CENTRALIA — About 150 people lined up outside of the doors of the Lucky Eagle Casino Thursday morning awaiting its reopening after a three-month hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic.
As the clock crept closer to 10 a.m., a red ribbon was stretched across the front door to add to the festivities. In attendance was Chehalis Tribe chairman Harry Pickernell to offer a few words to the guests.
“Back on March 17 we were the first to announce our closure and back then I assured (Lisa Miles, CEO of Lucky Eagle Casino) and (JaNessa Bumgarner, COO) that we were not going to be the first one to reopen,” Pickernell said to the crowd. “We’re going to play it safe and see what we need to do and make sure the place is safe.”
Miles added that the reopening was just a day before Lucky Eagle Casino’s 25th anniversary.
“This is a really big day for us, we are so excited to have you join us,” Miles said into the microphone. “We’ve been busy getting the casino ready and safe, we feel like now is the right time to open.”
As guests entered the building, they were greeted by applause from a new branch of the staff at the casino: the “clean team.”
Outfitted in lime green shirts, the clean team’s responsibility is rather self explanatory, they are the ones keeping the Lucky Eagle Casino sanitized from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m., the casino’s modified hours of operation.
The clean team and their uniforms stemmed from an independent research study targeting Lucky Eagle gamblers to find out what their expectations were upon the casino’s reopening.
According to Miles, the response rate was high and they concluded two things.
First, “Most importantly, they wanted to see cleaning and sanitization efforts,” Miles said. “They didn’t want to just hear it was being done, they wanted to see it.”
Second, “They wanted to be able to make choices when it came to their safety and health,” Miles said.
One of the compromises the casino made in light of this finding was to allow its guests to smoke in the designated areas. Currently, the casino is testing the effectiveness of ionization machines in the smoking areas to filter out the smoke.
Miles said if the ionization machines prove to be effective, they will be adding more to the facility.
At the reopening, Miles said they would be allowing the casino to reach 50% to 60% capacity, up from 25% to 30% during their soft opening from June 1 to June 10 that consisted of invited guests only.
The casino and the tribe will be monitoring how the opening at 50% to 60% capacity goes before they open the facility up any further, Miles said.
“To keep it safe, we are doing this in a very phased approach,” Miles said.
The casino will be bringing back more employees in tandem with the amount of guests they will allow in.
“Right now we’re at about half capacity and we have about half of our employees,” Miles said.
Several guests in attendance told The Chronicle they had no reservations about contracting COVID-19 while at the casino.
A group of three gamblers, Max Patino, Tanya Parker and Tomi Donyes, chuckled at the idea of falling ill from going to the casino.
“I don’t even know anyone who’s got it,” Patino remarked.
