Casino’s plans on hold

Steve Marcus

The Silver Nugget in North Las Vegas is surrounded by vacant lots, but its neighbors will eventually include City Hall and a 350,000-square-foot shopping center.

By Mike Trask

Friday, Sept. 26, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Steve Marcus

Joe Cain, vice president of Silver Nugget Gaming, says, "We're bullish about this market."

Walk outside the front door of the 45-year-old Silver Nugget in North Las Vegas and there’s nothing to see — unless you’re looking for the future.

The small locals casino has no next-door neighbors. It is surrounded by dusty lots with no signs of life, save for the traffic speeding past.

Just wait a decade, says Joe Cain, vice president of Silver Nugget Gaming.

The Silver Nugget sits at the center of a $1 billion redevelopment project. The 12-acre vacant lot north of the Silver Nugget, which until this summer had been a trailer park, will be the site of a $156 million City Hall.

Across Las Vegas Boulevard North, behind a bus stop where nobody waits, is the site of Las Flores, a 350,000-square-foot shopping center. Construction is to begin next year.

As part of a major transportation overhaul, the city is considering changes to the street, adding bus lanes and a nicer median and expanding to three lanes of traffic in each direction.

The Silver Nugget has been planning a massive expansion of the casino to add movie theaters, restaurants, more gaming and a hotel tower.

It would cost at least $200 million.

Given the economic turmoil, however, this isn’t the time to try to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars. So plans to undertake the expansion in the next few years have been curtailed.

Cain now sees it as a long-term project. He will wait 18 months or so before looking at financing again.

“We’re bullish about this market,” he says, standing in a recently renovated events center. At the moment, “everything is unsettling. But in 10 years this is going to be a different place.”

The city wants Las Vegas Boulevard North to look like a different place, too.

The road has had a seedy reputation for generations, reaching an all-time low in June 2006 when a 20-year-old man was killed inside the Silver Nugget.

Six months later Cain and a new ownership group took over, aiming to capitalize on the surrounding development.

That development should go a long way toward solving the image problem, in Cain’s view.

When the new City Hall opens, probably in 2011, government employees will be able to walk to the casino for lunch or after work. The shopping center would give people a reason to drive down Las Vegas Boulevard North.

“These things should upgrade the neighborhood,” Cain says. “Right now people are going elsewhere because we can’t compete.”

For now it’s a battle to stay afloat. Next week it will offer boxing, hosting the first in a monthly series of fights that Cain hopes bring about 700 people to the casino.

That’s not even close to the numbers who will go to a multiplex showing Hollywood films.

But it’s going to have to do for now.