Hard Rock Casino to expand entertainment offerings with Yuba County land purchase
Enterprise Rancheria is buying almost 350 acres in Yuba County adjacent to the tribe's Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Sacramento at Fire Mountain to expand offerings in the rural entertainment district north of the capital.
The swath of land near Highway 65, off of Forty Mile Road in Wheatland, is sandwiched between the casino and Toyota Amphitheater to the south, and could eventually house a combination of new developments aimed at attracting more visitors from the broader Northern California region.
The purchase falls within the long-term plans for the casino and surrounding land zoned for sports-entertainment development , and its announcement comes on the heels of the Hard Rock's five-year anniversary north of Sacramento.
The sale is under contract but not final, said Mark Birtha , Hard Rock Casino president. More concrete details about how the tribe and casino plan to use the land are expected within the first half of next year.
"With that amount of land, and the sports-entertainment zone designation that exists for it, it creates a really unique opportunity to envision something that would be, obviously, something that doesn't exist here currently in this region, in this marketplace," Birtha said.
The tribe has partnered with Hybrid Development Group to study the market demographics and how to work with the land's existing zoning designation to create a destination that stands apart from others in the region.
"We've got some really unique opportunities to do things here that don't really exist anywhere else in California or the West Coast," Birtha added.
Since opening in October 2019 , the casino and its attached businesses, including its Hard Rock Live concerts , have brought an estimated $2.3 billion into the Yuba and Sutter county economies, said Brynda Stranix, president of Yuba-Sutter Economic Development Corporation.
What to do with the land?
Although development plans are not finalized, Birtha named several possible uses for the land.
One possibility is a "festival entertainment district," including an indoor-outdoor retail promenade with entertainment and dining. That could attract big-box and boutique retailers to the area, some of whom are not already in Northern California, Birtha said.
Another possibility is building more convention space, which could include new hotels, meeting spaces and convention facilities.
"Indoor water park features," in partnership with existing water park operators, could also adjoin those hotel and convention space plans, Birtha said.
The area's ties to farming, ranching and rodeos open the possibility of related forms of entertainment.
"Given the legacy of rodeo, Rosser family, some of the authentic nuances to this area, we feel like that sporting and that entertainment component would be a really cool sort of nod to Northern California," he said.
The tribe and hotel could also build a race track, bringing family entertainment car sports of some kind, he said.
"We feel like two or three of these concepts can easily fit adjacent to each other, sort of interconnect the entire causeway, landscape all the way to the shoulder entities there," he said.
