Harrah’s Cherokee Valley River Casino Breaks Ground On Expansion Project

Ground was broken on a $275 million expansion project for Harrah’s Cherokee Valley River Casino & Hotel, situated in North Carolina.

According to a press release from Cherokee One Feather, tribal leaders broke ground on the new expansion on Thursday, Sept. 29. The current plan has completion of the project in about 18 months.

The additions include new gaming space and a hotel tower. The gaming space will see a 23,359-square-foot addition, and along with it, there will be 400 new slot machines, 12 table games, and a 10-table World Series of Poker room.

“We’ve been working on a master plan since about 2018. We engaged with the design team, JCJ Architecture, to really look at a master plan for this property. But we really had limited funding. So, we just kind of did it in a sequence. The project in Cherokee with the fourth tower and convention center came about, so JCJ redirected up there and started helping the team there with that project,” said Lumpy Lambert, general manager of Harrah’s Cherokee Valley River.

The cost of the original base campus was $110 million. The budget for this project is more than double. In addition to the new game space, the hotel tower will add 296 rooms.

A new parking deck will add 1,700 spaces available to visitors. A covered sky bridge will connect the deck to the other buildings at the casino.

This is the second expansion project that has occurred at the Valley River Casino.

“We had a small expansion in 2017 where we added the bowling center, a sit-down restaurant, and a casino bar that is now inside of our sports book. Those three amenities have been tremendous for this property,” Lambert said.

“We were constrained on funding initially," he added. "We had a 110-million-dollar project. A lot of the amenities and a lot of the programming needed to be left out of that. So, it was really an opportunity for us. We paid the property off within five years, so we knew there was an opportunity with the success of the property. The timing was good as we started the exercise. Obviously, we didn’t anticipate or know what the outcome was going to be with some of the recent economic conditions that are occurring.”

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