Following the money: How and where Danville’s casino revenue is being spent, one year after it opened

Slot machines blink and whir, chips hit the table, ATMs spit out cash, dice roll and all the while, the City of Danville gets part of the take. 

Caesars Virginia in Danville has been open for one year Wednesday, marking 12 months of full-scale casino resort gaming tax revenue in the city’s coffers.

In its first year of operations, the permanent casino brought in over $386 million in revenue from table games and slots, according to reports from the Virginia Lottery, which tracks casino activity. 

The city saw just over $25 million in gaming tax revenue from the full-scale resort in its first year. These figures don’t include revenue from this month, which will not be posted by the Virginia Lottery until January.

But Danville has been collecting gaming tax revenue from Caesars for longer than that. 

A temporary casino facility opened in May 2023, meaning the city has had this revenue stream for over two-and-a-half years.

In that time, Danville has received a total of about $69 million from the casino. This amount comes from gaming tax revenue combined with a local supplement that Caesars pays Danville every year. 

That money is being spent all over the city, going toward projects and initiatives that are starting to become noticeable. 

Driving around Danville, residents and visitors alike will notice an abundance of construction sites, some newly paved roads and freshly planted tree saplings. 

There are other upgrades happening where the everyday person may not see them, like in the city jail for example, as well as initiatives that can’t be seen, like space studies for downtown buildings or teacher pay raises. 

All of these things have received funding from the city’s cut of the casino tax revenue. 

And all of the city’s spending of casino money can be found online, in a spreadsheet that follows the allocation of gaming tax revenue each fiscal year since the temporary casino opened in 2023 — $650,000 for this project, $2.2 million for that one, $35,000 here, $1 million there. 

The city created this spreadsheet to be transparent about where the money was going, said City Manager Ken Larking. 

“You can’t announce that you’re going to have up to $40 million of extra revenue every year and then not say anything about it afterwards,” Larking said. “It’s important to tell people what you’re going to do with it.”

Scrolling through the list of projects receiving casino funding, residents might recognize something they’ve noticed going on in the city. 

Cardinal explored a few examples — but first, it’s important to understand how the city worked with Caesars to get the best odds for success. 

Creating a development deal and selecting an operator that would best support Danville

Before Danville voters even approved the referendum to allow a casino in the city, local government leaders started looking for an operator and thinking about how to spend the potential new revenue. 

In 2019, Virginia’s General Assembly approved casino resorts for five cities — Bristol, Danville, Petersburg, Portsmouth and Richmond — so long as residents there voted for it. 

In December 2019, about a year before the referendum would take place, Danville put out a request for proposals for an operator. Larking said the city wanted to start the process early, to let folks in Danville know what a casino resort might entail. 

Selecting an operator and creating a development agreement ahead of time would help folks understand what they were voting on, with specifics about job numbers and potential revenue, he said. 

In May 2020, the city announced that it was in negotiations with Caesars Entertainment. 

“During the announcement … it came to me that I should let the community know that we’re about to get a pretty significant amount of revenue, and that we wanted to hear from them about how they wanted us to invest these new resources,” Larking said. 

The next month, Danville hired a financial consulting firm to guide that process. The effort was eventually called the Investing in Danville initiative. 

It involved gathering feedback from residents, business owners and other community stakeholders about how they’d like to see the casino revenue invested, if voters approved it that November. 

This was during the pandemic, so three town halls were held virtually. Perhaps because of COVID, the town halls got a lot of resident engagement, Larking said. 

With this feedback, the city put together a report that was released in December 2020, a month after voters approved the referendum to allow a casino resort. 

“We consciously made the decision that [casino revenue] should be invested in things that would help further our economic resurgence,” Larking said. “Education, economic development, public safety, quality of life, amenities, housing.” 

Some residents wanted to see the money used to lower taxes, Larking said, but that felt inconsistent with the General Assembly’s choice to allow Danville to build a casino resort. 

The five cities selected as potential casino sites had experienced economic distress and could benefit from gaming tax revenue, according to the General Assembly. With the exception of Richmond, all of the cities voted to approve a casino during the referendum. 

“Just lowering our taxes is not really going to make us a different community,” Larking said. “Instead, we need to invest in ourselves more, and people need to see that we’re investing in ourselves.”

In the same vein, Larking wanted to be careful not to rely on the casino revenue for everyday operations. It’d be more beneficial to spend it on one-time capital projects to spur additional growth in Danville, he said. 

Also as part of the city’s development agreement with Caesars, Danville would receive a yearly local supplement from the casino. The minimum local supplement that Caesars must pay Danville every year is $5 million, regardless of casino’s revenue. 

“That adds up to a pretty significant amount over time regardless of how the casino is doing, which is a big deal,” Larking said. 

The city is comfortable using the $5 million to fund some operational costs, since it’s guaranteed, Larking said. The rest of the funding is being allocated to projects and initiatives that will help further the city’s ongoing economic growth. 

