MESQUITE, NEV. — Two decades ago, real estate mogul Randy Black turned this blip on the Arizona border into a boomtown when he opened the first of four casinos. Nearly 1 million visitors a year followed, and hotels, restaurants and stucco homes seemed to sprout from sand.
"It seemed to be one of those things that 'Geez, it's just going great. It's never going to end,' " said Victor Kotalion, who left Las Vegas in 1990 for this arid patch off Interstate 15.
Locals and travelers passing through have long kept Mesquite's casinos afloat. But like the spent mines that have busted many Western towns, Mesquite's source of wealth ran out. As the economy soured, tourists hoarded their cash, and the town's gross gambling revenue plummeted 11%. Visitor volume fell 7.4% last year; the average daily room rate fell 35.4%.
Last month, Black laid off 347 workers at the Oasis and shuttered much of the casino. Kotalion, a 60-year-old dealer and floor supervisor, was one of the ones let go.
"As you get older, what do you do?" Kotalion said. "There aren't a lot of options here . . . not for me. Actually, not for anybody that's in the gaming industry."
During the last 20 years, a number of states bet on gambling -- a supposedly recession-proof business. But this downturn has wiped out even conventional wisdom: In the third quarter of 2008, revenue dropped in six of the 12 states with commercial casinos, the American Gaming Assn. said.
Resorts are typically reluctant to cut staff, experts said, because training new hires costs thousands of dollars. Yet in the last year, commercial and tribal casinos have trimmed workforces in Riverside County and on the Las Vegas Strip as well as in Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut and New York.
The industry's losses can be seen vividly in Mesquite, whose reliance on gambling resembles a Rust Belt town tied to an auto plant. Job losses hurt restaurants and retailers, overwhelm social service providers and demoralize the remaining employees.
"If you have one, two, maybe three key industries, if one goes out, the whole town suffers," said William Eadington, director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno. "It's like cutting one of the legs off a stool."
Before Randy Black arrived, Mesquite was barely more than a cluster of dairy farms and alfalfa fields along the Virgin River. The Oasis was the sole casino. Black envisioned the city as a rural desert destination, "halfway between where you are and where you're going."
