Renovated, relocated Rosie's expanding economic footprint of gambling in region

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Rosie’s Gaming Emporiums have a growing economic footprint in Southwest Virginia with a Vinton location recently expanded and one in Collinsville newly opened.

The games featured at Rosie’s are very similar to traditional slot machines found at casinos, except instead of using a random number generator, the machines use three historical horse races to determine the results each turn, according to Todd Lear, the Vinton location’s gaming operations manager.

Players have the option of picking and choosing what they believe to be the results of each race based on different stats provided by the machine, or they can allow the computer to choose, with the latter giving the player the best odds to win, he said.

After each turn, players can see an animated version of how the race played out, while also seeing details like when and where the race took place.

To date, the largest single-game purse a player has won is $480,000, according to Rosie’s Vinton Marketing Manager Jeff Paugh, also noting that there are people that win $1,000 or more daily.

The expanded venue resembles a typical casino, save the absence of traditional games like roulette and blackjack, and has a capacity of 1,100 with 500 machines, two bars, a restaurant and a stage for live bands.

You can also bet on live horse racing but it is much less popular, to the point where only $1.75 million was wagered last year compared to the more than $300 million that was used on the slot machines. It’s also a very small corner of the facility.

The restaurant consists of typical bar food, with fresh donuts made onsite being one of the menu’s staple items.

Paugh said business is steady throughout the week, but Friday and Saturday are by far the busiest nights.

The main demographic is women 55 and older, though Paugh said there are plenty of people who visit a for a night out with friends or family.

Since coming to Roanoke County in 2019, the gaming center — Rosie’s, named for the World War II patriotic character Rosie the Riveter — has been a win-win situation for everyone, according to David Lermond, the executive director of the Virginia Racing Commission.

The Colonial Downs Group reports having made a $300 million investment in Virginia and says it pays more than $32 million in annual state and local taxes plus an additional $12 million in racing industry payments annually.

“Our five Rosie’s locations have delivered great entertainment to their communities while providing good jobs and important tax revenues to the localities and to the commonwealth,” said Aaron Gomes, chief operating officer at Colonial Downs Group.

Said Gomes: “We are proud to bring this same community partnership to Collinsville and we look forward to many years of fun, safe and successful operations.”

“The localities are always thrilled with the tax money that they receive,” he said. “We’ve had little to no complaints from customers [of Rosie’s] … They really focus on customer service, so if there is a problem, they handle it pretty well.”

In 2021, the Vinton location saw $317 million in wagers, with approximately 92% of that going to the customers. That number also takes into account winnings that players rewagered as opposed to actual money put into the machines, Lermond said.

Rosie’s collected approximately $23.7 million in revenue from that pot, and Vinton received roughly $800,000 in taxes, with the state getting another $2.4 million from the Roanoke location alone, according to Lermond.

For comparison, the state received $24.5 million from all locations in 2021, and the Richmond Rosie’s saw the most traffic with approximately $1.2 billion in wagers.

For now, Rosie's is owned by Colonial Downs, headquartered in New Kent County east of Richmond off Interstate 64, at the site of Virginia's first horse racing facility. Along with Vinton and Collinsville, Rosie's has facilities in Hampton, Dumfries and Richmond.

In late February, Churchill Downs Inc., the company behind the famed Kentucky Derby horse race, said it had agreed to a $2.48 billion acquisition of Peninsula Pacific Entertainment LLC, the parent company of Colonial Downs and Rosie's Gaming Emporiums in Virginia.

If approved by the necessary authorities, including the Virginia Gaming Commission, the merger would create one of the nation's largest providers of historical horse racing betting.

Vinton Town Manager Pete Peters said the gaming center has been a great success for the town, and the single biggest tax generator of any business in the locality.

“Citizens will finally start seeing the benefits of having it here as we have started using some of the funds for different capital improvement projects,” he said.

Lermond said those numbers will only grow for Vinton, as the center only had 150 machines until December, before adding another 350.