How Much Is Clark County Paying For Las Vegas Grand Prix Road Resurfacing? County Still Doesn’t Know; Las Vegas Tourism Board Also Approves $7 Million Grand Prix Ticket Deal
(Publisher’s Note: Security at the Las Vegas Convention Center initially refused to allow LVSportsBiz.com to attend a public LVCVA board meeting at the facility’s board room this morning. A trade show was happening at the same time and security said LVSportsBiz needed a trade show badge to go on convention center property to attend the meeting. LVSportsBiz.com emailed LVCVA PR that security was not allowing us to attend the board meeting. A PR staff member responded that security was briefed to allow people to attend. Security, however, did not know of any board meeting. LVSportsBiz.com showed security the PR person’s email and then walked by security to attend the meeting. We arrived in time to report this story.)
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By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher/Writer
It’s common for Las Vegas’ publicly-funded tourism agency — the LVCVA — to dole out free event tickets to key influencers in hopes they will drive tourists to Las Vegas.
So, LVCVA chief Steve Hill said he typically doesn’t ask the governing board of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) to approve purchases of tickets to hand out to sponsors, airlines, influential visitors and business people who help get tourists to Las Vegas.
But when your public agency wants to spend $7 million to buy tickets for a grand prix road race to give to business influencers, Hill thought it might be a good idea to break out this particular item on Tuesday’s board meeting agenda. You know, in the spirit of transparency, he said.
As Hill told the meeting audience in the LVCVA board room, buying $7 million worth of Formula 1 tickets was a “big enough deal.”
Hill acknowledged there was concern in the community that the tickets would be “potentially used inappropriately.”
The cheapest ticket is $500 for the Nov. 16-18 event, but most grand prix tickets will run well into the thousands of dollars. There’s even ticket deals that run as high as $1 million (Wynn Las Vegas) and $5 million (Caesars Entertainment). As you can see here, the F1 ticket costs range from $2,000 to $10,000.
The LVCVA CEO stressed that anyone who receives a free ticket to the grand prix race from the tourism agency will have “have to have a business reason.”
As you can see by the agenda item, $2.8 million of the $7 million in ticket purchases will be used for tickets that LVCVA will, in turn, sell to local hotel companies like Boyd Gaming. It’s unclear why Las Vegas hotels are buying F1 tickets from the LVCVA instead of from conventional open market ticket sellers.
So, the LVCVA said only $4.2 million is actually be used to give free tickets to its contacts.
The LVCVA board — which consists of members from local governments and major hotel companies — did not ask a single question about the agency it oversees laying out $7 million in public dollars.
The board approved the ticket buy without comment.
After the meeting, Hill explained that there will be a list of people who receive free tickets from the LVCVA.
But he did not know why the hotels simply did not buy their tickets from open market sources.
Hill said there’s a way to track tickets being sold to the hotels, but he trusts these lucrative tickets will be used correctly by the hotels and not end up in the hands of ticket brokers and other secondary market ticket sellers.
Terry Miller of Miller Project Management, LLC gave the LVCVA board an update on the road resurfacing job for the entire length of the 3.8-mile race circuit, which will run counter clockwise and south on the Strip.
The Las Vegas Boulevard segment of the road work will be from April 9 – May 19. So, plan accordingly for traffic delays on the Strip during that time period.
It what can only be described as the understatement of the meeting, Miller said, “It will be disruptive, obviously.”
Miller noted the race’s road work will be similar to “all the other (road paving) disruptions.”
Remarkably, Clark County and the LVCVA have hyped this car race event in November without even knowing how much public money will be spent on the road resurfacing of the race circuit.
Clark County Chairman Jim Gibson also chairs the LVCVA board, while Clark County Commissioner Michael Naft is also an LVCVA board member. Neither Gibson nor Naft asked Miller how much the road race paving job will cost Clark County.
“It’s still under conversation between the county and F1,” LVCVA chief Hill explained.
During the meeting, Kevin Bagger, vice president of the LVCVA Research Center, provided a summary of visitor findings. For example, the average Vegas visitor age in 2022 was 40.7 years old compared to 47 years old in 1992. The visitor’s average gambling budget in 2022 was $761, while 59 percent attended a show.
What LVSportsBiz.com found extra newsworthy was that with all the hype, hoopla and government money spent on sports in Las Vegas, only six percent of Vegas visitors said they attended a sports event in 2022. At least that’s up from three percent from 2017.
Hill said he thought the six percent number was low.
