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Margaritaville Expansion of River Spirit Reaches Halfway Point

Matt Trotter
/
KWGS

Nobody’s wastin’ away in Tulsa’s Margaritaville.

The $365 million themed expansion at River Spirit Casino is about halfway done. Workers started pouring concrete on the 15th of 27 floors this week.

"They'll place the floor for 15, and then we'll go and start the process of placing the walls and the columns to start going toward 16," said Redstone Manhattan Project Director Ryan Haynie. "It's a seven-day cycle, so that will put us topping out the hotel structure basically late January of this next year."

To construct the building pad for the new hotel and casino, enough dirt was moved from the Arkansas River bury a football field under 164 feet of it.

Haynie said forecasts of El Niño bringing a very cold, wet winter shouldn’t slow down the work.

"Now that we're kind of out of the ground, we're going vertical, there's not a whole lot of impact weather-wise for us," Haynie said. "We had a really wet spring, but for us it didn't affect our schedule because we were already going vertical and we were already out of the ground and out of the mud."

The reflective glass that will cover most of the 316-foot tall tower is already going up, and the hotel should open in winter 2016.

A 50,000-square foot themed casino is also under construction. River Spirit Gaming Operations Manager Jerry Floyd said it’s mostly just steel and concrete right now.

"But they've got most of the superstructure completed. Within the next month and a half, they'll be inside," Floyd said. "They'll have the walls up, and by the time winter gets here, they will all be working interior finishes."

The new casino will have 850 gaming machines and 27 live table games. Floyd said the demand for it is there, and it should open Labor Day weekend 2016.

Matt Trotter joined KWGS as a reporter in 2013. Before coming to Public Radio Tulsa, he was the investigative producer at KJRH. His freelance work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and on MSNBC and CNN.