Plans for the 1,000-room Legends Bay Casino at Sparks Marina are on hold indefinitely, officials for Legends developer RED Development and Olympia Gaming said last week.
Olympia still plans on building a casino on the 13 acres it owns at the site, says DC Graham, chief marketing and development officer for Las Vegas-based Olympia Gaming. However, the company won't proceed with the project until it can secure financing a challenge with northern Nevada's weak gaming industry and when it does move forward the first phase of the casino will be a scaled-down version.
The original design plan called for 500 rooms in the first phase of the project, but when finally undertaken, the revised plan will see around 300 rooms built.
"Ideally we would like to proceed as originally planned, but the current economic environment and the scarcity of credit make it difficult to break ground on a project of this magnitude in the immediate future," says Graham. "The revised design scope gives the project the best chance of achieving more favorable financing in these challenging times. Although the magnitude of Phase 1 may be scaled back somewhat, it will include all of the same attractions of the original plan."
Graham says Olympia would like to break ground on the casino project sometime in 2009, but the timing really depends on securing funding and finding banks willing to lend money for a new casino in northern
Nevada may prove difficult with Washoe County's gaming win down 20 percent in September. Sparks itself saw an 18 percent dip from the same period last year.
"The credit market is somewhat connected to market performance, and the banks are probably a bit skittish about Nevada until we start seeing some improvement in the gaming numbers themselves," Graham says.
The Legends Bay Casino isn't the only part of the billion-dollar development to miss its target date.
RED Development Vice President of Marketing David Claflin says a million square feet of retail development was originally planned to open at the same time as Scheels All Sports, but now is targeted for a grand opening on June 19.
"All the retailers are still coming, it has just been a question of when to open the stores," Claflin says, who adds that a number of building shells are finished, and tenant improvements will continue throughout the winter.
"Once all the parts are up and running, you have got a casino, Scheels, the main shops, and outparcels, Target and Best Buy, and also an 8,000-seat arena," Claflin says. "We don't have financing for (the arena), and this definitely is not the time to be pushing that forward, but all those different elements feed off each other. We will have the retail waiting for other pieces of the development, but it lacks the symbiotic relationship the other pieces bring."
