Creve Coeur Patch Kicks Off New Interview Series

Editor's Note: The city of Creve Coeur is home to companies of all shapes and sizes. Today, Patch starts an effort to talk to the people who run them. We want to ask CEOs and local business owners about the issues and current events facing their company, the local business climate and other topics. If you have a suggestion for this series, please let us know. 

On Monday,will mark five years of calling Creve Coeur home. The gaming company moved here in 2006 after deciding that a headquarters in Biloxi, MS, a city which saw a a path of destruction from Hurricane Katrina, didn't make the best business sense. Almost half of the roughly 125 employees who work in the company's offices on Emerson Road made the trip from Mississippi.

Monday also marks the third month for the company's Chief Executive Officer.

This year, the company has faced off with mother nature again, while winning the last gaming license in the state of Missouri. Like other gaming firms, Isle of Capri is trying to make sense of what the poker landscape will look like.

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On the start of her tenure:

McDowell: "I think that pretty much everything happened as I expected except for the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers...My promotion Became effective at the end of April. At that point we had one of our 15 existing riverboats closed in Iowa and over the next couple of weeks, which would have been the first two weeks of me at the helm, we ended up closing four more so we had literally half of our Lady Luck portfolio closed at one point going into our fiscal year and going into the the beginning of my tenure as CEO, so I guess it’s the equivalent of being thrown into the deep end of the pool."

On the importance of holding the last casino license in the state of Missouri in Cape Girardeau?

McDowell: "To us, Cape Girardeau is a phenomenal opportunity. It’s the largest city between St. Louis and Memphis, a completely underserved market from a gaming perspective. The only two casinos that Cape Girardeau residents can really visit easily are Metropolis in Ilinois and then our property almost an hour in Caruthersville, and so for us, for a city of that size not to have a casino in it, we saw as a great opportunity."

Gaming companies have been watching with interest as the online poker landscape changes. In April, according to CNN and other news outlets, the Justice Department forced three of the largest players in the online poker world to shut down service to American customers. McDowell said that in turn resulted in additional foot traffic to IOC casinos. Just this week, a campaign funded in part by some of the casino industry launched an effort to promote legalization, according to the National Journal.

McDowell: "We look at online gaming whether its interstate or intra-state as a business opportunity for us as a company and certainly some of our competitors actually have very active development divisions that are working on this simply because there will be a time in the United States when we realize that we’re leaving a tremendous amount of money on the table by not finding a way to be able to have this happen legally in the United States. All of this money is going to off-shore companies and to other countries and Americans just want to sit in their living room and play poker."

McDowell did not describe Isle of Capri as an active player in this market yet, but said doing so would mean trying to extend the company's "brick and mortar experience" at a casino into the home. She added that there was too much else going on, including the debate over the debt ceiling, for there to be resolution on the matter before the 2012 elections.

On the business climate in Creve Coeur:

McDowell: "I think that it is a wonderful climate to have an office building in, and a wonderful location. Our employees that live out in Wentzville and St. Charles County can get here easily, our employees who live downtown can get here easily."

McDowell said the proximity to the airport, restaurants and hotels were a part of the equation, too. She had praise for the city leaders and said they were in regular communication with company employees. McDowell said she's watching the growth and development of business on Olive Blvd. and said five years from now, she saw "nothing that would stop us from being here, from having a headquarters" in Creve Coeur.