Dan Lee, president and chief executive office of Full House Resorts has a project in mind for Colorado that he says could double his company’s profits and send its stock price into the stratosphere. This would benefit him personally since he owns 8.8 percent of the company.
Lee owns Bronco Billy’s in Cripple Creek, one of the state’s historic gambling towns, near Colorado Springs. He bought the casino in 2016 at a discount and began to envision expanding its existing 24 rooms and 800 slot machines.
Lee described the problem this way to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, ‘’And so you get people to come up, we give them two drinks and then we say ‘Oh, sorry we don’t have any hotel rooms, good luck.’ The road back at night is kind of an intimidating — there might be a deer around any corner.’’
Lee’s purchase came with additional land, so Lee proposes to build a 170-room hotel with plenty non-casino amenities to lure people to stay all night. He will present his $100 million plans to the Cripple Creek city council next month.
Lee says he hopes that his hotel scheme would cause more Colorado residents to bet more money per capita than they do. Currently they spend less than the average U.S. citizen. Lee says that’s because they don’t have nice places to stay near casinos.
