As world gambling revenues are expected to reach $155 billion by 2012, Las Vegas construction is more than booming. In fact, more than 20 hotels and casinos are in the design, renovation or construction phase. That’s more than $40-billion worth of construction jobs currently underway, with a big piece of that pie going to design-build firms.
One of the biggest players in the market is Marnell Corrao Associates, a Vegas-based design-build firm responsible for the design and construction of dozens of resorts throughout the city. The firm, once run by casino builder pioneer CEO Tony Marnell II, has had a hand in Wynn Las Vegas, Bellagio, Mirage, Rio Palazzo Suites, New York New York, Caesars Palace and Treasure Island. Today, the CEO’s son, Anthony Marnell III, is building his own casino and Marnell Corrao is the lead contractor on the job. With financial backing from the MGM Mirage, Marnell’s M Resort & Casino is a $1-billion addition to Las Vegas with a 390-room tower, 35 suites, 97,000 square feet of casino area, a 40,000-square-foot conference room, a 20,000-square-foot health spa and salon, eight restaurants, four bars, one entertainment venue, retail outlets, a 100,000-square-foot pool area, a 63,000-square-foot, movie entertainment theatre with 14 screens and other five-star amenities. It is scheduled to open in Spring 2009.
Another major design-build project underway is the Encore at Wynn Las Vegas, currently in the interior construction phase. California-based, design-build firm Tutor-Saliba Corporation is heading up the $2.1 billion project. With a planned opening of early 2009, the Encore will sit on approximately 20 acres on the Las Vegas Strip, immediately adjacent to Wynn Las Vegas. The resort will include 2,000 units, a 72,000-square-foot casino, additional convention and meeting space, as well as restaurants, a nightclub, swimming pools, a spa and salon and retail outlets.
“We’re scheduled to complete it right about the end of this year,” says DeRuyter Butler, vice president of architecture for Wynn. “And we may actually open at the end of this year or early January, depending on Mr. Wynn’s comfort level.” Butler says Wynn Design typically does the building design in-house, but because of the quick timeline, the company chose design-build. “We engaged a contractor to validate the pricing and work toward scheduling and everything,” he says. “And then we assigned the architect to work directly for the contractor. The benefit of that is, we were seeking a relationship where we have one point of contact and one source of responsibility. … By having the architect work for the contractor, our relationship is with the contractor directly. We agree on a schedule; we agree on budget, and it then becomes the contractor’s responsibility to deliver the project on time, and for the budget.”
Vegas Virtues
When it comes to Las Vegas construction, speed is most important, with everybody trying to open as quickly as possible, which makes design-build extremely attractive, Butler says. “Projects of this magnitude are so complex with all of the related infrastructure and the special finishes, if we were to take a design-and-then-build approach, we would spend probably three years in producing documents,” Butler says. “It would take three years to build. That’s about six years [total]. [With design-build], Encore is about four years and eight months along.”
Design-build is often the construction method of choice for small projects, too. Brian Stys, vice president of The Hospitality Group for Boston-based Shawmut Design and Construction, is a specialty contractor for the Koi Restaurant inside Planet Hollywood. He says by using design-build, the restaurant is able to cut down design time and valued engineering. “If the contractor and the designer own a budget, they’re going to try and make sure that they design to that budget from the contractor’s point of view.
It was that kind of holistic approach that won over Public Storage for TCD Construction, a Vegas-based design-build firm. A diverse general contractor with several small- to medium-sized jobs, TCD’s architects meet with clients and work hand in hand with them.
“When we put them in touch with an architect or if we aren’t even involved with their architects, say they have their own, we like to get involved with clients to help them make their project better,” says Tom Devlin, owner of TCD Construction. “With our Self Storage facilities, we helped our clients with their chosen architects and engineers. We do value engineering, help them make it a more economical and more productive type of facility. And therefore, when we go out to build it, we get it built more cost effectively, and more timely, and more efficiently.”
City Challenges
It seems the No. 1 challenge firms face in Vegas is no different from any other place in the world: labor. The demands on union labor are extensive. “There’s over 700 iron workers in Las Vegas. At one time, we had about 400 on The Plaza,” says Jay Allen, vice president of sales and engineering for Schuff International, a Pittsburgh-based steel company. “You’re not going to get the same quality across the board every day.”
Stys agrees. “Getting the right labor, the tradesmen on the job, the right guys to build it, is tough,” he says. “Between [MGM Mirage’s] CityCenter, Wynn Encore, Fountain Blue, and Echelon, just those four projects — forget about all the other ones. … That’s a mammoth amount of work going on.”
In addition, this has been a dangerous year in Las Vegas construction. A crane oiler was recently killed, becoming the sixth worker to die on the 66-acre CityCenter project. In all, 11 workers have died on construction sites in Las Vegas in the last year and a half. After the accident at the CityCenter, workers held a one-day strike June 2, but they reached an agreement with Perini Building Company to improve safety on the jobs and to slow down the projects, and construction is back underway.
“The challenge is everything has to be done yesterday,” Allen says. “It’s easy to get ahead of yourself in Vegas because of that demand all the time.” And then there’s Clark County, where inspecting departments can be slow getting to projects. “One of the largest challenges we’ve experienced, in particular on Encore, is basically the log jam in the building departments,” Butler says. Clark County has a pre-development process, where county building officials meet with project members. Butler says the casinos walk the officials through the project and come to an agreement on when drawing packages are submitted.
“A major project, like an Encore or Wynn Las Vegas, [is] broken into five phases,” Butler says. “We tell the building department how big each phase is, and when we’re going to be delivering the drawings. So it’s up to us, through the architect and the contractor, to make sure that we make our schedule. We deliver the drawings on time.” To receive approval on these drawings should take six weeks, but realistically, it is taking Clark County six months to approve drawings and other materials. Butler says the wait forces them to modify drawings. “If we commit to a document production schedule to submit drawing packages on a timely basis, we’ve been experiencing huge, huge delays in getting either a first response, or once we get a first response: ‘this isn’t quite compliant, or this needs to be corrected, we need more information on this or that.’ We then turn those packages around very quickly to resubmit. And you still may have to wait two months before you get another response for that one,” Butler says. “From their side of the coin, they have a set staff, they have the ability to farm out major projects to sub-consultants in other jurisdictions. I don’t want to say necessarily that they’re completely under-staffed, but they’re certainly behind the 8 ball with a lot of work coming in a relatively closely spaced time,” he says. “They just get barraged with projects.”
Clark County also has its own adopted code, which is highly enforced and supplemental to international building code. “Clark County has its own interpretation,” Butler says. “You really have to work the two codes, plus normal code issues related to ADA and the ANC, and all those things. But they have a much more stringent and rigid approach to interpreting building codes, and therefore, they’re much more severe to work with.”
However, because of these stringent codes, it behooves owners to use design-build, Stys says. For example, indoor sprinkler systems and fire alarm systems are selected at the pricing phase, and if it’s specialty-contracted out to somebody not around during design, the systems might not meet code. “If you bring them in early, in the design build phase, that part becomes more streamlined,” Stys says. This is a big-time selling point for Devlin’s design-build operation. As somebody who is growing in a stagnant market, winning jobs over design-assist firms, Devlin simply tells clients he builds to code and to plan. And that he’ll handle any fire that comes the job’s way.
“It’s easy to get angry over delays,” Devlin says. “Everybody needs to make money, and when you have money sitting out there and you can’t get things approved or get things passed, that’s always the everyday challenge in this industry.”
Fred Minnick is a professional writer and photographer based in Louisville, Ky.