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Posted At : January 21, 2009 01:04 PM | Posted By : D McKee
Related Categories:
Regulation,Lake Tahoe,Tropicana Entertainment,Sahara,The Strip,Atlantic City,Fontainebleau
Last Sunday's Las Vegas Review-Journal carried an interview with new Tropicana Las Vegas President Ron Thacker. It delicately sidesteps potentially uncomfortable questions about the plug-pulling on Folies Bergere or the brevity of Thacker's tenure at Fontainebleau. His fondness for Who Moved My Cheese? earned him some reader derision. I found it a refreshing change from those execs who routinely cite Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat (presumably in search of clues on how to outsource the casino industry to Bangalore).
Thacker is a third-generation casino manager and a well-traveled operator. This should stand both him and the Trop in good stead after the clownish bumbling of hapless Columbia Sussex. He also evinces a longstanding affection for the property, which is a quality any executive there ought to possess. So that's another point in Thacker's favor and he's right that nostalgia is the main selling point down there. With the exception of parts of the Sahara, there's no property that says "old Vegas" (in a Rat Pack sense) quite like the Trop.
But when he says, "We're going to put some money back into the property with the infrastructure itself. Bring it up to the standards our customers expect and our employees expect," you have to wonder if he's read Tropicana Entertainment CEO Scott Butera's business plan. It earmarks $8.4 million for renovations and maintenance this year (that'll get you 1/30th of thrifty Eastside Cannery and about an 80th of Aliante Station) and an average of $5.2 million for each year afterward.
That's not much more than is set aside for MontBleu, up in Lake Tahoe and a small fraction of what Butera proposes to spend on the Tropicana Atlantic City. Then again, in order to do the latter, he'd have to persuade the New Jersey Casino Control Commission to let him have it back and ... well ... you know.
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