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Another bad week for Dan Snyder’s theme park chain. Six Flags announced that it will not be building a Dark Knight roller coaster at its New England outpost after all.
Six Flags started construction on the $7.5 million coaster this winter without bothering to get zoning and construction permits from the town of Agawam, Mass., where the park is located.
Agawam officials in February ordered Six Flags to stop work on the project until they got the permits.
And, yesterday, after months of debate during which it turned out that there were safety and other issues with the unapproved plans, Six Flags decided to scrap the coaster project, and will instead be tearing down everything built thus far.
In place of Dark Knight, Six Flags disclosed yesterday, the New England park will debut something called “Glow in the Park,” an attraction described by the company as “a phenomenal nighttime extravaganza that will blow our guests away.”
Wall Street, alas, wasn’t blown away by “Glow in the Park”: Six Flags stock (SIX) closed at $1.56 a share yesterday, which, if I’m reading the charts correctly, is its lowest closing price in history. Investors might also be fleeing SIX because of other recent headlines regarding the threat of bankruptcy, the three class action suits related to 500 cases of Norovirus traced to Six Flags’ upstate New York park, or testimony in the lawsuit from that sordid case of a kid getting her feet chopped off last summer on the Superman Tower of Power ride at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom.
In any case, the same stock sold for $11.80 in the spring of 2006, as Snyder took over the board of directors and put his management team and marketing strategy in place.
In SEC filings, Snyder’s Red Zone LLC, an investment group which includes several top Redskins officials, claimed ownership of 10.9 million shares of Six Flags stock. Assuming they’ve still got them, as of the close of yesterday’s markets the Ashburn office pool had lost $111,616,000.
Again: They’ve lost $111.616.000.
Keep the dial right here for all the breaking news in Snyder’s Six Flags soap opera.
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