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One Year and 10 Days From Today Raiders Stadium Construction Scheduled To Be Complete

Raiders stadium construction site Sunday morning.

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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Alan Snel: Alan Snel brings decades of sports-business reporting experience to LVSportsBiz.com. Snel covered the business side of sports for the South Florida (Fort Lauderdale) Sun-Sentinel, the Tampa Tribune and Las Vegas Review-Journal. As a city hall beat reporter, Snel also covered stadium deals in Denver and Seattle. In 2000, Snel launched a sport-business website for FoxSports.com called FoxSportsBiz.com. After reporting sports-business for the RJ, Snel wrote hard-hitting stories on the Raiders stadium for the Desert Companion magazine in Las Vegas and The Nevada Independent. Snel is also one of the top bicycle advocates in the country.