Take a look at the local papers and the bad news continues. The $3 billion Cosmopolitan project is in foreclosure and the quick fix purchase scenario that was envisioned hasn’t materialized. The $10 billion overhaul of the Tropicana was put on hold as the parent company battles to stay afloat. The sale of the struggling Hooters hotel was cancelled. The deal to build the multi-billion dollar Crown hotel and casino that was to go up on the site of Wet ‘n Wild collapsed. The Conrad Hilton planned for a chunk of land near The Riviera has been cancelled. Harrah’s rumored massive overhaul of its Center Strip casinos remains merely a rumor nearly two years after it was to have been announced.

And those are just the things that popped into my head while I was writing this.

It’s obvious that Las Vegas is going through some rough times, but the question is how bad is it? And more importantly, what does it mean to you, the average Vegas visitor?

The answers are pretty bad and quite a lot, actually.

Visitor volume to the city is flat, meaning the same amount of people (roughly) are coming to Las Vegas this year as they did last year. But according to the statistics, they are staying fewer days and spending a lot less money while they are in town, especially in the casinos. Gaming revenue has been declining, which has an effect on everything from rates the hotels charge to the stock value of the major corporations that own them.

Wall Street has noticed the troubling signs in Vegas and most gaming stocks are in a freefall, plunging by double digit percentages last month.

The reasons for this are pretty obvious. The economy is in trouble and people are feeling the pinch – or at least feel like they are. The country is in a bad mood economically speaking and things like $4 a gallon gas, rising airline costs, and a general sense of bigger trouble ahead is keeping people away from vacation spots, especially expensive ones like Vegas.

Back in February of this year, a reader asked me if the economy would be affecting room rates in the city and I sort of shrugged and said “maybe” but probably not by a lot. I’m happy to admit when I’m wrong and I was wrong here. Room rates have come down consistently throughout the summer at almost every single property around town and it looks like the bargains might even extend into the fall.

A good way to judge this is by looking at the offers that casinos are sending to their players’ club members.

As I have mentioned several times, I am a moderate gambler at most. In the past, I have mostly gotten free room offers during the week at mid-priced or lower hotels. But now I’m getting offers from high-end hotels to come and stay any day of the week for free and some are even throwing in temptations like the chance to earn or win flat panel televisions, cars, and vacations. That’s surprising as it is, but I’d shrug it off if it was limited to the summer months but some of these offers are going all the way into October.

A quick check of room rates at major Strip hotels shows that with the right amount of flexibility in your vacation plans, you can get some amazing rates. I won’t name names here, but there is one luxury hotel on The Strip that is nearly impossible to get into for less than $200 a night on the weekdays and $300 on the weekends but there are several dates through November as low as $159 and $239 respectively.

Granted, this particular hotel is still charging high rates for a lot of their other nights but the fact that you can find these prices at all is noteworthy.

So what does the future hold for both the city and for you, the visitor? I wish I had that crystal ball up and running – it would make my gambling junkets a lot more rewarding. But if you were to force me to guess, I’d say the rocky times are going to continue through the fall but may start to turn around in early 2009. Several new hotels are opening in the coming months – the Eastside Cannery and Aliante Station, which could help out the local market and Encore at Wynn Las Vegas, which could spur some renewed interest in The Strip.

And I don’t want to stray into a political discussion here, but this fall’s election could go a long ways toward improving the general mood of the country. Even if economic conditions don’t improve, the fact that people feel better about things can go a long ways toward healing certain sectors like the leisure travel market.

I’d say if you can afford it, book your trip to Vegas in 2008 before prices start to go up again in 2009.

Of course, I’ve been wrong before.

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To celebrate, I’m running a series of columns about things that have happened over the last decade, or in this case, things that didn’t.

Las Vegas has never been short of big plans and outsize dreams. It’s just the kind of city that inspires such audaciousness. And while some of the crazy ideas have turned into reality, the bulk of them have remained pipe dreams.

So this week, I thought I’d take a look at the Top 10 Things That Never Happened in Las Vegas.

1 – The Titanic Hotel
There were several competing plans to build a hotel/casino tribute to the Titanic but the one that got the farthest was from a guy named Bob Stupak. “Wacky Bob,” as I liked to call him, was the ultimate Vegas huckster in his day, a guy who had a hand in the development of The Stratosphere but was mostly known for making a lot of grand pronouncements that never really turned into reality.

The hotel was to be built near The Stratosphere and would have been accessible from a parking garage across the street via “gangplanks.” It was slated to feature massive smoke stacks and a giant iceberg housing the shopping arcade. Residents in the quiet neighborhood behind the proposed site objected loudly to the thought of looking out their window at an iceberg and managed to “sink” the zoning variances required to build such a project.

Meanwhile another company announced that they would be building a similar hotel either on the empty land across the street from The Sahara or just south of Mandalay Bay, the latter of which would’ve been somehow more appropriate if you think about it.

Lawsuits ensued over who might own the rights to a Titanic hotel and that, along with a slowing US economy in the late ‘90s and rising interest rates, pretty much scrapped everyone’s plans.

