Mayor Lorenzo Langford is committed to Atlantic City gambling and seeing the city’s casino industry recover, despite his well-publicized disputes with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie over reforms implemented by the state that the mayor says cut him and other city leaders out of the process.

Langford, a former dealer and pit boss as well as Atlantic City’s mayor since 2002, was critical of Christie’s reform package that was passed by state lawmakers in 2011 and put authority over the city’s 12 casinos under the state through a newly created tourism district. In an interview last Friday in his seventh-floor City Hall conference room, Langford said the first two years of Christie’s planned five-year program haven’t shown any notable improvements for Atlantic City gambling.

“The numbers don’t lie,” Langford said, citing gaming revenue statistics that showed declines of 6.9 percent in 2011 and 8 percent in 2012. Atlantic City tourism and gaming leaders, however, cite upticks in non-gaming areas, such as luxury tax collections, sales taxes and occupied hotel room nights.

Langford supports the Atlantic City gambling industry’s push to create more non-gaming amenities, such as restaurants, nightclubs and retail offerings. He likes the glitzy, $30 million a year “DO AC” advertising campaign produced by the casino-funded Atlantic City Alliance that touts the market as a destination resort.

He only wishes the casinos had undertaken the effort 10 years ago, before gaming competition from Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and Delaware and the tanking national economy took business away from Atlantic City.

“We’re trying to be like Las Vegas and rely more on the non-gaming business,” he said. “We just started too late.”