Jeff Simpson has a suggestion to improve traffic congestion: Connect the monorail to the airport

Sunday, Feb. 25, 2007 | 7:21 a.m.

The transportation snafus during the recent NBA All-Star Game weekend should be a wake-up call for the valley's tourism industry.

When the Strip and its surrounding streets reach a state of gridlock, visitors are unhappy.

When people have to wait for more than an hour for taxis to and from McCarran International Airport or the Thomas & Mack Center, it is bad for the valley's tourism business.

And that is why the Las Vegas Monorail needs to be extended to the airport, by way of UNLV.

Right now the monorail's most efficient use is ferrying convention-goers from hotels on the east side of the Strip back and forth to the Las Vegas Convention Center.

But if the monorail had stops at the Thomas & Mack and the airport, it would get a lot more business while our visitors would have another solid option to get where they are going. Hotel executives should do what they can to help the monorail raise enough money to build the extension.

I spoke recently to Pinnacle Entertainment President Wade Hundley and was quite impressed by the company's pipeline of development projects.

Although Pinnacle was outbid in its effort last year to acquire the Tropicana's parent company, the company has no shortage of impressive projects that will transform it into a significant national casino operator.

Pinnacle is upgrading its existing casinos in New Orleans; Bossier City and Lake Charles, La.; Indiana; and Reno with significant capital investment.

But the company's development plans are truly amazing. They include two new casinos in Missouri, with one $430 million casino in downtown St. Louis set to open in November, and a $400 million locals casino in the suburbs south of St. Louis that will open late in 2008.

Pinnacle also plans this summer to break ground on a second Lake Charles casino, a Florida-style resort to be called Sugarcane Bay, to further capitalize on the Houston market. The company also is trying to get permission to open a new riverboat casino in Baton Rouge, La., and plans to build a $250-million-plus casino in Central City, Colo.

The company's biggest project will be built on its 25 acres in Atlantic City, which has 382 feet of Boardwalk and beach frontage. Pinnacle plans a $1.75 billion resort that will open in about four years.

Hundley and Pinnacle Chief Executive Dan Lee aspire to build a nationwide company that can leverage the kinds of marketing synergies that made Harrah's Entertainment the biggest company in the business. I'm very impressed by Pinnacle and its executives. There are casino companies with a more expensive development pipeline, but there are no operators with as many exciting projects lined up and ready to go.

One Las Vegas locals operator that consistently flies under the radar is Cannery Casino Resorts, but the company is poised to break out in a big way. Owners Bill Paulos and Bill Wortman have built a solid small company with the Rampart in Summerlin, the Cannery in North Las Vegas and the Nevada Palace on Boulder Highway.

Paulos told me Friday that he and his partner will be awarding a construction contract this week to build the $250 million Cannery East next to the Nevada Palace, a project slated to be finished by June 2008. The company opens a Western Pennsylvania racino at its Meadows harness track in late May, and plans to break ground in September on its permanent casino facility. Total cost for Cannery's Meadows racino: $430 million.

But that's not all. Paulos told me they've got a few more projects in their pipeline. The company has grown from having a couple of hundred employees when it took over operations at the Rampart five years ago to 2,000, and expects to have 2,500 to 3,000 workers soon.

It's not only the big players in the casino business that are fueling the industry's boom.