One Year and 10 Days From Today Raiders Stadium Construction Scheduled To Be Complete
By Alan Snel
LVSportsBiz.com
The big stadium just off the Strip is scheduled to be complete in one year and 10 days and the 26 canopy trusses now give the venue its stadium shape.
LVSportsBiz.com visited the 62-acre site on the west side of Interstate 15 Sunday morning for a look. At 7 a.m., the parking lot was packed with construction workers’ cars and there’s an average of 1,500 workers on site daily.
We spoke with a security worker who said dozens of people used to drive along Polaris Avenue for a stadium sight-seeing pit stop. But now, he noted, it’s literally up to hundreds of people checking out the construction of the 65,000-seat domed football stadium on daily basis. The construction cost is now slightly more than $1.37 billion, while the overall project cost has hit $1.88 billion.
Workers will tighten 850-foot-long cables gradually all around the stadium to create the ring beam that keeps these 300-ton roof trusses in place. The Raiders stadium construction pointman, Don Webb, compared the tightening of the ring beam to truing a bicycle wheel: “Similar to truing a bike wheel, the cables are tensioned in unison,” explained Webb, chief operating officer of the Raiders stadium project who just happens to enjoy bicycling.
AEG Facilities, picked by the Raiders to operate their publicly-subsidized stadium, believes the venue could host 46 events a year, including at least 10 Raiders games and six UNLV football games a year starting in 2020. AEG is already in Las Vegas, as the T-Mobile Arena construction partner of MGM Resorts International. So, the Los Angeles-based entertainment company, owned by Colorado billionaire Phil Anschutz, has a handle on the Las Vegas market.
The Las Vegas Bowl will be staged there starting in 2020, while Las Vegas-based UFC, the MMA fight show promoter, looks to have one event at the stadium annually.
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