Wynn a cheerleader for new Strip projects

By John Katsilometes

Sunday, Nov. 16, 2014 | 2 a.m.

Steve Wynn has been assessing his Strip empire from the inside out lately, upgrading areas, monitoring others, checking out the neighborhood from his front porch.

Under his own roof, Wynn has been hard-focused on Encore Theatre, which he hopes to reanimate by bankrolling “Steve Wynn’s Showstoppers,” a production of classic Broadway numbers. Set to open for previews Dec. 16 with a gala premiere Dec. 20, the show includes a cast of more than 60 musicians, dancers and singers and comes with a pre-production price tag of $10 million.

Out back, Wynn has seriously considered a buildout of the Wynn/Encore fortress, a new design for rooms and convention space that would overtake the famous Wynn Country Club, formerly the great Desert Inn Golf Club. Reports of Wynn mulling that possibility drew the attention of his high-rolling customers who play the green on the gaming tables and the well-manicured course.

But in golf parlance, he took a mulligan on the concept of wiping out the course and decided to keep it operating.

Across the Strip, Wynn, one of the city’s great visionaries, has gazed at land that is scheduled to be home to two new multibillion-dollar developments. One is a resort by Crown Resorts head James Packer and Wynn’s onetime resort president Andrew Pascal at the site where New Frontier once stood. This other: Resorts World Las Vegas, fronted by Genting Berhad, the parent company of Genting Group of Malaysia, and its CEO, KT Lim, on the site where Stardust stood and Boyd Gaming had started to build Echelon.

No fan of partial construction, Wynn said he was happy to see anything planned to replace the metal skeleton of Echelon. He gave a hooray, using that actual word, for the effort to develop on the dirt across the way.

“I’m really hoping these guys end up with real guts across the street, besides the PR chatter, and I hope that KT Lim goes through with his plans to spend $3 billion or $4 billion in Las Vegas,” Wynn said. “It requires a great degree of courage … but they have my extreme support and best wishes, because anything is better than that empty lot across the street.”

Asked if he was skeptical the New Frontier land and Resorts World Las Vegas would be fully developed as planned, Wynn said: “No. I just find it incredible that they would do it, and I’m thrilled that they say they will. That Jamie Packer paid hundreds of millions for that land is an act of tremendous support for your belief in Las Vegas.”

That project is scheduled to open by the end of 2018. Work on Resorts World Las Vegas, scheduled to open in 2016 in phases, was supposed to start by the end of this year, but the property has sat stagnant even as MGM Resorts International enlisted crews to start work on the MGM Resorts Festival grounds to the north, which will host the Rock in Rio USA music festival in May.

“If these guys put their money where their mouths are, I’m a big cheerleader,” Wynn said. “KT Lim and James Packer, between the two of them, are talking about $7 billion to $8 billion. Hoo-RAY!”

Wynn noted that each company has the financial artillery to bring their grand designs to life.

“Both of them have the capacity to do it,” he said. “KT Lim is not some yahoo from podunk with a fancy rendering. KT’s got the resort in Singapore (Genting Singapore). He’s got the monopoly in Kuala Lumpur (five resorts at Resorts World Genting in Malaysia). He’s got a lot of cash, and they’re as rich as we are, at least, in terms of companies, in terms of the balance sheets.”

And Packer?

“They’re doing well in Macau,” Wynn said. “But this is still a very, very big commitment, to spend $3 billion or $4 billion … We’ll have a parade for them when they have a groundbreaking and actually bring the crews on the job. I want to see that happen.”

Wynn had talked about expanding his own property, moving out to the east, away from the Strip, with new hotels and convention center space. Over the summer, he talked about opening exhibit halls along the Lake of Dreams, accessible via boat from Wynn Las Vegas.

However …

“We did think of building out to the country club, and we did a lot of planning drawings and models,” Wynn said. “But we decided that what we gained did not compensate for what we lost. In this case, we lost our suburban environment, that wonderful, wonderful experience that allows you to feel as if you’re not in a steel-and-concrete city.”

There was a business component to the decision, of course, as well.

“I made a decision that I was going to use the golf course and its wonderful environment to continually raise my prices and exploit the uniqueness of these 4,800 rooms,” Wynn said. “While I’m alive, I will never, ever develop the golf course. It is there to stay.”