Kan. lottery chief: Mike Ensign not in casino plan

Associated Press

Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009 | 11:57 a.m.

Retired Las Vegas gambling executive Mike Ensign is no longer involved in an attempt to build a casino south of Wichita, the Kansas Lottery's executive director said Tuesday.

Ensign's involvement in a previous proposal for a Lottery-owned casino in Sumner County in south-central Kansas had brought the plan additional scrutiny because he is the father of Nevada Sen. John Ensign, a Republican who confessed in June to an affair. The senator said in July that his parents had paid his mistress and her family $96,000.

Lottery Executive Director Ed Van Petten said that both Mike Ensign and Peter Simon, another former Mandalay Resort Group executive, have dropped out of efforts to bring a casino to Sumner County. He said they didn't like the fact that the Lottery owns the new gambling under Kansas law — or the 27 percent share of revenues reserved for state and local governments.

The two former Mandalay executives were part of South Central Gaming Partners, which had been one of three developers seeking a casino contract with the Lottery for Sumner County. The former competitors have now joined forces to push a single plan.

"I do not expect that to include Mike Ensign or Peter Simon," Van Petten said in an interview. "Basically, they just didn't like the regulatory makeup."

The remaining plan, for the Chisholm Creek Resort Casino, received the Kansas Lottery Commission's endorsement Tuesday. The $225 million project would be built near Mulvane, about 20 miles south of Wichita off the Kansas Turnpike exit for Kansas 53.

A state casino selection board still must review the Chisholm Creek plan and decide by the end of October whether it can move forward. Had the Lottery Commission still had competing plans, it could have forwarded more them all to the selection board, which would have picked one.

A spokeswoman for South Central Gaming Partners did not return telephone messages Tuesday. Attempts to find an office number for Mike Ensign were unsuccessful, and there was no phone number in an Internet listing for his Las Vegas home.

Van Petten has said questions about the payments to the Nevada senator's mistress and her family were not an issue for Kansas Lottery officials because the elder Ensign had not been accused of wrongdoing.

But it had provoked comments from at least a few legislators, including state Rep. Pete DeGraaf, a Mulvane Republican who opposes efforts to locate a casino near this hometown.

"We were assured that this was squeaky clean," DeGraaf said. "There's still great concern that the state do this with total integrity."

Lottery officials have said they didn't push South Central Gaming Partners to combine with its competitors.

Van Petten said Ensign and Simon simply made a business decision about being involved in a Kansas project and, "It wasn't an angry situation on anybody's part."

Foxwoods and another former competitor, Lakes Entertainment Inc., of Minnetonka, Minn., each are responsible for half the financing for Chisholm Creek. Foxwoods President Gary Armentrout said they won't have to rely on any debt financing.

"We can now come to the state of Kansas with the assurances that we can build this facility with all cash," he said.

Both Foxwoods and Lakes Entertainment will be involved in the casino's management, but the former competitors haven't settled on a role for South Central Gaming Partners investors, Armentrout said.

Foxwoods is owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe of Connecticut, which operates what its officials describe as the largest gambling-and-resort complex in the U.S. there. Lakes Entertainment has operated 11 tribal casinos in seven states, including California and Oklahoma.