The City of Greater Sudbury appears ready to take another step toward approving plans for a new casino and arena complex on the Kingsway.

On Monday, the planning committee voted to approve the re-zoning request for the casino portion and Wednesday night, re-zoning requests were also approved for the arena and parking lot. 

The project developer Dario Zulich says he's looking forward to the future.

“I’m very excited about the decision. You know, change is a difficult thing and it hurts and I saw that the planning staff and planning committee have moved forward with a lot or courage and it takes a lot of courage to move forward with confidence in making change and I’m not going to let them down. I’m going to do the best I can and I will not let them down.” said Zulich.

On city councillor, Mark Signoretti, remains skeptical.

“The people that did speak tonight spoke very eloquently and gave a lot of factual information, so I really hope that the planning committee will take that into consideration because there's a lot of people with a lot of insight. Not just passionate pleas, but actual factual pleas.” said Signoretti.

Some of the pleas to keep the casino and arena off of the Kingsway came from a group called No Casino Sudbury. The group is made up of concerned citizens who are against the idea of a casino in the community for various reasons. They say they plan on continuing their battle.

Gordon Petch is the No Casino Sudbury lawyer.

"There will not be any shovels hitting the ground and they cannot spend public money on this as long as there are appeals. So, my instructions are to appeal this, if council proceeds the way they are on the 11th, to the new land use Local Planning Appeal Tribunal.” said Petch.

Rowan Faludi is a partner with urbanMetrics, who wrote the report on the Kingsway Entertainment District and Arena Economic Impact.

"It's written in their economic development strategy, so the city has already made a commitment to protect and enhance the downtown, they can't now alll of a sudden give up that commitment by making a massive project on the periphery of the city. That's going to be competing directly with the downtown."  said Faludi.

This week's resolutions will be put to council on April 10th for final approval.