Within only a couple of hours after the
opening of the new sky bridge connecting the
Reno-Sparks Convention Center to the
Atlantis a few days ago, John Farahi was looking
toward the casino-hotel's next big projects.
Farahi, general manager of the Atlantis
and co-chairman and chief executive officer
of its publicly held parent company, says the
company's next big step will be replacement
of motor lodge units with another hotel tower
on the east edge of the Atlantis property.
Accompanying that construction, he says,
would be a multi-story parking garage.
When? That's a big question, as executives
of Monarch Casino and Resort, the parent
company of the Atlantis, want a better sense
of the direction of the gaming market before
they make any big bets on expansion.
Like others in the gaming industry,
Monarch has felt the effects of skittish consumer
spending. In the quarter ended Sept.
30, the company reported operating income
47.5 percent below the levels of a year ago.
While the new hotel tower and the parking
garage have been sketched in master plans for
the Atlantis, Farahi said the company isn't
putting any money into design of the project.
The motor lodge units that would be
replaced by the new tower are among the last
vestiges of the original Golden Door Motel
property purchased by Farahi's family in the
1970s. The property has been expanding
almost constantly ever since.
The company just completed a $50 million
expansion to the southeast corner of its hotel
and casino an expansion that cleared the
way for the $12.5 million sky bridge project.
The 650-foot sky bridge which
includes a 110-foot span over Peckham Lane
had been part of the master plan for the
convention center since 1995.
It couldn't be built, Farahi said, until the
Atlantis had expanded far enough to provide
an anchor for the sky bridge on the north side
of Peckham.
Engineering the sky bridge connection
into the Atlantis was fairly easy, because it
could be designed along with the 116,000-
square-foot expansion.
But the convention center needed to be
retrofitted to allow the connection, and that
work consumed about $4 million of the $12.5
project budget. The Atlantis paid the entire
cost of the sky bridge project.
Tying the meeting space of the convention
center to the new meeting space on the second
floor of the Atlantis, the sky bridge also is
configured for use for trade show displays.
The sky bridge is 18 feet wide inside, and
it's wired to handle the technology that
exhibitors brings with them.
Ellen Oppenheim, president and chief
executive officer of the Reno-Sparks
Convention and Visitors Authority, said it's
rare for convention facilities to be connected
directly to hotel facilities.
Meetings and conventions account for
about 17 percent of the tourism in the region,
Oppenheim said, and enhancements help
keep the RSCVA competitive.
