We're all in favor of keeping the Roadhouse looking spiffy but, at the moment, the activity does not seem to portend anything. The Nevada Gaming Control Board has no new application for gambling on file and none postdating 2012. According to City of Henderson Public Information Officer Nicole Johnson, the city is not aware of any construction project at that location – 2100 North Boulder Highway – nor has it received any application for a business license at that site.
If the Roadhouse's owners do seek to reenter the casino fray, it's certain to get Station Casinos' dander up. At least twice in the past, Station has clashed with efforts to revive the long-dormant property. While the prospect of the small Roadhouse presenting a competitive threat to massive Sunset Station suggests a mouse terrifying a giant, Station regards the Roadhouse as a serious menace to its business.
The Roadhouse has had a very spotty history as a casino. The Roadhouse name comes from a 1992 remodeling under a Fifties theme. (It had previously been a Stuckey's and Sunset Restaurant & Casino.) It closed in 2002, then reopened in November 2003 for an incarnation as a Country-themed casino, complete with 200 slots, a mechanical bull, and the Cowboy Up Lounge. During that tenure, what was described as a "faulty halogen spotlight" led to a June 2004 fire that caused $150,000 worth of damage.
Casualties included the ceiling over the dance floor, which caved in under the blaze. "We'll just have to get in there, clean up and be ready for Saturday night," said an undaunted General Manager Joe Sulima. They kept the C&W theme going until 2007, when the Roadhouse closed again.
At this time – and although the Roadhouse now needed to have hotel rooms in order to offer gaming in Henderson (see below) – the California-based Soboba Band of Luiseño Indians put $15 million into escrow to obtain the property. "They're not going to take a small casino and keep it small. They're going to take it, and make it big," said the broker handling the tribe's end of the sale, John Culton. This got Station's hackles up and soon it was lobbying Henderson against the deal.
In May 2007, McMackin accused Station of having queered the pitch for the Luiseño sale by pressuring the Henderson City Council. "I have reasons to say that," he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, adding that he'd rebuffed a Station offer for the acre-property in 2006. Whatever the reason, the Luiseño Band's interest quickly fell by the wayside, even though it – unlike McMackin – proclaimed itself undeterred by having to build a hotel.
In 2010, Henderson issued a permit for McMackin to reopen the Roadhouse as a casino. Although the Roadhouse is grandfathered by the Gaming Control Board under a Nevada law that permits older properties to run casinos without 200 or more hotel rooms, it was not the Roadhouse's state gaming permit that Station targeted but a Henderson-issued one. In 2006, the city issued an ordinance that trumped Gaming Control rules and decreed that casinos in Henderson have to be accompanied by hotels. It also voted in new restrictions on how close casinos could be to residential developments, dooming the revival of the Roadhouse's neighbor, the Alystra, which burned down in 2008.
Come back tomorrow for the conclusion, as we pick up the story when things begin to get nasty and the lawsuits start to fly...
