Formally speaking, Alon hasn’t broken ground but that hasn’t stopped James Packer‘s bulldozers and backhoes from moving earth around at the site of the planned megaresort, as well as 
leveling some of the landscaping Steve Wynn paid for to conceal the empty land. So can we move this into the “in progress” category? (That’s more than can be said for dormant Resorts World Las Vegas.) CEO Andrew Pascal has taken a vow of silence on the project until “early next year,” when details — it is promised — will be revealed.
While the exact appearance of the resort remains under wraps, Vegas Inc. obtained some specifics of the Alon-to-be, which will have two hotel towers. One, 17 stories high, is to be filled exclusively with VIP (will they have enough to fill that many rooms). The other, 26 stories, is reserved for the hoi polloi. Amenities will sprawl over nearly 85,000 square feet and the casino will be only 27,800 square feet. (Wynn Las Vegas, by contrast, has 110,000 square feet of gaming, not counting Encore.) Excepting SLS Las Vegas — which isn’t doing so hot — I can’t recall a casino-hotel banking so heavily on non-gaming amenities to carry it.
Alon’s underlying real estate includes 16 acres rented from Margaret Elardi … but I wouldn’t worry about that. The lease doesn’t expire until 2097, long after Alon will probably have been demolished for The Next Big Thing. Meanwhile, Resorts World Las Vegas is conspicuously inactive. What Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchinson (R) called a “jewel in the desert” is still a bunch of semi-finished steel skeletons. When Vegas Inc. tried to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding the project it ran into the proverbial stone wall.
* Carl Icahn‘s hollow Fontainebleau will get a 100-foot fig leaf … eventually. Showing they really mean business, Clark County commissioners gave the billionaire until mid-2016 to get it done.
* Could labor unrest be coming to Detroit‘s casinos? The Detroit Casino Council, which — its Chamber of Commerce-like moniker 
notwithstanding — is a coalition of four unions, has voted to authorize a strike at MGM Grand Detroit, MotorCity Casino Hotel and Greektown Casino-Hotel. Casino workers are still covered under the terms of their old contract but it looks like management wants to negotiate health benefits more to its liking and that’s the sticking point. Still, MGM COO Steve Zanella took the strike vote in stride, saying, “We’re all at the table and not at an impasse.”
