Up in the sky, a (moving) sign of suddenly desperate times

By Brendan Buhler

Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Anthony A. Marnell III, 34 years old and handsome, scion of a Las Vegas construction empire, is standing on the top floor of the $1 billion resort he is building and of which he is chairman and chief executive, and it is hard not to feel a little sorry for him.

Because, you see, there is a blimp behind him.

The blimp is filled with 170,000 cubic feet of helium, but it’s really kept aloft by several million dollars and Marnell’s hopes.

Behind the blimp are empty lots, the southernmost edge of suburban Las Vegas and, 11 miles away, the Strip. Beyond that are high fuel prices, rising unemployment, a troubled stock market and 300 million people wondering how bad this is going to get.

Count Marnell as one of them. When his company started planning the 396-room resort, he says, no one could have imagined the economy could turn so sour so quickly. He’s still optimistic about the Las Vegas economy five or 10 years off, but to get there it looks as if he’ll have to compete for fewer visitors and dollars.

“I lay awake nights thinking of ways to stand out,” he says.

Hence, the blimp.

The blimp — called the M Lightship, after Marnell’s project, the M Resort — is white and painted with the M’s graceful black logo. And on one side is a 70-by-30-foot video screen that will show ads as the blimp plies the skies over Las Vegas for the next two years. Look for it after dark, flying for six hours a night, five days a week (unless it’s off promoting the M out of state).

Marnell hopes that selling the advertising space, for a couple of hundred dollars a minute, will help pay for the blimp’s lease.

(This is why he’s standing on the top of the building, showing off the blimp, which is scrolling ads for Coca Cola. The other people here, all wearing business attire and hard hats, are potential advertisers.)

And, of course, he hopes the logo-covered blimp will bring people into the casino on the very edge of town, where the views to the south are of open desert and I-15 disappearing toward California, and his handful of neighbors are mobile homes and one, small, pyramid-shaped house.

One bright spot for Marnell is that the resort is being built by his family’s construction business and will open in March, under budget. “I hired the best guy in the world to do it,” he says. “My father.”

Washington will have to get serious about fixing the economy, he says, putting money back in people’s pockets, money they can gamble with and spend on spa treatments.

“I don’t think we want to get back to trading chickens and sheep to feed our families,” Marnell says.

But yeah, he worries. He doesn’t know when this economy fixing will happen. He says he’s staring at a “choppy” couple of years.

“If I told you I wasn’t scared, I’d be lying.”