The Investing in Danville Committee identified eight broad categories that fit this goal: Public education, economic development, quality housing, healthy community, public safety, quality of life amenities, infrastructure improvements and long-term financial stability.

“If we invest in those things, they’ll help our community be stronger and more prosperous going forward, which translates to additional tax revenue, frankly, from new investment that comes to our community,” Larking said. “So we can multiply the impact by using the funds in a smart way.”

Now, a year after the full resort began generating money for the city, residents can see and feel the impact of those funds. 

It’s the shade under a tree on a hot day. It’s a smoother drive through your neighborhood streets, which used to be riddled with pot holes. 

It’s a high school student getting college credit because of funding for a dual enrollment program. It’s a new fire engine bringing first responders to an emergency on time. It’s a first-time homebuyer closing on their house through a down payment assistance program. 

It’s almost everywhere, if you know where to look.

Trees are important to a locality, but they’re often a low priority. Thanks to casino money, Danville’s trees are getting attention

On a sunny and cool November morning, about 70 Schoolfield Elementary School third graders took a bus to Ballou Park to plant tree saplings — American hollies, eastern redbuds, white fringetrees and one northern red oak. 

The holes had already been dug, and the saplings placed near them with burlap wrapped around their roots. 

The students stood in a horseshoe shape around the hole, watching Jessica Smith, the city’s horticulturist, lower the saplings into its place. Then, the third graders took turns using a plastic shovel to fill the hole back in with dirt.

The tree species are all native to the area, said Smith, so they’re disease resistant and beneficial to local wildlife.

This project, and several other tree planting events, received funding from gaming tax revenue. 

The city has been receiving casino tax revenue since the temporary facility opened in May 2023, and each year since then, the total revenue has increased. This fiscal year, the city allocated $1 million toward citywide tree planting programs. 

This money “funds the cost to plant trees in underserved communities, flood prone watersheds and urban heat pockets,” according to the spreadsheet for casino funding projects. 

Smith said that Parks and Recreation has plans to use the full $1 million during this fiscal year, which ends in June. The department has 360 tree plantings scheduled and is working to complete them all before April, she said. 

Some of the plantings will be done by contractors, but others involve the community, like the November event with Schoolfield Elementary. 

The department also used some of its casino funding to apply for a matching grant from the Virginia Trees for Green Water program. 

Smith said she found out the morning of the planting with Schoolfield Elementary that they had received the grant, which will provide another $1 million toward this work. That fulfills the goal to use casino funding to create more revenue streams for the city, like Larking hoped. 

“It’s a lot easier to have funds and need to spend them than to be looking for funds,” Smith said. “If we didn’t have the casino funding available, it’s possible that this may have never happened.”

Smith said she’s worked with city governments in multiple localities, and tree planting doesn’t always receive this kind of attention.

“In cities with a tight budget, landscaping isn’t always the highest priority,” she said. “Even though we know how important trees are, sometimes it can fall to the wayside and get lost, because there are so many other things that trump that.”

Danville was already working to expand its tree canopy through an urban forestry campaign launched in 2024. 

The city worked with the Green Infrastructure Center, a nonprofit organization that gathered data to identify heat islands, which are areas that get hotter than others because they have more heat-absorbing surfaces and heat-generating activity, as well as less vegetation. 

That data has informed where new tree plantings should go, though new trees will also be planted at schools, parks and along the streets, said Smith. 

The urban forestry campaign also includes balancing tree planting with the city’s continued growth and development. Increasing development is often associated with cutting trees down rather than planting them. The city wants its growth to coexist with tree planting, Smith said. 

“The casino is great, but it’ll also bring more development,” she said. “We need to be cautious about how many trees we’re removing and the best thing to do is to keep planting trees to compensate for future development.

Modern offices for city departments come together, using millions from Caesars

In the last 20 years, Bill Sgrinia  has seen the start and finish of countless Parks and Recreation programs in Danville. Lately, he’s spearheaded some of the city’s most anticipated projects, like a riverfront park and a whitewater channel. 

But he’s never worked in an office with hot water, or central heat or air. 

The City Auditorium, an almost 100-year-old building, has housed parks and rec since the late 1960s or early 1970s, Sgrinia said, which is decades before he started working with the department. 

It’s a beautiful building, he said, but it’s “very dated.” It can’t hold all of the parks and rec staff, so they’re spread out in different locations across the city.

“We have staff that are sharing basements of buildings and share offices,” he said. “We’ve been looking for a new space for years. We had to do something.”

This month, construction is winding down on a new office space for parks and rec in the Dan River Falls building, a 550,000-square-foot former textile mill that has been rehabilitated into residential and mixed-use space. 

Offices for two city departments — parks and rec and economic development — and for private company Dewberry Engineering will soon be complete at Dan River Falls. 

