Construction on new Danville casino 'going smoothly'
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DANVILLE — The Golden Nugget Danville is “starting to look like a building and not just a construction site.”
That’s the assessment of James Wilmot, vice president of gaming for Wilmorite Management, which is building the casino on Eastgate Drive next the Lynch Road on Danville’s east side. The gambling establishment is slated to open in eight months.
Wilmot said construction has gone relatively well, although there have been some hoops to jump through with equipment delays and higher costs.
“Shipping costs alone on all the materials in some cases are double a year ago,” Wilmot said. “Inflation and limited availability have driven up prices to an incredible amount. We’ve seen a lot of price creep on this job.”
Wilmot said that’s just something that has to be dealt with.
For the most part, he said, the weather has cooperated, although some of the hot, humid days haven’t been pleasant for crews.
“Staying hydrated on site and getting some protection from the sun” are important, Wilmot said.
Seventy different construction workers from the various trades have been on site at various times.
Wilmorite management personnel rotate spending time at the location. Wilmot, based in New York, was last there in mid-June and will return the first week of August.
The 60,000-square-foot building that will be transformed into a casino is a former manufacturing facility. Its most recent use was as a storage facility for vehicle crankshafts.
The building should be enclosed around Thanksgiving.
“They’ll finish the steel around Labor Day,” Wilmot said. “All the erection of the steel, that’s a big milestone. We’re sort of hitting (the marks) on a daily basis.
“Right now, everything’s going smoothly. Just like all construction jobs, we have had to move things around on the schedule because of delivery stuff. To keep people working and busy and keep them on back, we have to be more flexible than usual.
“We’re happy to have the Danville labor union on our job. We’re proud that over $16 million in contracts have been let to Illinois contractors. We will keep doing that for vendors and purchasing, whether it’s for coffee at the cafe or paper products or cleaning supplies.”
The hiring process is all part of the prep work, “making sure we’ll have staff ready,” he said.
Some of those jobs were posted about a month and a half ago, and Wilmot said there have been dozens of applications. He said the company has also started the vetting process for some of the senior management positions.
Wilmorite will look to bring on personnel such as purchasing manager, head of finance and human-resources manager in the next few months.
The company will hire local residents as much as possible.
Wilmorite will work with Danville Area Community College to train many employees for handling jobs including food-and-beverage workers, dealers for table games and slot-machine technicians.
The training is expected to start early next year.
Wilmot said the company has learned that training employees too early leaves the possibility that some will take other jobs before the casino opens.
“The last thing we want to do is have someone trained and sitting around for several weeks,” he said. “Our goal is to have our team trained and make sure they have an opportunity” to get onsite in the proper time.
Everybody who will be hired to work at the casino has to go through a background check, Wilmot said.
“The reasoning: It’s a cash business. It’s a business that originated with some nefarious characters,” Wilmot said. “In the early days of Atlantic City and Las Vegas, we got a bad rap.”
Now, he said, “it’s a very regulated industry,” and he said he takes a great deal of pride that people have more accountability than in other jobs.
“If someone lies on a credit report or to a bank and had an issue, we can’t have them working at the casino. We want good people,” Wilmot said.
