- Clark County commissioners voted unanimously to expand the Strip’s gaming enterprise district onto the SkyVue parcel.
- The approved plan puts a casino floor and 752 rooms on 11.95 acres across from Mandalay Bay.
- Developer Eli Applebaum paid $70 million for the parcel this spring, unbuilt since the observation wheel stalled in 2012.
- A nonrestricted license from the Nevada Gaming Commission is still ahead of any gaming floor there.
PARADISE, Nev. – Clark County commissioners voted unanimously Wednesday to expand the Las Vegas Strip’s gaming enterprise district onto the abandoned SkyVue parcel, the approval a 752-room hotel-casino needed before it can rise across from Mandalay Bay. The board also granted a resort hotel use permit for the 29-story, heart-shaped tower.
Three Holdover Applications Cleared At One Hearing
The board took up three applications filed by Kulik River Capital, LLC and held over from an earlier hearing, according to the county’s annotated zoning agenda for the July 22 meeting. The first vacates county easements and a stretch of the Mandalay Bay Road right-of-way between Las Vegas Boulevard South and Haven Street.
The second carries the use permits, a waiver allowing non-standard improvements in the right-of-way, and the design review for the resort. The permits cover the gaming enterprise district expansion, the resort hotel and a recreational facility. The third is a tentative map folding the ground into a single commercial lot.
The land is 11.95 acres in a Commercial Resort zone inside the county’s Airport Environs overlay, east of Las Vegas Boulevard South and south of Mandalay Bay Road in Paradise. Expanding the gaming enterprise district is the piece that matters most to a casino, because a gaming floor cannot be licensed on ground that sits outside one.
A $70 Million Parcel And 122 Rooms Lost To Airport Rules
Applebaum bought the nearly 12 acres this spring for $70 million from the family of Seattle-area businessman Wayne Perry, whose group had taken the land out of a 2020 bankruptcy auction.
The tower shed roughly 60 feet on the way to the hearing, and an 874-room design came down to 752 rooms so the Federal Aviation Administration would clear the height, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
Two Unfinished Columns Become A 265-Foot Restaurant
The SkyVue observation wheel stalled in 2012, and the two concrete columns raised for it have stood on an otherwise empty lot ever since. Under the approved design, crews strengthen that pair, raise a third alongside them, and hang a restaurant from the trio roughly 265 feet above the property.
Behind a full-height LED curtain wall, the rest of the program runs to the gaming floor, restaurants, retail, a pool, a parking garage of six levels, a covered pedestrian plaza and upward of 42,000 square feet of convention space. That floor would open on a Strip where dice have been the volatile line item: Las Vegas craps revenue climbed in April on hold, the share of the money players brought to the tables that the house kept, rather than on how much they bet.
The Gaming License Is A Separate Decision
Wednesday’s action settles zoning, not gaming. A casino on the site still needs a nonrestricted license, which the Nevada Gaming Control Board investigates and the Nevada Gaming Commission awards, and that review runs on its own track well after the county signs off on a building. A zoning approval adds nothing to the Strip’s craps count today, and nothing to the legal online craps market either.
The filings describe a gaming area without a table count, so what the floor holds is an open question. Any dice game the resort eventually opens would run under the state rules covering legal craps in Nevada.
The project stays in planning for now, with a final map and a state gaming license both still ahead of it.