Gaming briefs for May 13, 2004

Thursday, May 13, 2004 | 10:37 a.m.

Tourism traffic jumps

Some 3.29 million people visited Las Vegas in March, a 9 percent jump from March 2003 and the second-highest March on record, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority reported Wednesday.

That's second only to March 2001, when Las Vegas reported 3.3 million visitors.

March is typically one of the strongest months of the year for Las Vegas because of the NASCAR races, a strong convention calendar and mild weather, senior research analyst Kevin Bagger said.

Strong comparisons to 2003 are somewhat tempered by the start of the Iraq war a year ago, he said. Still, "all of the indicators were very, very strong" this past March, he said.

Convention attendance was up 4.3 percent to 618,258 in March and the economic impact of those events rose 6.4 percent to $744.4 million.

Average room rates rose 8.2 percent to $94.25 and the occupancy rate rose 7.2 percentage points to 92.8 percent.

Air passenger traffic through Las Vegas rose 16.1 percent to 3.6 million visitors and average daily auto traffic near the California border at I-15 increased 5.3 percent to 35,898 cars.

Casinos Austria deal completed

A Las Vegas casino equipment manufacturer has completed the acquisition of a subsidiary of a rival European company.

Shuffle Master Inc., Las Vegas, completed the previously announced acquisition of CARD, a subsidiary of Casinos Austria AG that manufactures card shuffling machines and is developing a chip-sorting device.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the companies said that litigation between the two companies over patent and trademark infringements have been ended.

CARD's managing director, Ernst Blaha, will continue in that role and CARD's one2six shuffling machine and Easy Chipper chip-sorting device are scheduled to be released early next year.

Slot petition to proceed

LOS ANGELES -- A state appeals court has ruled that card clubs and racetracks may proceed with a ballot initiative that could threaten California Indian tribes' current monopoly on slot machines.

The 2nd District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles on Tuesday declined to consider separate challenges to the initiative brought by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians and a coalition of other casino-owning tribes.

Santa Monica attorney Frederic Woocher, who represents the Agua Caliente, said he was surprised by the court's decision, calling it a "compelling case for pre-election review." Woocher said the Agua Caliente, which own two casinos in Palm Springs, might bring a suit in Superior Court or drop the case until after the election.

"We've maintained all along that the initiative would withstand legal scrutiny and we're glad that the court has agreed," said Greg Larsen, a spokesman for the 11 card rooms and five horse racetracks backing the measure.

The tribes argued that the initiative would violate state constitutional provisions that prohibit ballot measures from addressing more than one subject and that forbid specific businesses from benefiting directly from initiatives they sponsor.

The initiative says that tribes will lose their monopoly unless they agree to a series of concessions, including paying the state 25 percent of gambling profits. If the tribes balked, the tracks and card rooms would receive rights to 30,000 slot machines.