After years of delays and a new ownership structure, the long-awaited Pamunkey casino is looking to turn the corner and get construction under way, representatives of the tribe and its new partner told WHRO.
“What you see now is the culmination of six months of exceptionally hard work. There's a lot more hard work to go,” said Uri Clinton, an executive vice president with national casino chain Boyd Gaming, which has been brought in to help the tribe build and run its casino. “Yesterday's council vote was literally just the first step in the entire process.”
Boyd’s been working with the tribe for the last six months as part of the continuing effort to raise a casino in Norfolk that stretches back roughly eight years, said Pamunkey Indian Tribe Chief Robert Gray.
And while new agreements approved by Norfolk’s City Council Tuesday night look similar to what’s been discussed for the last several years, some key elements have changed.
Notably, the tribe itself is no longer the city’s preferred operator, a legal designation required by the state for an operator to open a casino.
As of this week, the preferred operator is now Golden Eagle Consulting, an LLC that was wholly owned by the Tribe for development of the casino and will now be majority-owned by Boyd.
According to the documents, the tribe will maintain a minority stake of at least 20% in Golden Eagle, leaving as much as 80% in Boyd’s hands.
This marks a major change for the project — formerly known as the HeadWaters Resort & Casino but which will be renamed under Boyd. From the outset, the casino was marketed as a project that would be solely owned by the tribe for its members’ benefit.
Ahead of the 2020 voter referendum, the tribe even pushed the narrative that the tribe’s ownership was preferable to corporate owners.
“Unlike international corporate casino operators, the HeadWaters Resort & Casino operators are members of the community and plan to reinvest a great deal of time, energy and financial resources back into Norfolk,” according to a website the tribe created to push for public support of the referendum.
City officials, including Mayor Kenny Alexander, have previously acknowledged that the tribe would likely need to bring in an operator to run the day-to-day of the casino.
Clinton, the Boyd executive, and Gray, the tribe’s chief, both said it was always the expectation that the tribe would bring in a development partner.
But ownership outside of the Pamunkey has never been part of the public discussion or reflected in the documents the city signed with Golden Eagle and the tribe.
Gray thinks the people of Norfolk will respect that the tribe is doing what it has to do.
“It's our project,” he told WHRO. “But with that ‘our project,’ that's what we choose to do with it. And I would assume the voters, the people of the City of Norfolk, understand that we're all about just bringing the right thing to the city, and we believe Boyd is going to help us get that.”
The “rescue” of a shrinking casino
Alexander, the mayor, previously told WHRO the tribe and its partners “were struggling to get the project out of the ground” and city officials “could only assume that the lack of progress was because of not having someone with the experience and the wherewithal, an outfit, an organization, that that's in this space that could pull it off.”
The tribe originally partnered with Tennessee billionaire Jon Yarbrough, who made his fortune selling slot machines but hadn’t previously built or run a casino.
Two members of council — supporter Tommy Smiegiel and critic Andrea McClellan — described Boyd’s entry into the deal as a “rescue” of the project during Tuesday night’s vote on the updated agreements.
Gray called the use of the word “rescue” an “overstatement.”
The council approved the new deal 7-1, with McClellan casting the sold dissenting vote.
“I think we’ve been dealt a bad hand, to use gambling parlance,” said McClellan, who has questioned the project from its very beginning.
McClellan said none of her original concerns about strain on the city’s public safety resources and the surrounding neighborhoods have been addressed throughout any iterations of the casino plan.
She also noted how the project had been scaled down, something that also came up during the public comments ahead of the vote.
The original proposal included a $700 million casino-resort development next to Harbor Park featuring a 500-room hotel, up to 4,500 slot machines and as many as 225 table games.
But by the end of 2019, Norfolk’s then-city manager said he expected an investment more along the lines of $375 million as the General Assembly opened up competition around the state.
Later, the tribe scaled its project back to a 300-room, $500 million project. The minimum required spend according to the city’s development agreement is $300 million. Later iterations stripped out a planned marina.
Now, with Boyd on board, the hotel has shrunk to an expected 200 rooms, though the company maintains it will still spend in the ballpark of $500 million to build it.
“We’re not going to back away from that number,” Clinton told the council ahead of Tuesday’s vote.
The current draft of the casino is projected to feature 1,500 slot machines and 50 table games.
Gray said he doesn’t think the development was ever oversold to the public.
“It was sold as a world-class resort, and we are still going with that,” he said. “Our acreage reduced, so the physical size of the facility just has to be reduced, but we're using just about every square inch of what's available there.”
The project’s footprint shifted due to the Norfolk seawall project now taking up land along the Elizabeth River.
Delays were to “do this project right”
The biggest lingering question has been when the development will finally start.
The Pamunkey casino proposal was the first approved in the Commonwealth, and the one that touched off a race for the General Assembly to approve commercial casinos in several cities around the state.
But the Norfolk casino will now be the last of four approved casinos to open. Neighboring Portsmouth’s has been open since January 2023, and two more out west are set to open in full by the end of the year.
Gray said the delays have been to ensure the quality of the Norfolk project.
“We wanted to do this project right, right from the get go. We wanted to bring something to the city that both the tribe and the city could be proud of,” Gray said.
“There were some hiccups along the way, some changes that we worked with the city on and overcame, but I think the time has been well worth it at this point, and now bringing on Boyd as a partner with us and the city, we're moving ahead. We're bringing this to the city as quickly as we can.”
Construction on the latest iteration is expected to start in the first quarter of 2025, following the necessary city approvals the tribe was never able to secure, despite repeated attempts over the last year.
The plans show construction wrapping up in September of 2027.
In the interim, Golden Eagle will put up a temporary casino, which Clinton described as “a sprung structure, something to put up, operate and pull down.”
He said it would be small and intended to satisfy the statutory requirements to get the casino licensed.
