After Boom Decade, Gambling Town of Laughlin Shows Strain
When Don Laughlin bought a tiny, remote gaming club known as the Riverside Bait Shop a quarter-century ago he hardly envisioned the gaming mecca that would follow.
Today, Laughlin is Nevada’s third-ranking gaming area, with glitzy casinos and 8,100 hotel rooms in an area once overgrown with scrub and weeds.
A hundred yards away, across the shining expanse of the Colorado River, sits Bullhead City, Ariz. Older, with five times as many residents and the feeling of settlement absent in Laughlin, it is home to 90% of those who work in Laughlin’s Casino Row.
If Laughlin is the offspring of gambling, Bullhead City is gaming’s stepchild. Troubles for the younger town mean bad times for the older. And Laughlin is showing signs of strain brought on by a decade of unbridled growth.
The gaming resort counted 3,432,057 visitors in 1990, up 15% over 1989. Gross gaming revenues ran $397.8 million in 1990, up from $345.3 million in 1989, ranking Laughlin ahead of Lake Tahoe in Nevada’s gaming markets.
Laughlin remained one of Nevada’s best-kept secrets for a dozen years after Don Laughlin, a transplanted Las Vegan, arrived with his family to run the bankrupt bar blessed with a valuable grandfathered gaming license.
Jim Ley, a Clark County planner, was assigned to help in the area’s growth in 1979.
“It was barely beyond the dirt road stage,” he recalls. “There were a couple of slot parlors, maybe 20 mobile homes along the river. Less than 90 people lived there.”
But it had some important things going for it, including location. The town is about the same distance as Las Vegas (280 miles) from Southern California markets. Laughlin is 80 miles closer to Phoenix. And Interstate 40, the main East-West route through the Sun Belt, passes just 25 miles south of the town.
Laughlin courted snowbird seniors, and they flock to the city in RVs, clogging the streets and filling casino parking lots.
In recent years, the city has targeted a new clientele, with corporate giants Circus Circus, Hilton, Ramada and Harrah’s adding high-rise resorts.
The Ft. Mojave Indian Tribe expects to break ground within a few months for the first phase of what is envisioned as a three-casino, 2,000-hotel-room complex on 4,000 acres of land 11 miles south of Laughlin. Golf courses, office complexes and valuable residential units also are planned.
But the boom and attendant problems have given some casino leaders second thoughts. Steve Wynn, chairman of Golden Nugget Inc., announced in January he was delaying plans to build a 2,000-room high-rise in Laughlin. Wynn said he was concerned that Laughlin had become overbuilt and could not accommodate additional rooms.
“We want to let Laughlin simmer a little,” Wynn says. “We want to step back and let it settle a little.”
Emerald River, a 6,000-room resort complex, was planned by Las Vegas-based John H. Midby & Associates, one of Laughlin’s early developers and a major player in the area. Today the first-phase tower of Emerald River is a concrete skeleton on the banks of the Colorado, around the bend from the main cluster of casinos.
The demise of the junk bond market and a shaky financial market have left Midby and other developers with few financing options and no money to complete ambitious projects.
There are about 8,000 proposed hotel rooms on record to be built that may never come out of the ground because developers cannot get financing, according to Mike Cool, Laughlin town manager.
Don Laughlin, the father of it all, sees the dynamic growth as a mixed blessing.
The boom has produced a market that provides river-view rooms for $25 weekdays, slightly higher on weekends.
Laughlin says he has been forced to cut rates in half at his Riverside Resort. On the other hand, that has produced new gamblers for his resort, with thousands of guests at the Hilton and Edgewater just a short walk away.
In another move to build walk-in traffic, Don Laughlin has begun booking major talent at his resort.
Meanwhile, Clark County is stretched to the limit in providing vital services such as fire and police protection, sewer and water, and schools. Laughlin is 95 miles southeast of the county seat of Las Vegas, itself one of the fastest-growing cities in America.
The population in Laughlin is approaching 5,000; the work force exceeds 25,000. Bullhead City, which had 10,000 residents in 1980, has nearly triple that today.
