Nassau County Executive Edward P. Mangano will be joined by hundreds of local business, community and labor leaders on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 11:00 a.m. in announcing a major Economic Development and Job Creation Plan to build a world-class sports-entertainment destination center. After months of intense media speculation, the County Executive will also announce plans to pursue the construction of an Indian gaming casino.

– Nassau County Executive Edward P. Mangano, press release.

Well there’s just a ton here.

First off, it’s worth noting that Nassau County executives absolutely love pomp, circumstance and press releases. When I was in high school I won some stupid award for something stupid, and I swear we got a press release announcing that some county politician was coming to present the award, then afterward a second press release announcing that he came and presented the award, then later a signed 8×10″ black-and-white photo of me with the dude. It’s somewhere in my parents’ attic now, unless they threw in out in one of their biannual stuff-no-one-needs purges. For all I know it could have been Edward Mangano.

Anyway, I hope this guy Mangano is actually “joined by hundreds of local business, community and sportsbet leaders” to announce whatever plans are so important that they merit capitalization. That’d be something to see: some 200 suits  set up behind podiums while two reporters from Newsday and some guy representing all the Herald papers sit in an otherwise empty conference room, anxiously biting their nails and tapping pencils on notebooks, desperate to learn whatever it is that the county is doing to quiet all the speculating they’ve been doing.

It should be noted that I got this release through the New York Islanders, which really calls into question the use of the phrase “world-class.” The Islanders, you may know, have finished dead last in their division for four seasons running and shut out a member of the Professional Hockey Writers of America (and the SNY.tv blog network, to boot) from covering their team for entirely nebulous reasons.

But I suppose it is possible that the new “sports-entertainment destination center” planned for Nassau County will be world-class even if the team playing inside it is not, and at least there will also be a nearby Indian casino for betting against the Islanders.