Well, in an ideal world, there will be close to 40,000 new jobs when all the new Las Vegas megacasino projects are completed and fully staffed.
MGM Mirage’s CityCenter plans to begin hiring 12,000 new employees in early 2009. Turnberry Associates will also start hiring in early 2009; its Fontainebleau Hotel-Casino will need 6,000 employees. The M Resort will begin accepting applications for its 2,000 positions next month. Aliante Station is opening in November with 1,200 new employees, and Wynn’s Encore is scheduled to open in December with 5,300.
Boyd Gaming has announced it will hire 10,000 employees for its Echelon Place project. But remember, we’re talking about an ideal world here. Boyd Gaming announced a few weeks ago that Echelon’s grand opening will now be delayed for nine to twelve months, blamed on market conditions.
In addition, MGM Mirage and its partner Dubai World have run into delays in securing more than $3 billion in financing for the CityCenter project. The last word was that a deal was imminent, and it could well be, but the price of the place also keeps rising. It’s now at $9.2 billion; when we first reported the cost in June 2005, it was at that same $3 billion. Some analysts are questioning whether even CityCenter, being built by the powerful MGM Mirage, backed by Kirk Kerkorian’s personal fortune, and the even more powerful Dubai World will open as scheduled in November 2009.
So as with everything else in this topsy-turvy economy, we’ll have to wait and see how many of the 36,500 or so jobs planned for Las Vegas are actually filled -- and when.
