Frenzied appeal to finish the job

By Liz Benston

Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Jim Murren was MGM Mirage’s chief financial officer when he conceived of CityCenter and persuaded the company’s directors to build it. That was during a good economy.

Amid last year’s stock market crash, Murren received what he calls a “battlefield promotion” to CEO when then-Chairman and CEO Terry Lanni suddenly retired.

The economy was souring quickly and even MGM Mirage was at risk of filing for bankruptcy protection, facing steeply declining profits and mountains of debt.

CityCenter has been a laborious, sometimes contentious project. Construction costs spiraled upward, chafing joint venture partner Dubai World, which had sunk more than $4 billion into CityCenter.

“There were so many times I thought, ‘I just don’t know how we’re going to get through this,’ ” Murren said. “If we could just buy some time, we could come up with something. I learned that on Wall Street, that if you buy some time, companies can heal themselves or some macro event could occur or you could come up with some new idea.”

The darkest hour — “it is seared into my memory,” Murren said — came in late April, when the $8.5 billion CityCenter was at risk of becoming an unfinished, dust-covered symbol of the recession surrounded by a chain-link fence, the world’s fanciest and most expensive ghost town.

Murren “literally begged” the company’s board of directors to allow him to approach the banks for an immediate $200 million payment to help power CityCenter through completion.

With their blessing and facing a bankruptcy filing by the end of that day in April, Murren hunched over a marble-topped table, pleading into a speakerphone to bankers who could make or break funding for CityCenter.

In the middle of that desperate phone call, Murren discovered that the floor-to-ceiling glass windows in his Bellagio office were shuddering.

“I said, ‘can you hold on a minute?’ Which is kind of risky when you’re on the phone with banks.” He went to the window, looked up and saw a cluster of news helicopters, circling over nearby CityCenter. He knew why they were there: to go live with the announcement that the largest privately-financed construction project in U.S. history was filing for Chapter 11.

MGM Mirage had rented fencing to surround the site and had notified security that workers might need to be sent home and to secure the construction zone.

“We were ready to tell 10,000 men and women that, you’re leaving, you’re not coming back on Monday, were shutting down the site. Can you imagine what would have happened out there? The violence, the anger, the sadness, the despair.”

Instead, the parties hammered out agreements ensuring that banks would finance the balance of CityCenter, allowing the project to finish on schedule and on a tightened budget.

With CityCenter ready to open, Murren’s greatest fears are behind him.

“Every day is a great day,” he says now. “Bring it on.”