Nevada casinos are doing so well that their 2005 take has already surpassed the state’s all-time “win” record -- with only 11 months tallied to date.

The $10.7 billion win (what the casinos retained after paying off successful gamblers) reported to the state’s Gaming Control Board is already 11 percent ahead of 2004 -- with December’s total still to be added.

The Strip? Up 23.8 percent for November 2005, over the same period a year ago. North Las Vegas? Up 21.5 percent. Mesquite? Up 18.3 percent.

Which makes the news for downtown Las Vegas all the more somber.

Yes, Glitter Gulch gambling halls had one good month this fall -- one month that exceeded their equivalent 2004 performance.

But the downtown win was down in six of the past seven months, and tumbled to $54.6 million for November -- off 5.2 percent from the same month the year before.

Frank Streshley, senior research analyst for the control board, explains, “Downtown Las Vegas is going through a transitional period.” Yeah. So are the Kansas City Royals.

Whatever they’ve been doing downtown, isn’t working.

It’s not that property owners have done nothing at all, mind you. The Fremont Street Experience’s overhead light show continues to flash. A parade of unusual musical acts trooped on and off the bandstand near the artificial Christmas tree during the holiday season. (The cowgirls in pink miniskirts, dancing with a reluctant Santa, were particularly, um ... memorable.) Street vendors sell T-shirts. Steve Connolly has added a six-piece live band to his Elvis review at Fitzgerald’s. A few promising new night spots have opened on North Third Street. A new tenant is promised for the defunct Race Rock Cafe site.

But overall? Down. And let’s not even talk about poor Neonopolis, about which the last debate is between pundits preparing the epitaph -- is it to be “NeoNecropolis,” or “NeoFlopolis”?

What should the City Council do?

In that question lies the heart of the problem: central government planning, regulation, and protectionism.

For years, the city government and its regulators have formed a “partnership” with downtown gamers ... to stymie free market competition.

Profit-making downtown businesses -- including the downtown’s only grocery store, where NeoFlopolis now looms -- were seized under eminent domain or the threat of eminent domain, their owners offered dimes on the dollar and told “You’ve had the property long enough -- time to give it up.”

For this purpose, blocks were described as “blighted” which the local magnates had insisted did not qualify for redevelopment help under that rationale when Bob Snow of Florida sought to build a big competing casino near Fremont and the Strip only a few years earlier. (Snow, hamstrung by lawsuits, was elbowed over to Main Street. Yes, he made his own mistakes. But instead of welcoming the new blood and the new capital, most in the downtown watched him like impatient dingos eyeing a toddler at the edge of the playground.)

When Andre Rochat invested hundreds of thousands to upgrade “Frogeez”? The longtime downtown businessman says the government-backed FSE declined to let him advertise his location, while city meter maids buried his customers in a blizzard of parking tickets, even late at night when there was no competing demand for the meters, at all.

What downtown needs is some private entrepreneurs willing to buy up multiple properties and build modern hotel-casinos and other attractions with larger “footprints,” bigger rooms, and more amenities.

What downtown needs is for the city government to invite all comers -- and then get out of the way.

Outside city jurisdiction, the Strip thrives under a “more the merrier” laissez-faire regime.

But as long as the Las Vegas city fathers play favorites with their existing friends, offering sweetheart land deals to these “good neighbors” as a reward for milking their properties with minimal reinvestment, enforcing picayune regulations that discourage newcomers to innovate (like barring music clubs from setting up next door to one another, not to mention setting loose a swarm of meter maids reminiscent of the flying monkeys of Oz) -- while insisting that any development on the 61 acres downtown must feature “no competing casinos” -- don’t look for downtown Las Vegas to step off the “Down” escalator anytime soon.