What’s being built in Council Bluffs
The new Hollywood Casino Hotel Council Bluffs will connect to the site’s existing 160-room hotel and feature more than 1,000 slot machines and 25 live table games, alongside an expanded dining lineup that includes the first Shake Shack in the Omaha metro area and a fast-casual Asian concept called Red Lotus. The Sportsbook Restaurant and Bar, 1853 Bistro and Steakhouse, Club 38 VIP Lounge and the property’s buffet all remain. PENN says the project will generate 450 construction jobs and add 50 permanent positions to a workforce that already tops 500. Construction is expected to take 18 to 24 months.
Financing runs through PENN’s longtime landlord, Gaming and Leisure Properties, the first gaming-focused REIT, which is offering up to $150 million toward the project at a capped 7.1% rate; PENN can repay it through a rent adjustment or a separate five-year, prepayable loan. “We are thrilled to be celebrating yet another transition from riverboat gaming to a new best-in-class entertainment destination,” PENN CEO and President Jay Snowden said, tying the project to the company’s recent land-based announcement in New Orleans as part of what he called “a disciplined approach to strengthening Penn’s competitive position in our markets across the country.”
Iowa is nearly finished with this transition
Iowa’s path to this point runs through legislation, not just individual company decisions. The state’s original 1989 riverboat law required gambling to stay on permanently moored barges; a 2004 amendment cleared the way for full land-based casinos, and the first opened under that authority in 2007. The effect has been near-total: of Iowa’s 19 commercial casinos, all but two, Lakeside Hotel Casino and Ameristar Council Bluffs, are already land-based. Once Council Bluffs completes its conversion, Lakeside will be the only riverboat-era holdout left in the state. Separately, Cedar Crossing Casino in Cedar Rapids, a newly licensed land-based project in Linn County rather than a converted riverboat, is set to open in November, adding to the state’s land-based footprint from a different direction.
Illinois is running the same playbook, with different operators
Illinois followed a similar legislative path, and the pattern there is genuinely multi-operator rather than confined to one company. The state legalized riverboat gambling in 1990, the second state in the country to do so, and its first riverboat opened in Alton in 1991. A 2019 gaming expansion law authorized six new casino licenses and explicitly allowed existing riverboat operations to relocate onto land, the same kind of legislative unlock Iowa had enacted 15 years earlier…