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By Alan Snel/LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer
You got to hand it to the Oakland Athletics, those thinkers of unconventionality.
There are several places where you can build a Major League Baseball stadium in metro Las Vegas.
But of all the places out there, the MLB franchise chose for its Field of Dreams the Tropicana hotel site at Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue on the Strip. It’s one of the busiest intersections in Las Vegas and the A’s will have at least 81 home dates when as many as 30,000 or 35,000 people will be descending on the corner.
Ballparks are smaller these days because the emphasis is on expensive premium seating and mall-style retail and food amenities, but even the Athletics’ idea of cramming a 32,000-seat baseball stadium on nine acres on the Strip in a car-centric market sounds rather, uh, challenging, in an area not exactly known for its mass transit resources.
But then again, the Strip follows its own rules.
Sure, officially speaking, there are Clark County planning guidelines for development on the Strip. Or in lieu of that, something called common sense.
But the Strip is the Vatican of Gambling, its own state-within-a-state outside the realm of conventional planning principles where anything goes as long as an entertainment idea makes a buck, appeals to tourists and is OK with the big hotel-casino company owners.
The Athletics’ previous ballpark site at the former Wild Wild West casino location on Tropicana on the west side of Interstate 15 is 49 acres. The A’s had proposed the usual entertainment-related businesses of sports pubs and merchandise stores around the ballpark in a proposed tax district.
But no need for an Athletics ballpark entertainment district on the Strip.
After all, it’s the Strip. The entertainment amenities are baked in.
Bally’s Corporation, the Providence, RI-based company that owns the Tropicana, and the Athletics did not respond to emails and texts for comments. Under the proposal, Bally’s would demolish the Tropicana hotel building to create space for the retractable roof ballpark on nine acres of the 34-acre site.
But Las Vegas-based consultant Jeremy Aguero, who is advising the Athletics, spoke with LVSportsBiz.com Wednesday about the MLB franchise shifting gears on ballpark sites.
“There’s no doubt some infrastructure investment will be necessary,” Aguero said.
He estimated that just less than 30 percent of the fans at an Athletics home game at the Wild Wild West site would have been out-of-towners, but now he believes that percentage will go up at the new site on the Strip.
“Connectivity to tourism will help,” he said. “Accessabilty for visitors will be off the chart high.”
The change in ballpark sites lowers the funding request from the public from $500 million to $395 million.
Asked what will be the minimum amount of money in bonds that Clark County will be asked to sell as part of the $395 million public funding package, Aguero said it will be $100 million. The $395 million in total public aid includes at least the $100 million in bonds sold by the county.
“No one wants to put (Clark County) in harm’s way,” Aguero said. In the case of the Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium, Clark County had to tap a contingency funds twice during the COVID-19 pandemic to pay debt on the bonds that helped finance the construction of the NFL stadium.
The Athletics’ new ballpark site on the Strip is small for a stadium footprint, but Aguero said ballparks in downtown San Diego and in Chicago like Wrigley Field are squeezed into tight areas.
He said the A’s will maximize egress and ingress options, ride share and pedestrian bridges.
“Do I see folks going over to NY-NY getting dinner and drinks and walking over? Yes. We will have to use multimodal (transportation),” Aguero said.
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Aguero said the next step is continuing to talk with state and county elected officials “on perfecting a (ballpark funding) bill.”
He wants to avoid proposing a “hastily” created ballpark bill.
And when asked if there will be a special legislative session that will have to be called, Aguero said, “Could be.”