Barstow, California, is well known to residents of the Greater Los Angeles area as a place to get food or gasoline as they drive to Las Vegas or Laughlin – but a 2006 agreement to build a casino in the city was supposed to change that.
Fourteen years later, the casino remains a desert mirage, as the Los Coyotes Band of Cahuilla and Cupeno Indians has yet to acquire the land to build it. In the latest delay, the Barstow City Council recently amended the development agreement it has with the tribe to remove the tribe’s previous development partner, BarWest Gaming LLC.
According to the Barstow Casino Project website, BarWest Gaming is a casino development group led by Marian Ilitch and Michael Malik. The company said Ilitch and Malik were involved in the development of the MotorCity Casino in Detroit.
The tribe has not yet publicly identified its new development partner. It has a reservation in San Diego County, east of Temecula and Escondido.
The tribe still needs to complete negotiations with the US Department of the Interior to purchase land for the casino site. No date for this purchase has been released.