Workers migrating to Laughlin came “expecting to make their fortune without a lot of financial support under them,” Ley says. “It is tough to come up with deposits, down payments for houses. And the quality of jobs, the level of people coming in tended to exacerbate the problem.”
New homes--some luxury custom jobs, others condos and townhouses--are springing up in the desert southwest of Casino Row. But housing is cheaper in Bullhead City.
Nevada’s tax structure has not helped Laughlin. Until 1988 the city had to operate on a budget of $100,000 a year because of tax limitations.
Voters boosted their property taxes to the limit in 1988 to come up with a $200,000 budget that provided increased police and fire protection. The next year, Laughlin coaxed the Nevada Legislature into changing the tax distribution ratio, giving the city nearly $1.5 million for the 1990 fiscal year.
Although the town generates millions of tax dollars from gaming revenues monthly, little stays here. Under present law, 93% of all gaming taxes go to the state, Ley says.
Many of the paychecks from Casino Row are spent in Bullhead City. That city is also paying a price for its transition, but sees a shining future ahead.
Kevin Fenner, Bullhead City’s chief planner, says water availability and a head start on infrastructure assure the Arizona city’s continued spread along the east bank of the river, providing living space and amenities for employees of Laughlin’s casinos.
“Essentially, they would rather use the water for the casinos than apply it to residential use,” Fenner says. “They get a little higher return for their money. They would rather see the residential development occur in Arizona.”
He predicted the tourism would lure wealthier home buyers.
“As we start to market the area as a retirement community and more of a visitor destination, I think you’ll see a different type of housing go up around here. We’ll get the big homes and the golf courses and the amenities,” Fenner says.
Already, workers are putting the finishing touches on a $6-million City Hall, and by September jetliners will be landing on a new runway, one phase of a $30-million airport expansion.
Increased air travel and reduced vehicular travel should help the area’s monumental traffic problems. So should the $20-million Bullhead Parkway, on which construction is planned this summer. The 10-mile route along low hills east of the city is expected to take the pressure off notorious Arizona 95, the city’s only main traffic artery.
“There’s more traffic on Highway 95 than there is on Interstate 40 on a daily traffic count,” says police Sgt. Robin Holmes.
Bullhead City was named for a rock formation first noted by Spanish explorers in the 16th Century but submerged by the lake created by Davis Dam in 1953. The dam and reservoir created a recreational mecca, but the unnerving heat of summer--Bullhead City is one of Arizona’s hottest spots--kept the area from any significant growth until Laughlin began to take off.
Among the growth pains suffered by the city--and possibly a root of its inability to keep abreast of growth--has been a chaotic government. Bullhead City has had 11 hired or interim city managers in less than seven years.
Desert living itself seems to draw the footloose and rootless--human prototypes of the tumbleweed. Throw in the allure of gambling, bright lights and cheap meals offered by the casinos, and you get more than a normal share of destitute arrivals, says Lt. William Cobb, director of the local Salvation Army office.
He and Holmes say the area has few problems with the hard-core homeless or street-crime violence suffered by larger cities such as Phoenix. The typical Bullhead-Laughlin transient is someone who has heard that the area is booming and spends his last cent driving in to look for work.
“They arrive with a dime in their pocket and an empty tank of gas,” Cobb says.
As Bullhead City grows, it looks for additional, stable businesses and service industries . But its prospects for industrial growth are curtailed by a lack of transportation, Fenner says. I-40 is 25 miles to the south, and 18-wheel trucks find tough going over the badlands along the river.
There is no rail transportation or locks to lift barges over the dams built to impound the water for agriculture or hydropower. As a consequence, river traffic consists mostly of powerboats, small cruise vessels and houseboats.
And underlying everything are concerns about the desert’s most precious resource--water.
Since the late 1960s, Laughlin developers have been required to submit needs for water and “get on the list,” Ley says.
“The problem is facilities more than supply,” he said. “We’re only using half the water allocated to us. The water district is in the process of building facilities to handle the water needs of the community.”
