Jim Murren wants more than our money with MGM Resorts International‘s controversial new parking fees. He wants our gratitude. 
“I ask them to honestly reflect what it means to be a local and how the tourist economy has improved their quality of life,” he said of irate Las Vegans, whose standard of living ebbs and flows with the tourist economy. Murren has a good point (and a tangible one) when he says that MGM’s Strip garages have lagged in capex maintenance. CityCenter‘s is so state-of-the-art compared to the others that it seems light years ahead. As for his competitors, “Frankly, they are sitting back and letting MGM take the heat on this,” he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Murren says he’s not tone-deaf on the issue, but he’s done a good impersonation so far.
Amazingly, the company claims to be surprised by the volume and intensity of negative reaction, which makes you wonder what kind of Yellow Submarine corporate culture is incubating at MGM. (I’ve never found them to be as out of touch as Caesars Entertainment, for instance.) Ever since it released this lead balloon, MGM has been shading in the gray areas of the initially nebulous policy. Circus Circus customers, rejoice: Self-parking will still be free. Valet parking will be costly — as much as $17 — at all MGM Strip properties, which could see valet-parking 
attendant receiving less in tokes, as customers try to scrimp and save where they still can. Different casinos will have different fees — there goes the $10 flat-fee structure. If Crystals and Mandalay Place parking remains free, won’t Aria and Mandalay Bay customers just take advantage of that? And, no, MGM employees (and employees of tenants) won’t have to pay to park. Had it been otherwise, just imagine Murren trying to sell that one to an irate Culinary Union. He’s touched a nerve, though: Namely the underlying, larger, existential debate on whether Nevada can continue to get by as a sort of welfare state, propped up the fees and taxes paid by tourists. If we didn’t soak them for so many taxes and fees, where would we find ourselves? In the barren waste, most likely.
* Baha Mar continues to be the albatross around Bahamas Prime Minister Perry Christie‘s neck. He’s beating the bushes for a buyer and claims to have found several potential ones, including “big American 
companies.” However, he’s demanding that he’s “not prepared to accept that those contractors will be paid less than a dollar for a dollar for the work performed.” Ironically, that’s the same reason the Chinese Export-Import Bank (Exim) isn’t liquidating its $2.5 billion loan and taking less than a 1:1 on its return. On the one hand, Baha Mar isn’t the political football for Exim that it is for Christie. On the other, Exim is running up carrying costs on its dubious asset.
“It’s over until the Chinese government, through [Exim], decides to whom they are going to sell that project, because clearly, they don’t want 
to run it. So, until they decide to give it away at a fire-sale price, it will just sit there,” former Baha Mar director Dioniso D’Aguilar said. He added that “the Chinese are in absolutely no rush to make this decision. Perry Christie [right] and his cabinet are anxious for them to make a decision, but they are in no rush. So you will see that project linger and linger and linger and linger until someone in China decides to make a decision, and you know someone is scared to make a decision because a head will roll.” More than one head could roll: Christie, having staked his country’s economic future on Baha Mar, could find himself on the chopping block.
* A Tom Brady fan and his money were soon parted in yesterday’s AFC championship game — and Las Vegas sports books stood to clean up big. Wagers lopsidedly favored the New England Patriots, with three dollars out of every four being bet on a New England victory. Think of it as Steve Wynn‘s revenge on Foxborough for turning him away.
