A longtime Danville corporation has sued the city over the site of its proposed Golden Nugget casino.
Mervis Industries, which owns a property adjacent to the casino site at 204 Eastgate Drive, is seeking a circuit court judge to declare that the city unlawfully changed its zoning code from industrial to business zoning for the purpose of putting the casino at the site.
Mayor Rickey Williams Jr. says the city acted within its boundaries as a home-rule community by approving the zoning change for the casino site. He says Michael and Adam Mervis are the only Mervis family members suing the city, and that their mother, Sybil Mervis, and their other siblings are not involved in the dispute.
City council members voted 10-0 on September 15th to approve the rezoning petition after the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission voted not to approve the request. Michael Mervis spoke at the zoning hearing and addressed complaints of parking and traffic patterns. Williams said after the commission vote that commissioner Ted Vacketta should have abstained since he is a longtime employee of Mervis Industries.
Alderman Mike Puhr, who was a member of a steering committee formed in 2019 to land the casino, told VermilionCountyFirst.com that he thinks the lawsuit was filed because the Mervises did not get the deal they wanted with the casino committee. The committee first looked at a 42-acre tract of land at the southeast corner of Lynch Road and Interstate 74 that was owned by Mervis family members.
However, in March of 2020 Michael Mervis increased the price of the 42-acre tract from an initial appraised value of around $3 million to $12 million. Puhr says the city made a $6 million offer on the property, but Mervis rejected it.
Before the September vote on a new casino deal with Wilmorite Gaming, Michael Mervis sent a letter urging the city to instead form a partnership with Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures, another casino developer based in Minnesota. He also contended that the city could not overturn the zoning commission’s vote, but Williams says the city can do so with a two-thirds vote by council members.
Puhr says the Mervis lawsuit has no merit and says he believes it will be thrown out in court. He added that the Eastgate Drive site is only a temporary location, as a new site will be built closer to I-74 in a future development phase. But the Eastgate property will remain as the site of training classes, machine delivery and repair and as the home of a restaurant.
