Suquamish Clearwater Casino Resort is about to embark on an ambitious five-year expansion that can make it the greatest convention center in West Sound, also as a major Northwest gaming and hotel destination.

“This is one thing we’ve wanted to accomplish for some time, and now’s the chance to perform it,” said Russ Steele, chief executive officer of Port Madison Enterprises (PME), the company arm in the Suquamish Tribe.

The strategy consists of huge conference space that will eclipse, by far, anything in West Sound including the Kitsap Conference Center at Bremerton Harborside and also the Silverdale Beach Hotel.

It also includes an expansive new hotel wing, an huge parking garage and a remodeled casino. Construction starts in June and ends in 2017. Steele declined to offer you a total dollar amount on the function.

In the project, casino space will stay roughly precisely the same, but convention and meeting space will develop just about tenfold, to 27,835 square feet.

The program reflects the tribe’s concentrate on getting a big convention venue. And gaming will be the draw.

“One complements the other,” stated Steele, who also declined to say whether or not convention revenues are anticipated to someday surpass gaming revenues.

Later this year, motorists on Highway 305 will see a parking garage with numerous stories going up next towards the highway exactly where the open parking lot is now. It will contain 700 spaces, bringing the total parking spaces in the facility to 2,010.

In 2014, a brand new five-story, 100-room hotel wing will likely be built off the south finish from the exiting casino. Though Steele declined to share the occupancy rate on the existing 85-room hotel, he did say that it’s high and that the hotel is sold out on weekends. The new hotel wing might be built within a way to ensure that 3 extra floors might be added later for nevertheless another 100 rooms.

All these new rooms will be needed to accommodate the new convention and meeting space. Built among 2013 and 2017, it’ll wrap about the existing casino’s east and south sides.

The number of individuals that space can accommodate has not been observed in Kitsap. Three thousand persons could fit into two giant rooms. Conventioneers desiring to be in a single room could quantity as lots of as 1,666, if they had been seated theater-style in chairs facing the exact same direction, or 1,248 at huge round tables.

Also along the way, the existing casino might be remodeled, together with the very same quantity of gaming units. The area will function a central round bar, and much more room for entertainment. The existing space allows for an audience of 200 persons; that goes to 1,500 people.

The Longhouse buffet, amongst the busiest and most significant nonmilitary canteens in West Sound, might be remodeled.

The number of eating spots at the facility will improve from 4 to five, and inside a nod for the anti-smokers, every single will be accessible in the outdoors. Now, nonsmoking eaters have to undergo the smoke-filled casino to obtain to the restaurants. Nonsmoking regions within the casino is going to be expanded, also.

“There is usually a demand for that,” Steele stated.

The curved entrance towards the facility will stay, but will have far more doorways.

Almost everything stays open for the duration of construction. Rice Fergus Miller may be the architect. A contractor soon will be chosen.

The facility’s expansion is expected to create about 170 new full- and part-time jobs, adding to the 790 current PME jobs now.

It wasn’t that extended ago that the patch of woods and weeds on the west finish of your two-lane Agate Pass Bridge held tiny far more than a humble smoke shop and weathered totem pole. A bingo hall opened its doors in 1992. A white, tent-style mini-casino went up in 1995. The popular tent underwent a couple of modest expansions prior to the casino seen currently replaced it in 2003. The present hotel, beyond the casino and overlooking the waterfront, opened in 2006, completing the present image.

Location elected officials received word from the expansion Thursday.

Steele stated of the enormous project, “Much like fishing, we desire to cast our net farther.”