” financial crisis. Twin River has missed loan payments to its bank and is in danger of falling into bankruptcy.

“The situation is dire. We are standing on the edge of a precipice,” Twin River spokeswoman Patti Doyle told The Journal last week.

A delegation from Twin River, meeting with House Speaker William J. Murphy last week, offered the money if the state would reduce its cut of revenue from the facility’s 4,751 video-lottery terminals from 61.08 percent to 25 percent.

Under intense pressure to close the state’s own funding gap, estimated at $425 million, Rhode Island elected leaders have so far demurred.

Gambling is the third-biggest source of state revenue, behind income and sales taxes.

Based on revenue figures from May, Twin River may generate $416.6 million in income from the terminals, yielding $254.5 million for the state in the fiscal year beginning July 1, according to an estimate provided last week to The Journal by the Rhode Island Lottery. Previous state estimates anticipated $261.4 million from Twin River.

In Massachusetts, members of Governor Patrick’s administration met last week with tribal representatives to discuss issues arising from the Wampanoags’ plans to build a full-scale casino in Middleboro.

Patrick’s office referred questions about the Wampanoags’ casino effort to Kofi Jones, a spokeswoman in the governor’s Office of Housing and Economic Development.

“We continue to have open conversations with the tribe as they move forward with their land [in] trust applications,” Jones said. “I would say it is premature to discuss any [gambling] compact negotiations between the tribe and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts because we simply haven’t reached that point.”

But there have been no recent conversations between BLB and Commerce City officials, said Paul Natale, the city’s mayor. The BLB employee who served as liaison to the city council no longer works for the company. Last year, BLB added racing dates to Mile High after it closed the Cloverleaf Kennel Club in Loveland, Colo.

BLB representatives met at the beginning of this year with Commerce City officials to discuss a plan to bring casino-style gambling to Mile High and the community on Denver’s northeastern edge, Natale confirmed.

BLB executives declined to comment for this article.

Natale and city officials hadn’t even settled their position concerning BLB’s planned ballot initiative before the company stopped its campaign.

“As long as we had some way to recoup our costs, I don’t think we would have been against it,” Natale said in a phone interview this week.

He said officials in the city of 45,000 would welcome a plan to replace Mile High with some other development.

“The racetrack has the biggest piece of land in our center city,” Natale said. “It’s just gorgeous.”

The Colorado Gaming Association represents casinos in the historic mining towns of Black Hawk, Central City and Cripple Creek, south and west of Denver.

The association’s executive director, Lois Rice, said she isn’t sure the casinos and the tracks share much in common.

“I tend to think that the people who participate in the greyhound racing events are different from the ones who come to the casinos,” she said.

Just the same, she said her group isn’t going to help the tracks get video slots or other gambling, since the casinos are having their own problems, knocked back by a soft economy and a hard smoking ban.

“Our revenues have been down 10 to 12 percent for the first [part] of 2008,” she said. “This is really the worst downturn in the history of gaming.

“It’s difficult to get people to drive outside the metropolitan area for limited stakes.”

The association is banking on its own ballot initiative to help reverse the slide. It’s backing an initiative that, if it gets onto a November ballot, could raise betting limits from $5 to $100 at the mining-town casinos and two Indian-run sites in state’s southwestern corner. While state revenue from casino gambling now goes toward historic preservation in Colorado, revenue raised from the higher limit would be funneled to the state’s community colleges.

As for BLB’s discontinued ballot initiative, Rice said: “We would have taken the same position that we took in 2003. We oppose any expansion of gaming to the Front Range and outside the three historic towns.”

Wembley spent millions of dollars in 2003 promoting a ballot initiative to allow Colorado’s racetracks to operate video-lottery terminals, but voters slapped it down.

Two years later, Wembley sold its tracks in Commerce City, Pueblo, Colorado Springs and a horse track in Aurora to BLB.

“BLB, when they came in here, never intended to race greyhounds,” said Bryan, of the greyhound association. “They were going to use the dogs until they could get a casino.

“These people have shot themselves in the foot every step they’ve taken out here.”

Kerzner International, headed by Sol Kerzner, is a Bahamas-based casino and resort operator, with properties including the Atlantis resorts in Dubai and on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. The company also helped develop the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut and continues to receive income from it, but has no ownership role in it.

Waterford Group is run by brothers Len and Mark Wolman. It owns or manages 22 hotels in seven states, mostly in Connecticut. Waterford built and manages the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford.

Last month, Waterford bought a 50-percent stake in a Sheraton hotel at Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, Conn., a year after pouring $33 million into renovations at a Hilton hotel in Hartford.

Like Kerzner, Waterford also receives income from Mohegan Sun.

Wolman and Kerzner are the primary financial backers of the Mashpee Wampanoag’s attempt to open a casino in Middleboro, Mass.

Starwood Capital is an affiliate of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, which owns the Sheraton brand.

pgrimald@projo.com