Over the past two fiscal years, the city has allocated several million dollars of its casino revenue toward commercial spaces at Dan River Falls. It’s not all going toward city offices — the building is expected to have an entire floor of commercial space, though it’s not yet complete. 

Last fiscal year, just under $894,000 in casino funding was allocated towards funding construction of commercial spaces at Dan River Falls. This fiscal year, $2.2 million was allocated there, and another $2 million was put toward a second phase of construction.

Sgrinia said he wasn’t sure exactly how much went to the parks and rec office, and while casino funding helped make the project happen, it didn’t make or break it. 

“The big thing [casino revenue] did is alleviate some of the fear about spending,” Sgrinia said. “It’s not like ‘we can’t spend the money on this right now because there are more important things.’ You feel better about making the investment because you’ll have some revenue to offset it.”

New office space has been needed for parks and recreation for about 40 years, long before Sgrinia, who is now the department’s director, came on board, he said. 

Gina Craig, director of the department’s administrative division, said she’s worked with parks and rec for 34 years and never had a window in her office. 

“Well, I did in the beginning, but it had bars over it,” she said. 

Now, Craig, Sgrinia, and their fellow staff members will have too many windows to count. When Dan River Falls was rehabilitated, its 14-foot-tall window openings were preserved, though the glass panes are new. The windows span almost the entire exterior of the building, providing tenants with lots of natural light and a view of the Dan River. 

This location also puts the department close to its ongoing projects, like the adjacent riverfront park that’s under construction and the anticipated whitewater channel, which will run in front of the building. 

The space will have offices for 20 parks and rec staff members, as well as conference space, casual meeting space, an office for facility rentals, a trophy wall and even showers. 

Many staff members are in the habit of setting up events during the day, going home to shower and then coming back when the event starts, Sgrinia said. Now, they can do that at the Dan River Falls office space.

The department has 62 full-time staff members and over 100 part-time members. Some of those folks will still be located at other places across the city, which makes sense for the department’s different programs, Sgrinia said. 

“Our programmer is going to stay at the Camp Grove recreation center, where she does therapeutic programs,” Sgrinia said. “We’re keeping some people at Ballou Park and Green Street, where they run centers. They’ll still have that center office space, but they’ll also be based out of here.”

The new space will also have a larger public entrance and a parking lot instead of the side street parking at the City Auditorium, so residents can have easier access to the department. 

“There is going to be guaranteed traffic for this building,” Sgrinia said. “We’ll have people coming into this building to go to restaurants and other things, so there are a lot of good reasons to put a city department here.”

The City Jail has “good bones,” but it’s needed upgrades for years. This year, $650,000 in casino funding is making that happen

On each block of the Danville City Jail, inmates are kept behind sliding metal bars. Behind the bars is a communal space with small tables and a shower, and behind that, another set of sliding metal bars designate individual cells. 

On the other side of the bars is a hallway with locked doors on either site, where officers enter and exit the block. 

“Obviously, we can control the opening and closing of those doors,” said Sheriff Mike Mondul. “But inmates are crafty, and they have a lot of time on their hands, so they’ve figured out a way to interfere with those mechanisms.” 

The City Jail was built in the mid-1970s, and its bones are good, Mondul said, but there are some infrastructure and security upgrades that have been needed in recent years. Those needs are now being met with the help of casino tax revenue. 

There’s not a risk to the public’s safety, Mondul emphasized, but outdated security features have created some risks for his staff and for the inmates themselves. 

Often, inmates will use something like a bar of soap to jam the cell door so it won’t close all the way, Mondul said. Then at night, they can get out of their cell and into the communal space, though they’re still locked into the block. 

“They’re not going to get out, but it gives them a little more freedom and that does create problems for us,” Mondul said. “It’s unsafe for our staff, it’s unsafe for other inmates and it’s been an increasing problem the past couple years.”

The jail has had smaller upgrades over the years, but no in-depth modernization. This fiscal year, about $650,000 in the city’s casino revenue was put toward jail upgrades. 

“We were thrilled to learn that there was going to be funding to fix this problem,” Mondul said.

New mechanisms to control the doors will be the most expensive part of the upgrade, he said. The jail, which can hold 213 inmates, is also getting new lighting and plumbing that will be safer and more efficient. 

In a mid-November interview, Mondul said the lighting replacements were almost complete and that the plumbing work had begun. The work on the bars is expected to start in January or February and will take about three years to complete, he said. 

These upgrades would’ve happened eventually even without casino revenue, Mondul said, but that money likely helped them happen sooner. 

“From a financial point of view for the city, I’m sure it was nice for them to receive that funding because otherwise they would’ve had to come up with the money,” he said. “But this would’ve had to happen one way or another.”

Road paving, parking, public education, redevelopment and more

Below are photos depicting other projects and initiatives that have received funding from the city’s casino revenue. The city is expecting about $35 million this fiscal year in casino revenue, and a full breakdown of where those funds are being allocated can be found on the city’s website.