Interesting.

They had completely stopped all renovations aside from the conversion of Harvey's to Caesars Republic Lake Tahoe (lol).

I guess they have restarted.

The VP paytable cut being related to this may actually be some of the story. This might be part of some weird market shift attempt, where they're trying to bring tourists to Reno, and they figure that tourists are much less sensitive to VP paytables than locals (especially in a market where other properties have good paytables).