After 25 years of operating the Club One Casino in Fresno, California without incident, Kyle Kirkland decided that in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, he needed to relocate to a larger location—one where he could add some tables.
He applied to the city to relocate to another part or town and to add 20 tables, to bring the total up to 51. He went forward with the process, but then a member of the city council decided he wanted Kirkland to prove to his new neighbors that he was “a good actor.”
It turned out to add 90 days to the process. It also involved holding a neighborhood meeting to poll the residents of the area.
“It wasn’t so much making nice as doing community outreach,” explained Kirkland in an interview with GGB News. “We had been at the old location so long that the zoning no longer reflected our use.”
The first thing Kirkland did was successfully persuade the city to update the ordinance, “Then we applied to move the cardroom.” That was approved August 19.
Kirkland recalls, “The councilmember said, ‘It’s a new location and we’d really like you to do community outreach.’ It wasn’t in the process and the problem was they raised it at the meeting. I thought, This is unusual but I thought it as a not unreasonable request.” Kirkland held a community outreach meeting onsite, where he was doing renovations. The new location had previously been a nightclub with a much larger building.
“We distributed flyers and bulletins and held a public meeting where people could express their concerns,” said Kirkland They were also able to leave feedback at several city council meetings.
He took questions about what would happen with parking and light pollution.
“The concerns that people were raising were over events that had happened at the old restaurant nightclub, and country music concerts at the nearby park,” he said. “The concerns were more general: ‘What is going to happen with noise?’ We had 25 years’ experience that we don’t create a lot of traffic and noise. We presented what we were doing.”
There are two churches in the approximate neighborhood. Kirkland visited them, “and I walked around to the other businesses in the complex and they were happy because we have more security than the nightclub did.” Kirkland added, “The local businesses didn’t have a problem with us. No one expressed substantive issues.”
There were some “speculative concerns. “The reality,” said Kirkland, “is we don’t have many calls for service calls from the police department. We’ve definitely been a destination, but nothing in the operations that said we were going to be a burden. I promised quarterly meetings to get feedback.”
After interacting with his prospective neighbors and allaying what fears they had, Kirkland returned to the city council December 2. The councilmember who had insisted on the community outreach, Tyler Maxwell, made the motion to give permission for Club One Casino to add the 20 chairs.
Club One Casino has been open since September 24.
“Our calls for service from 911 have been fewer than normal,” said Kirkland. “One was for a gall stone attack. We called in a fire at a homeless camp. We had a guest that showed up intoxicated and we opted not to allow him in the facility. He drove up and we called the PD. It’s not unusual to have calls for service and it turns out our calls for service is very small considering our size.”
That may be because Club One Casino has between 15 to 20 security guards and one of them is a 36-year police veteran. “The Fresno voice unit oversees us and they had no recommendations to make to the city,” he said.
He added, “What’s interesting is we weren’t building a new building from scratch. If we were there would have been a lot more community activism, but we were moving into an existing nightclub facility. It was offset from the street and residential areas, while there are residential areas adjacent to us. Our operation is 30,000 square feet and doesn’t have huge monuments\ signs and isn’t creating a lot of traffic.”
All in all, when asked if the experience of being required to seek community input was too onerous, Kirkland observed that he wouldn’t have been able to add staff until renovations were complete anyway.