2 – Moon Resort
Here was the plan: 10,000 rooms, a 40-story replica of the moon with the casino inside, a wave pool in the shape of a moon crater, a replica of the International Space Station hovering over the lobby, an indoor winter sports arena with downhill skiing and ice skating, an indoor golf course, a 60,000-seat arena, the largest convention center in the world with private helipads, and a showroom featuring a moon-themed Cirque show called Cirque du Lune.

The sheer audaciousness of this plan was intoxicating, as was the attitude of the guy behind it who supposedly invested a million dollars to build the models and develop the plans for the resort with absolutely no idea of how to actually build such a thing, much less pay for it.

3 – Gorilla on the Stratosphere
Battling the Titanic Hotel for “Wackiest Idea” was the plan to build a thrill ride for The Stratosphere in the shape of a giant gorilla scaling the tower. Riders would’ve been inside the belly of the beast as it climbed the tower, roaring and lurching and slipping back down at one point. I couldn’t find the official reason why it was never built, but I do remember stories about the hotel’s neighbors being concerned about a massive gorilla roaring in the sky over their homes. Can’t say as I blame them.

4 – Moulin Rouge Redevelopment
The Moulin Rouge was only open for less than a year in 1955 but its mark on the city was legendary. It was the first racially integrated casino in Las Vegas and was the playground for people like Sammy Davis Jr. and The Rat Pack. It was also the site of the signing of an agreement in the 1960s that officially integrated all of the city’s casinos.

Since its closure, there have been innumerable plans to try to reopen the place, including a recent one that appears now to be falling into lawsuits and public name calling. Meanwhile what is left of the Moulin Rouge – which isn’t much as most of it was destroyed in a fire a couple of years ago – sits empty and neglected in a bad neighborhood near Downtown.

5 – Biggest Ferris Wheel in the World
I was able to find no fewer than three separate plans to bring the Biggest Ferris Wheel in the World to Las Vegas. The first was as a part of a water themed resort called Voyagers that was going to go on the land where Wet ‘n Wild used to be. The second was for another project that never got off the ground on the southern end of The Strip. The third was going to put it in the parking lot of The Rio.

The people who own the idea have not given up trying to find a Vegas home for the massive wheel so you may hear more about this one in the future.

6 – Tropicana Overhaul
Almost as long as I have been writing about Las Vegas, I’ve been writing about plans to do something with the Tropicana. A series of owners has unveiled big dreams for everything from a cosmetic overhaul to full on implosion to expansions and more. The latest would’ve torn down almost all of the hotel (except for the two main towers) and rebuild it as a 10,000 room paradise. Was anyone surprised when that got put on “hold?” I wasn’t.

7 – Tallest Building in the World
There were lots of plans to build the tallest building in the world in Vegas, including a hare-brained idea to construct a 200-story hotel, casino, and condo complex in Downtown Las Vegas. But the one that got the farthest in terms of planning and money spending was Crown Las Vegas, which in its original incarnation would’ve consisted of an 1,800-foot tower. While that wouldn’t have qualified it as tallest in the world, it would’ve qualified it as tallest in the US and would’ve dwarfed the roughly 1,100-foot high Stratosphere nearby.

But the Federal Aviation Administration put the kibosh on the idea saying that the building would get in the way of planes landing at McCarran airport.

The developers revised the plans several times, finally settling on a much smaller tower but then the whole project collapsed recently under financing pressures and the Crown will never be seen in Vegas.

8 – Citywide Monorail
The idea for the monorail seemed like a good one. There would be a high-tech line that would whisk people from the airport to Paradise Road and then The Strip, over to the convention center and all the way up into Downtown. A series of spur lines would connect the east and west sides of The Strip and the whole thing would revolutionize the way people got around the tourist areas of Las Vegas.

Did anyone else see that episode of “The Simpsons?”

Obviously all we got from the grand plans was the current 4 mile line that runs from the MGM Grand up to The Sahara, and it really hasn’t done much to alleviate the traffic around town.

There is still a lot of discussion about extending the route to the airport, but I’m going to go watch “The Simpsons” while I wait for that to happen.

9 – Frontier Replacement
Over the years, the guy that owned The Frontier kept coming out with the grand plans for what would replace the aging hotel. One of the plans would’ve built a San Francisco themed resort, complete with a replica of The Golden Gate Bridge acting as the main entry way to the casino. Another idea would’ve brought a touch of jazz to The Strip with Montreux, a Swiss themed hotel patterned after the city that hosts the famous jazz festival. Then there was another that was sort of a theme-less luxury resort.

Of course none of that ever happened but unlike most of the other things on this Top 10 list, the Frontier is getting replaced. It was torn down last year to make way for a multi-billion version of the famed New York Plaza Hotel scheduled to open in 2011.

10 – Michael Jackson Robot
As a part of a Michael Jackson comeback, there was a rumor that someone associated with Jackson (perhaps tenuously, but still) wanted to build a 50-foot tall robot replica of the singer that would wander around the desert outside of the city and emit laser beams from its head.

Of all the things on this list, this is the one that I really wish would’ve happened. There’s nothing about a 50-foot tall laser beam emitting Michael Jackson robot that doesn’t make me happy.

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