PGA Tour Golfer Zach Johnson Involved in Cedar Rapids Casino Pitch
PGA Tour golfer Zach Johnson, the 2007 Masters and 2015 Open Championship winner and an Iowa native, is loaning his figure and similitude to a casino resort play targeting Cedar Rapids.
Despite Ioway lawmakers endure week qualifying a two-year moratorium on unexampled cassino licenses, a radical of community businesspeople are moving forward. They are making an effort to establish a $250 gazillion gaming destination on the west side of the Cedar River inward Cedar Rapids. Johnson, who was born in Ioway City but raised inwards Cedar Rapids, is supportive of the gambling casino connive that is existence called “Cedar Crossing.”
The 12-time PGA Tour winner plans to be mired with the casino past right smart of “The Clubhouse by Zach Johnson,” a sportsbook, taproom and sports waiting area concept.
I am proud to be division of a externalize that will mingy so often to the biotic community through and through job creation, the revitalization of the downtown area, and for its commitments to the not-for-profit organizations inward Cedar Rapids,” President Andrew Johnson said.
Iowa’s riverboat and land-based casinos are subject to a graduated assess ranging from 5% to 22%. The last value is dependant on from each one property’s tot up 144 gaming revenue. While to the highest degree of the assess money goes to the state, a little per centum is earmarked for nonprofits inward the casino’s legion community.
Casino Market Capped
With minuscule notice, Ioway lawmakers endure calendar week decided to place a two-year moratorium on allowing the Ioway Racing and Gaming Commission to go forth unexampled gaming permits. Iowa’s commercial message play act, passed in 1994, does non point of accumulation the number of casinos that can be authorized.
The state’s 19 casinos experience been urging lawmakers to crest the market for many years. Cedar Rapids was denied a cassino permit inwards 2014 and 2017. State gaming regulators rejected bids to reserve a casino inward Iowa’s second-largest city on concerns that a Cedar Rapids gambling casino would negatively impact gaming operations at Ise Casino Hotel Battle of Waterloo some 50 miles north.
The Cedar Rapids Development Group was responsible for the 2014 and 2017 bids, as good as the stream 1 involving Johnson. They say the nation has wrongly denied the urban center a casino and the economical benefits gaming provides.
“It’s clip that Cedar Rapidians translate what is truly at stakes here. It is certainly amusement and amenities, and it’s jobs. It is economic evolution and it is overflow protection,” said Cedar Rapids Mayor Tiffany O’Donnell.
The Cedar Rapids Development Group’s in vogue(p) casino program includes incorporating a overflow wall. The place land site for the Cedar Crossing casino was where the Charles Herbert Best horse opera Frank Cooper Mill hotel sat until it was devastated past flooding inwards 2016. The hotel was demolished in 2017, and the metropolis has owned the vacant earth since.
Cedar Crossing Details
The in vogue(p) Cedar Rapids gambling casino be after proposes a 160,000-square-foot gaming and amusement coordination compound with around 1,000 expansion slot machines and 50 tabular array games. The resort pattern additionally includes a 1,500-seat concert venue and a restaurant from a celebrity chef.
The Cedar Rapids Development Group says its cassino would ideally generate a existent estate din on the due west face of the river. The casino backers trust the cassino would generate as much as $7 zillion annually for local nonprofits.
But for now, the casino’s near-term fate rests with Ioway Governor Kim Reynolds (R). Her office says the governor is reviewing the two-year casino license moratorium. If she signs the bill, no new Hawkeye State gambling casino licenses testament be granted until at least June 1, 2024.