County agency OKs Strip projects

Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2001 | 11:29 a.m.

The Clark County Planning Commission has approved plans for a London-themed resort on the Las Vegas Strip, as well as plans for a big expansion at one of the city's most famed casinos.

At its Feb. 22 meeting the commission approved Park Place Entertainment Corp.'s proposal to add a 30-story, 864-room tower at the Flamingo Road side of Caesars Palace. The expansion would include 320,000 square feet of additional retail, restaurant and meeting space, and would expand the hotel's room inventory by 35 percent. Park Place has already demolished the hotel-casino's Circus Maximus dinner theater and some older meeting space to make room for the expansion.

Also approved was Turnberry Associates' application to build a 44-story, 2,050-room resort casino modeled on the city of London. The resort would feature a 90,000-square-foot casino, replicas of Big Ben, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace, and a "changing of the guard" show. The proposed casino would be built at the former site of the El Rancho hotel-casino, imploded by Turnberry late last year.

The commission delayed acting on a third casino proposal made by a group of California developers, led by Steve Sisolak. The proposal called for the construction of a four-story, 600-room hotel-casino based on Chinese landmarks such as the Great Wall of China and the Forbidden City. The resort would be built on Las Vegas Boulevard just north of Warm Springs Road.

The commission delayed action on the application until the March 8 meeting to give the applicants more time to develop landscaping plans.