The long wait is over. Steve Wynn has been approved to begin the process that will put his "best work ever" on display along the Cotai Strip area of Macau.

Wynn has been talking up plans for his newest resort for months and began the basic planning more than two years ago, but the way it works on Macau, developers must wait for permission from the central government for approval as they take the long path toward the opening of any new project.

In public comments, Wynn has always been respectful of the procedures that are in place there. There’s none of the trash talking that has characterized his continued reaction to what is or isn’t coming out of Washington.

Wynn has said that the government long ago issued preliminary commitments to his company, allowing it to fence in and even build a warehouse on the 51 acres that have been dedicated to the new project.

"Things move a bit more slowly there," he conceded.

Months ago he was told the project, which will probably cost in excess of $2 billion, would get permission to begin moving forward "any day," but that approval came only in the last couple of weeks.

Wynn is willing to spend $2.5 billion, maybe as much as $3 billion.

"What difference does it make?" he seems to ask rhetorically. "We’ll be making $100 million a month. This hotel, the one in Macau, is going to be filled with entertainment attractions, everything from public to showroom entertainment. It is going to be the best thing we’ve ever done – physically and operationally, the culmination of more than 40 years of experience."

He promises it will reflect everything his team has learned about Asian tastes and preferences since it arrived in Macau a decade ago with one of three new casino concessions. The evolving list of insights explain his approach to entertainment in the Cotai development.

"The government," he said, "is very anxious that Macau have a terrific entertainment profile. We respond to anything the government likes because that is the way to live and be successful there," which explains the focus on what he describes as "creative, fanciful public entertainment, the kind of things that do not require a ticket, per se, but which take the fantasy quotient of the facility to a whole other level.

"This place is going to be an entertainment experience from one end to the other. We’re doing things we’ve never done before and that means we can’t go to the Yellow Pages to find out how to do them."

And that also explains the difficulty in being very specific about the budget at this point. I recall him saying years ago when he was still designing The Mirage. He was speaking before an audience of analysts telling them, "If I have to spend an extra $50 million to make it right then that is what I will do."

More than 20 years have not changed Wynn’s approach to project design.