DANVILLE, Va. — The Caesars Hotel and Casino in Danville, Virginia won't be as big as previously planned.
The casino's hotel was expected to have 500 rooms, but that's getting scaled back.
High costs are impacting the project. Danville City Manager, Ken Larking, said the hotel will now have 320 rooms.
It comes after he said the cost for the group to build has gone up.
"There's a lot of reasons, I'm sure for that," said Larking. "One of the ones that we've heard is that construction costs for them have skyrocketed quite a bit. They might be tweaking some programs. They're focusing on other things a little bit more but in their estimates, it was best to reduce the number of rooms and save costs so that funding could go to some other aspect of the project."
The city has a development agreement with Caesars. It calls for at least 300 rooms for the hotel, which the group will still reach with the 320 rooms planned.
"Frankly, when they said they were going go to 500, we said 'that's great,' but now that they're dropping down to 320, it's still within the agreement, so it's not a problem," said Larking.
Besides this change, Larking said things are going well.
"Things seem to be going pretty well," he said. "Anywhere in Danville, you can see the building going up. Of course, it's right next to the three smokestacks that people have been familiar with, seeing throughout their entire lives and the building is nearly as tall as that; it's going pretty well. I go by there fairly often and there's always some vehicles out there always some vehicles out there. It's a sight to behold."
Larking anticipates a surge in people visiting Danville when the casino and hotel open up. He said the city handled the traffic from the roughly 10,000 people working at the mill back in the day and believes the city can handle more people on the roads.
"Certainly, this is a huge splash," he said. "I would say that if you've been paying attention to Danville over the past 10 years, you will see that we've made a lot of progress compared to where we were. The decline of tobacco and textiles hit us pretty hard, but about 10 years ago, the leaders decided to start doing something about that and put things in place that helped our downtown grow, and help improve industrial recruitment."
Larking said without the casino the city has seen hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and thousands of jobs.
"Danville was successful for a long time for a lot of good reasons," he said. "Just like many places, especially isolated cities, it saw hard times in the 90s, but we're on the way back and the casino itself was like just throwing gasoline on a fire. It's just going to accelerate things a little bit faster and everyone likes to see things happen right away, so this will enable us to do that.
He said the challenge is how to maintain smart growth for the city. He said they can only do so many projects at a time and they are trying to manage it and be smart for their growth.
"We are very excited to see that as the alternative to decline," he said.
While there will be 180 fewer rooms than expected, Larking believes they can accommodate everyone coming into town for lodging.
"I believe the city will be able to handle the capacity," he said. "We've actually got a lot of hospitality projects in line to go forward right now, so we've had a new hotel open up just down the road, maybe a couple of months ago, a few more that are under consideration."
Caesars Virginia expects to open up at the end of the year.