Oak Tree casino in Woodland closes

The Oak Tree Casino in Woodland — also known as the Lucky 21 Casino — has closed, this time for good.

The doors of the casino and restaurant building near Interstate 5 were locked Monday morning, and a sign taped to the inside of each door stated “Lucky 21 Casino Closed 6 am April 8th 2019.” The casino’s main road-facing display board has also been updated with the message “Oak Tree Casino Closed.”

The latest closure appears to have been an abrupt decision. A group of four employees stood outside the front entrance of the building Monday afternoon, warning visitors that the casino had closed permanently. More than one of the employees indicated that they had only been notified about the closure that same morning. The restaurant portion of the business already closed back in December, one of the employees said.

All of the employees declined to comment further.

The casino’s owners could not be reached for comment Monday, and calls to the casino and restaurant phone lines were not returned.

According to the 2017 financial statement from the casino, the most recent available from the Washington State Gaming Commission, the casino operated at a $365,527 deficit for that year. The two years prior to that, the casino reported more than $200,000 in net income for 2016 and 2015. According to financial statements from the commission, the casino had a deficit of $863,643 for 2014, and $1,214,999 in 2013, the most of any cardroom in the state for that year.

The closure of the casino will mean a hit for Woodland’s finances. According to gross receipts from the gaming commission, the Oak Tree paid $101,648 in local taxes for the 2018 fiscal year; $190,271 for 2017; $260,129 in 2016; $264,563 in 2015; $184,526 in 2014; $32,706 in 2013; and $46,788 in 2012.

So far, the city has received $4,564 in taxes from the casino, according to City Administrator Pete Boyce. Woodland budgeted to receive $18,286 in 2019.

The building has been home to the Oak Tree restaurant for at least 30 years. The cardroom was added in late 2011 to help fill the building’s 48,000-square-foot interior. The project was pitched as a way to bring significant tax revenue to Woodland, which along with La Center is one of only two Clark County-area cities to allow cardrooms.

But the casino had a rocky first year, according to a 2013 Columbian story. The promised gambling crowd never materialized, and the change to a cardroom cut down on the restaurant’s traditional customer base. The casino and restaurant closed in December 2012 due to mounting debts.

The restaurant was purchased in February 2013 by Lucky 21 Casino LLC, a Portland-based group headed by chiropractor Dan Yan, and reopened in May 2013 following an extensive interior remodel that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to The Columbian story.

The cardroom reopened later that year, although Yan said at the time that he wanted to prioritize the food experience in order to avoid making the mistakes that sunk the business’s original iteration. The new name of Lucky 21 Casino was intended as a reference to the business’s proximity to Exit 21 from I-5. A spokesperson at the time said the restaurant and casino together employed about 200 people.

Back when the casino reopened in 2013, the biggest sources of competition were four cardrooms in La Center, located about seven miles south of Woodland on I-5. But a much larger threat emerged in 2017 with the opening of the $510 million ilani casino resort, located on the stretch of I-5 between the two cities.

One of the four La Center cardrooms, Chips, closed in 2014, followed by the New Phoenix Casino in 2017 — a spokesperson for the latter casino attributed the closure to the impact of ilani. It’s unclear whether the presence of ilani played any role in the closure of the Oak Tree Casino.

Reporter Adam Littman contributed to this story.