By now, it’s common knowledge that Penn National Gaming Inc. plans to build a $70 million-plus racino across Main Street from Bass Park, home of Bangor Raceway.

What may not be known generally is a major reason the new facility is going there: The city wants it that way.

The site that the company is arranging to buy now is occupied by the Holiday Inn-Civic Center and the Main Street Inn on Main Street.

The deal, which will involve Penn National buying the Holiday Inn site and conveying it to the city, has been the subject of numerous closed-door negotiating meetings conducted by the City Council over the past several months, most recently on Monday night. Negotiations now are entering the final stretch.

The city and Penn National initially shot for a Nov. 30 deadline. Wednesday, however, came and went without a signing.

Despite that, the project remains on track, City Solicitor Norman Heitmann said Wednesday.

“Deadlines can be extended,” he said. He said the fact that Penn’s purchase agreement with Holiday Inn owner Larry Mahaney does not expire until the end of the year gives the city some additional wiggle room.

The hotel properties, across the street from Bass Park and Bangor Raceway, are among the few commercially zoned properties both large enough to accommodate Penn’s proposed 150,000-square-foot permanent facility with attached multilevel parking garage and within the 2,000-foot radius of Bangor Raceway allowed by state law.

That is a big change from the plan originally presented by Capital Seven LLC, the Nevada-based company owned by entrepreneur Shawn Scott that unveiled the racino concept to Bangor three years ago this month. Capital Seven, however, sold its interest in the project to Penn National in early 2004.

That plan originally called for locating a 1,500-slot gaming complex at Bass Park, in the area now used for parking during events held at the Bangor Auditorium and Civic Center, as well as The American Folk Festival, which takes place each August at the Bangor Waterfront.

At the request of city officials, who eventually concluded that building a racino at Bass Park posed problems for existing activities, Penn National officials began looking for other sites. In April, they confirmed they were negotiating with Mahaney.

“It’s what the city wants,” Jon Johnson, who oversees Penn National’s Bangor operations, said in a recent interview. “Putting the project at Bass Park would take up all of the parking area there.”

In April, Penn National spokesman Eric Schippers confirmed that the company was negotiating with Mahaney, who had bought an option on the Main Street Inn property and two houses behind it belonging to Chiou Lin of Hampden. City Manager Edward Barrett and City Solicitor Heitmann said earlier this month that it was their understanding that if the deal were approved, the inns and nearby houses on Main Street and behind the hotels would be torn down and replaced with a new facility.

“We would be looking at starting in the spring and completing the project by fall 2007,” Johnson said in a recent interview.

Penn National this month opened a temporary slots facility, called Hollywood Slots at Bangor, in the former Miller’s Restaurant. The temporary gaming parlor, which has 475 slot machines, is just up Main Street from the proposed home of the company’s permanent facility, referred to as the Riverside Block in city documents.

Though the permanent facility’s move across Main Street proved controversial to some – including anti-gambling groups, who characterized it as a bait and switch, and horsemen, who wanted the slots facility closer to the racetrack – city officials believe the Riverside Block will work out better in the long run.

“From my perspective, I don’t see how it could have been a good thing,” Bass Park Director Mike Dyer said last month of the original site. “It would have worked, but it wouldn’t have worked well. I think it wouldn’t have worked well for either party.”

For starters, it would have created traffic problems. In order to reach Bass Park from Interstate 395 or from Hampden to the south, patrons would have had to cross two lanes of oncoming traffic in an area that already has occasional congestion, Dyer noted.

It also would have meant shoehorning the racino and parking garage around the auditorium and civic center and the racetrack, he said. Now, the city can reconsider its plan to build a new arena at Bass Park instead of downtown, near the site recently chosen for the new state courthouse.

Bass Park, Dyer said, is rare among municipally owned public gathering places in that it has lots of green space. That allows for large outdoor events, such as the state fair, and the logging exposition that draws vendors and buyers from across the country and Canada.

“Some of these we can’t do in a downtown location,” Dyer said.

Dyer thinks that having the racino and city entertainment facilities across the street from each other could work well for both.

“Look at Anne Murray,” he said. The Canadian singer-songwriter appeared at the auditorium on Thanksgiving weekend. “It’s their [Penn National’s] demographic. It’s their audience.”

The racino’s main market is expected to be older people with some disposable income to use for entertainment. Dyer can envision concertgoers making a weekend of it, taking in a concert, playing slots and perhaps doing some shopping downtown.

“It works for both. We’re fine with it. It can only help,” he said. The idea behind the racino concept is to combine horse racing with year-round entertainment, namely gambling, as a way to bolster Maine’s struggling harness racing community by providing additional revenues, among other things.

Harness racing in Bangor had been on the decline for years. Bangor Historic Track Inc., which operated the annual racing meet at the city’s historic half-mile dirt oval, survived because investors continued to pump their own money into it.

As some saw it then, harness racing’s days were numbered.

“They were just about ready to pack it up and forget about it because they were getting hammered every year,” Dyer said.

Though horsemen aren’t wild about the new site, they would rather see the project move ahead than fight it, Denise McNitt, a spokeswoman for the Maine Harness Horseman’s Association, said last month.

“We’re in contact with the city of Bangor and Chamber of Commerce and we’re going to be working out some of the issues. They’ve really reached out to us,” McNitt said.

“Bass Park is certainly in need of some improvement, and the revenue stream [generated by slots] will help make that happen,” she said, adding that the improvements could boost attendance during the racing season.