It was back in early March of 2013 that news suddenly broke of a buyer for Boyd Gaming's Echelon Place, the partially built megaresort planned for the site formerly occupied by the Stardust, which was imploded in early 2007. Construction on Echelon, which was to include a 140,000-square-foot casino, four hotels (including a Shangri-La, a Delano, and a Mondrian, in addition to the Echelon Tower), plus a convention center, was suspended in mid-2008 thanks to the Great Recession. Boyd continued to profess its intention to someday bring this vision to fruition and gain a foothold on the Las Vegas Strip, however, and was granted an extension until 2018 from Clark County to finish the 87-acre project.
Then, just months later, came the surprise news of a sale to Malaysia's Genting Bhd., the largest casino operator on the Southeast Asian market, which announced its intention to invest as much as $4 billion to realize an ambitious and entirely re-imagined Asian-themed concept for the north-Strip entity, which it purchased for a mere $350 million. Citing ideas that harked back to the heyday of Las Vegas' casino theming, including a replica of the Great Wall of China and a live-panda enclosure, in addition to an indoor water park and rooftop "sky park' and observation deck, Genting anticipated an initial groundbreaking sometime in 2014, with Phase I completion scheduled for 2015 and a complete resort grand opening the following year.
There were local reports in the middle of last year that touted a plan from Genting to begin promoting its Strip presence well ahead of any construction, with permission allegedly sought to construct two pagoda-style preview centers, the embellishment of existing construction fencing with Chinese imagery, a sound system to broadcast news and music to Strip passers-by, and even live dragon dances, none of which actually materialized, to the best of our knowledge.
In fact, nothing at all seemed to be happening even by early spring of this year, provoking local skepticism including our own March 5 Today's News item observing the "invisible" progress at Resorts World Las Vegas. We were not alone: The Las Vegas Review-Journal approached the new owners for a status update around the same time and was informed that Genting had been "very busy" with other things and was taking a "thoughtful" approach to the development, which had the distinct ring of cold feet about it and reflected the accuracy of what locals had perceived to be an evident utter lack of activity at the site.
Finally, in May, came word that Genting Berhad had at least been busy behind the scenes and had successfully won approval from the Nevada Gaming Commission to do business in the state. A new ground-breaking date of "this summer" was announced, along with a restated commitment to invest at least $4 billion in the Asian-themed megaresort. Still, any actual progress in Las Vegas seemed to be taking a back seat to the company's (so far abortive) attempts to gain a foothold in the Florida market, while spending more than any other bidder on both lobbying and campaign contributions in 2012 and 2013, pursuing its ongoing ambitions in New York state.
Then, a little over a week ago, the company suddenly released some new artists' renditions of proposed design concepts for Resorts World Las Vegas as part of a vimeo video pitch to foreign investors to invest in to the construction kitty in return for Green Card status, courtesy of the EB-5 visa program that grants permanent residency to the immediate families of investors who sink a minimum of a half-million dollars into a U.S.-based enterprise (see "QoD" 9/28/14 for more details on this and other classes of U.S. visa and what they entail/bestow). With this bid to attract $500,000-level foreign investors in order to realize a $4 billion massively ambitious (and, to this writer's taste at least, gaudy-to-the-point-of-vulgar) masterplan, and with still no ground as yet broken, we have to remain skeptical in the extreme with regard to anything new debuting on the Stardust/Echelon site in 2015, or 2016 for that matter, if at all...
