Two casinos set to expand as three megaprojects move ahead

With big plans for hotels, casinos and residential developments currently in the works, the city of West Wendover, Nev., continues to transform from a small gambling stop in the middle of the desert to a resort destination.

The latest sign of that transformation is the Peppermill Corporation's $400 million, yet-to-be-named casino-and-hotel project on Wendover Boulevard. The project will be ready for groundbreaking in 2010 or 2011, according to John Spillman, marketing director for the Peppermill Resort in West Wendover. Peppermill also owns the Montego Bay Resort and Rainbow Casino Resort, both located on Wendover Boulevard.

"We've kicked around the idea of having an Italian theme or Mediterranean theme, which would make it kind of like a smaller version of the Bellagio in Las Vegas," Spillman said. "It will be a 14-story hotel with 1,200 rooms, and the casino will be double the size of the casinos at our other three properties."

The Montego Bay and the Rainbow are also planning major expansions that will add almost 500 more hotel rooms to West Wendover by at least 2010.

"We are currently getting the groundwork ready to add 120 rooms at Montego Bay, and starting in the summer of '09 at the Rainbow, we will be adding 300 rooms and doubling the size of our casino floor to increase gaming," he said. "We'll also be adding some restaurants, which would include seafood and Italian food, as well as some retail shopping stores."

Those expansion plans come on the heels of an announcement last year of a massive, two-in-one luxury project in Wendover: the $500 million SilverHorse Resort and the $120-million Hooters Casino Hotel.

Walt Sanders, director of property development for SilverLeaf, a Scottsdale, Ariz., development group that will be building in West Wendover, said the Hooters hotel will eventually employ around 800 workers, while the 25-story SilverHorse Resort will eventually employ 1,500 and include 1,500 rooms. Both hotels will be part of SilverLeaf's planned 10-year, $1.5 billion mega-project on 525 acres of land, located at the east end of town off of I-80 and Wendover Boulevard.

The SilverLeaf project will not only include the two state-of-the-art hotels, but also a number of single-family homes, a community park, and commercial and retail space for businesses.

"Hooters is moving along with plans, even though construction hasn't started yet, and for the SilverHorse project we're still waiting to get the 750 workers we need for the development," Sanders said. "We have no place to house that many workers because of the shortage of good quality housing here in Wendover, so we've opted to start our housing project for the development first before we build our hotels. We want to have 200 to 300 homes completed before we get our workers, and we've already broken ground for the start of the housing development."

Sanders said the project's housing development will include a total of 1,000 single-family homes, and that with more than 500 acres of land, there may be additional amenities added to the property in the future.

"We have our 1,000 homes designed and ready to be built, and after all of them are finished we expect to start at least one of the hotels this year," he said. "We do have 50 percent of the design and engineering for the casinos done, but we just want to finish building the homes first."

Sanders also said other Wendover projects include a new terminal for the airport, located in Wendover, Utah, and a new $6 million-estimated office complex housing the city offices, police department and justice department.

"We've gotten to the point where we're now sometimes getting in four plane loads with 140 passengers each per day sometimes," said Sanders. "There are now over 100 cities across the U.S. that fly in direct."

Spillman said that because of West Wendover's growing demand as a tourist attraction, there is even more potential for citywide growth commercially.

"People come from all over the country to visit us now, instead of just from Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming," he said. "People are flying in from places like Seattle, Dallas, Houston, Green Bay, Milwaukee and Minneapolis. The city has changed tremendously, and the fact that the Wasatch Front and Tooele County keep growing helps us out a lot too."

Sanders said the primary reason for expansion comes from West Wendover's major increase in gaming numbers over the years, and that talk of a recession will most likely not be a worry for the city.

"From year to year, we've had the highest increase the state [Nevada], and our gaming and overall revenues, which include food and beverage, hotel and miscellaneous revenues, increased 17 percent from 2006 to 2007," he said. "For all five major hotels in West Wendover, we generated $245 million in total revenues in 2007. I've also noticed that when people are nervous about the economy or their current financial state, like at this time right now, the gaming aspect is actually better because people want to take a chance at grabbing that 'brass ring' even more."

Doug Radunich: dougrad@tooeletranscript.com