The National Harbor in Prince George’s County. Photo by afagen

With Prince George’s County voters having endorsed the construction of a casino resort in a ballot referendum last year, the bids from casino operators are starting to come in.

Washington Business Journal reports that MGM Resorts International, considered to be the frontrunner to land a site in the National Harbor complex in Oxon Hill, submitted its proposal to Maryland gambling officials today. And the company did so in the kind of style befitting a Las Vegas count room:

They loaded lockboxes of case files into a black GMC Yukon XL and left for Baltimore, home to Maryland’s Video Lottery Facility Location Commission, getting a jump the Friday deadline to submit responses to the 110-page request for proposals.

The National Harbor casino would be the sixth full-scale gambling facility in Maryland, where some of the existing casinos recently introduced table games. But unlike the others, such as Maryland Live! in Hanover or Hollywood Casino in Perryville, MGM envisions a behemoth resort on the scale of its properties on the Las Vegas Strip.

Although MGM’s proposal for the casino is hush-hush, the company has a website for its National Harbor plans laying out the broad strokes. “An MGM resort at National Harbor would be designed and operated at the same level of quality as our other iconic hotels, including Bellagio, MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay, Aria, The Mirage and others,” the website reads.

It also states that the resort would include a luxury hotel and spa, entertainment venues, and restaurants featuring name-brand chefs. Although the bidding process appears to be heavily favored toward MGM Grand, it’s not entirely one-sided. Penn National, which owns Hollywood Casino and opposed last year’s referendum, said earlier this week that it, too, will make a bid.

But MGM’s plans have been in the works for a while. The company has said its proposed resort would be an $800 million project; it also spent considerable amounts of cash last year to get the gambling expansion ballot measure passed, including recorded phone calls by Vegas mainstays like the magician David Copperfield and the boxer Oscar de la Hoya.