David McKee

From our Today’s News feed:

“Until now, MGM Mirage exercised a policy of having each property in the group compete with the others, as if they were totally independent competing entities. It was a strategy designed to keep salespeople ‘on their toes,’ but it’s one that new CEO Jim Murren feels has put the company at a competitive disadvantage. Hence, MGM Mirage will now follow the same model that Harrah’s has employed successfully for years, with group sales agents cross-selling rooms, restaurants, and entertainment options throughout the entire group, based on the customer’s needs and preferences.”

Bravo! With CityCenter (above) about to plunk thousands of additional rooms and scores of new amenities on the market, it’s high MGM’s casinos began working together rather than against each other. (The old silo-oriented business model never made a lot of sense to me but it seemed to work during pre-depression years.) Kudos to Murren for having the huevos to concede that the old ways weren’t working and it was time to steal a page from the competition. Many another CEO would let his ego get in the way of necessary change.

From Bette to Achmed? According to one rumor making the rounds, Caesars Palace will go drastically down-market when Bette Midler wraps up her show on Jan. 31. Writes an LVA subscriber:

“I know know who will replace [Midler] … Jeff Dunham and his great list of puppets! I received in the mail yesterday an offer from Caesars for two free Jeff Dunham tickets for late November. The correspondence says these performances are his inaugural performances, as he is scheduled to take over the Colosseum beginning toward the end of January, for 2010. It’s been years since I have seen anything funnier than Jeff and his puppets, especially Acchhhhhhmed, the Dead Terrorist!  Makes me break up with laughter simply thinking about it!”

However, the Las Vegas Review-Journal‘s Mike Weatherford hypothesizes that Dunham will be filling gaps in the Colosseum schedule, as Harrah’s continues to wait for Céline Dion to decide whether she wants to return to The House That Celine Built.

Good for Gibbons. The Silver State is one of the worst in the nation, when it comes to recycling and we’ve got the landfills to prove it. Well, Gov. Jim Gibbons proposes to do something about that and make recycling a top priority for Nevada. It sure beats being “Trash Compactor for California.” It’s a splendid idea and I hope we’re not too far gone budgetarily to pull this thing off.

Wasn’t that clever? The newly ratified Ohio casino industry just got a little bit more incestuous. It’s been revealed that Lakes Entertainment CEO Lyle Berman made a last-minute $4.3 million cash infusion into the pro-casino campaign. The quid pro quo is that Berman gets the option to buy 10% of all four casinos that voters improved. If these cozy, interlocking ownership agreements don’t raise regulatory eyebrows, nothing will. Remember that Berman’s own one-casino proposal was resoundingly rejected by Ohio voters last year, with the help of a media blitz funded by one of his new business partners, Penn National Gaming.

Scarcely a week passes that we don’t hear about how vexed Steve Wynn is with all the empty land and unfinished projects surrounding Wynncore. Perhaps he might take a minute to what it’s like for his neighbors in northwest Las Vegas to have to stare at a big, fenced-off empty lot — a little residential project that El Steve began on a grand scale, then abandoned. The subject of Wynn’s wasted space came up in conversation recently with City Councilwoman Lois Tarkanian, who theorizes that Wynn bought the area with the intention of building a master-planned set of homes for his descendants. Now it’s the Alta Drive version of El Ad Properties‘ comatose Plaza project for the old New Frontier site.