Raiders Stadium In Las Vegas Has Intriguing Players Behind Process

 

By ALAN SNEL

LVSportsBiz.com

 

Back in the day when the Raiders were an NFL powerhouse, the team not only won Super Bowls while being based in different California cities but the club’s roster was peppered with colorful players such as Kenny “The Snake” Stabler and Ted “The Mad Stork” Hendricks. A former coach, John Madden, became an even more famous broadcaster and video game frontman, while former owner Al Davis was known for his “Just Win Baby” quote.

 

And Las Vegas, for a city of its size, must have more wacky characters per capita than any other city in the country. I don’t know how you can scientifically measure or prove that. All I know is that the city has been pretty well-known for its colorful characters through the years and for the movies made about Las Vegas.

 

So, when it came to a Raiders-Las Vegas stadium mash-up, the odds were pretty good that you’d have some interesting people around the process of building a $1.8 billion, 65,000-seat domed palatial playground on 62 acres on the west side of Interstate 15 across from Mandalay Bay. The venue opens for the 2020 NFL season.

 

LVSportsBiz offers you five of our favorite Las Vegas Raiders stadium players.

 

^     Sheldon Adelson. Here’s a man who made news for not being at any stadium board meetings even though he was the main man behind the stadium deal in the first place. I have covered public stadium deals around the country and this multi-billionaire casino tycoon provided a stadium first for me. Adelson bankrolled the political process that pushed through a record $750 million stadium subsidy as part of Senate Bill 1 signed into law by Gov. Brian Sandoval in 2016. Here’s the unprecedented part: Though Adelson was the man who made the deal happen, he dropped out of the stadium arrangement afterwards even though he was instrumental in getting $750 million in public dollars through a hotel room tax increase designated for the Raiders stadium. And that, my friends, is a first. Theories abound why Adelson walked away even after the Raiders won the public subsidy — and that will provide content for an LVSportsBiz.com story one day.

 

^      The array of folks who spoke about the community benefits plan. The truth is that most of the public stadium board meetings during the past 12 months consisted of debate-free board votes approving dozens of law-mandated stadium agreements with little spirited debate. But the one hot-button topic that attracted public speakers was the “community benefits plan” written into Senate Bill 1 to ensure that minorities, small businesses and other groups would get a piece of the employment and financial pie created by building a stadium for $1.8 billion. At some meetings, the speakers included local residents from Las Vegas’ black communities, while others represented unions and even showed up from California. It turned out the stadium board did not have a beef about the community benefits plan because the Raiders are meeting and exceeding their minority hiring targets.

 

^     Stadium board member Tommy White. White, the business manager and secretary-treasurer of Laborers Union Local 872, was ready to start moving stadium site dirt at the stadium board’s first meeting. White is a fervent Raiders and stadium supporter and goes by a Twitter handle of “Just Build It Baby.” While most of the stadium board members rarely commented about the stadium, White was happy to chat stadium all the time.

The 2,500-member laborers local, whose members are the hard hats at construction projects across Las Vegas including the Raiders stadium construction site, held a pep rally for the Raiders stadium at a North Las Vegas Park last summer. Here’s White from that event.

 

^     Steve Sisolak. No local politician pushed harder for the Raiders stadium than County Commission Chairman Steve Sisolak, who showed up at one stadium board meeting last year and tossed out small footballs into the crowd. Raiders President Marc Badain credited Sisolak for giving the UNLV-Raiders negotiators a “kick in the ass” to get a deal done that provides the conditions under which UNLV’s football team can play at the NFL stadium.

 

Sisolak, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, is aligned with Laborers Local 872 and announced a Raiders draft pick in 2017. Sisolak serves as kind of Clark County’s unofficial sports commissioner, tweeting about Raiders stadium, Golden Knights and other sports highlights.

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Marc Badain. The Raiders president has the challenging job of selling tickets for Raiders games in Oakland for two years in a market that he plans to leave so that he could move his team into a new stadium in Las Vegas. That’s a delicate operation. It takes a certain personality type capable of juggling dozens of daily to-do items to handle the move and it’s a good thing the long-time Raiders employee has a sense of humor.

 

After stadium board chairman Steve Hill called the members together for a team photo at a recent meeting, Hill talked for more than five minutes, offering thank yous to lot of folks. When Badain was invited to say a few words, the Raiders president cracked that Hill’s long talk probably wouldn’t be short enough for an Oscar acceptance speech. Keep that humor, Mr. Badain. You’re gonna need it.

 

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It’s Stadium Bonding Time

 

Did you know that the stadium authority collected $48.6 million in hotel room tax money from March 2017 to February 2018? That money will be used to help the Raiders build the stadium. And there’s another 30 years of collecting that room tax in Clark County.

 

Here’s some more fun stadium financing facts. Clark County recently sold $645,145,000 in bonds for the Raiders stadium.

 

And 43 different institutional and retail investors bought the bonds at an interest rate of 3.94 percent over a 30-year period.

 

The final maturity will be in 2048. And when the bonds are paid off, that will trigger a sunset for the room tax that is being collected to fund the bonds.

 

Those funds became available Tuesday — May 1.

 

The private-public split? The stadium’s construction is being funded 55 percent on the Raiders side and 45 percent from the bond proceeds, as spelled out in Senate Bill 1.

 

The bonds will also fund a year of debt service in case it’s needed because of an economic downturn. Room taxes also will  fund a year of debt service as a reserve. You know, just in case the room tax revenues come in below budgeted levels.

 

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