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While Station has remained steadfast in its opposition to Culinary, the union has made gains elsewhere in recent years. The entire Las Vegas Strip is now unionised, and Culinary used city-wide strikes as leverage in late 2023 and early 2024 to gain new multi-year labour agreements with the city’s major operators, including Wynn, Caesars and MGM.
Other than Station, Las Vegas Sands had been the other largest non-union holdout in Las Vegas for many years. But when the Venetian-Palazzo was sold to Apollo Global Management in 2021, the firm had no issues with Culinary and ratified the property’s first-ever deal with the union in 2024.
The animosity between the sides has become political over the years. Station is owned and operated by the Fertitta family, who have been prominent Republican donors for many years. Culinary is a largely Democratic organisation that typically supports and endorses left-leaning candidates.
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“Our work is not driven by opposition to the gambling industry or to legal, licensed operators. Quite the contrary.”
The focus is on identifying illegal and unregulated gambling sites, operators that offer gambling services without the necessary licence, as well as sites that misuse, copy, or falsely refer to other operators’ licences.
“You can try to stop gambling, but then you go onto foreign gambling sites and crypto casinos and they keep appearing,” Madsen says.
What is Blessed Flame?
In June, Administrative Law Judge Joseph Meyer sided with the tribe, finding Minnesota Valley’s policies did not prohibit behind-the-meter generation and that disconnecting the casino would violate the cooperative’s obligation to provide service.
More than two dozen other Minnesota electric cooperatives subsequently backed the findings, agreeing that threatening disconnection over a non-exporting solar project violated core cooperative principles.
The PUC largely adopted Meyer’s recommendations, ruling that Minnesota Valley acted “unlawfully and unreasonably” by threatening the tribe.
