Gateway Casinos has purchased land at the old Kingsway Entertainment District site north of The Kingsway, now dubbed the Kingsway Employment District.
A land title search reveals that Gateway Casinos and Entertainment Ltd. purchased land from Kingsway Entertainment District Inc. on June 30.
Sudbury.com has reached out to Gateway Casinos for comment, who forwarded the inquiry to communications staff. A follow-up story will be published in the event they respond with further insight regarding the land purchase.
Gateway Casinos currently operates a casino at Sudbury Downs in Chelmsford, which has been in operation since Nov. 26, 1999.
Although Gateway Casinos has long planned to open a casino off of The Kingsway, their June 30 land purchase is the first update from the company since city council voted to pull municipal funding from the Kingsway Entertainment District (KED) in July 2022.
The KED had been slated to include a new private casino (Gateway Casinos), private hotel (Genesis Hospitality) and a municipal arena/event centre.
The city pulled their investment after their projected cost more than doubled to $215 million. City council has since shifted the event centre project to downtown Sudbury, where it’s projected to open by 2028.
Although Gateway Casinos was on board for the KED project for years, they put their commitment on pause in November 2021, at which time a representative said it was “not commercially reasonable” for them to proceed with site preparation work at the time.
At issue, according to a letter to the city by Gateway Casinos executive vice president development and construction Jagtar Nijjar at the time which was leaked to Sudbury.com, was uncertainty surrounding legal action by the Minnow Lake Restoration group which sought to stop the project and an OPP investigation into an allegation by then-Ward 3 Coun. Gerry Montpellier that he was “offered financial conflict of interest” to support The Kingsway site for the project.
(The OPP investigation concluded that there was no evidence to support charges, and the Minnow Lake case was dismissed as “entirely without merit.”)
After putting their commitment on pause, Gateway Casinos reiterated in July 2022 (a few weeks before city council pulled their support and effectively killed the KED as originally envisioned), their support for the project.
“We have not wavered in our decision to pursue the KED as the location for our new Sudbury casino,” Nijjar wrote at the time. “To date, Gateway has invested over $4 million in design, development and legal costs at the KED site.”
With the KED effectively killed via council pulling municipal investment, not much took place at the vacant property on The Kingsway in the years that followed.
Then, earlier this year, developer Dario Zulich attached a new name to the property; the Kingsway Employment District, which recycles the Kingsway Entertainment District acronym.
Already decades in the works, the property, on the north side of The Kingsway, west of the Sudbury Landfill Site, had also been called the Jack Nicholas Business and Innovation Subdivision.
Zulich later championed the Kingsway Entertainment District, but with that project dead, the Kingsway Employment District (a.k.a. Jack Nicholas Business and Innovation Subdivision) has continued.
In April, city council approved an $8.6-million contribution toward a road opening up the KED site, which will extend Levesque Street northward to help open up 30 hectares of industrial land north of The Kingsway as part of a broader 70-acre industrial subdivision.
Although it would stretch to the developer’s northern property line, the municipal road is eventually anticipated to extend farther north to Lasalle Boulevard and is part of the city’s Official Plan.
The road will be handed over to the municipality once completed (by Oct. 26, 2026), and the developer is funding the balance of the total project cost of $11,465,185, which doesn’t include such things as water/wastewater infrastructure the developer is responsible for.
Gateway Casinos and Entertainment Ltd. bills itself as “one of the largest and most diversified gaming and entertainment companies in Canada," with 31 gaming properties in British Columbia, Ontario and Alberta. They employ approximately 7,000 people across these sites.
Sudbury.com will be following this developing story and will publish details as they become available.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.