In Las Vegas’ Bread And Circuses Approach To Public Policy, Public Dollars Handed Out To MLB Team For Baseball Stadium On Strip
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By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer
Things are kind of busy in Las Vegas in the sports world.
Local folks are not talking much about the Oakland Athletics breezing into Carson City and heading home to the Bay area with $380 million in public assistance to help build a baseball stadium on the Strip.
After Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo signed something called the Southern Nevada Tourism Innovation Act into law, a fella by the name of Tim Leiweke wowed the locals with a $10 billion NBA arena/hotel/casino plan on Las Vegas Boulevard about two miles south of the Strip.
And then you may have heard about William Karlsson and his stand-up bit about his buddy, Jonathan Marchessault, in front of 200,000 Stanley Cup-celebrating VGK fans who were possessed with euphoric civic joy over their homegrown Vegas Golden Knights securing the National Hockey League title in the franchise’s sixth season.
It was against this backdrop Athletics owner John Fisher had his own celebration. He had his own stand-up duo of Jeremy Aguero and Steve Hill perform a fast-talking jig that somehow convinced the citizen-lawmakers of the Nevada Legislature that it made sound public policy sense to give $380 million of government aid to the heir of a well-known retail blue jeans chain to help build a MLB stadium on the Strip.
It was like watching Major League the movie have a baby with Alice in Wonderland the book and the offspring was a TLC network TV show about a medium-sized market hoarding major league sports teams in a desperate attempt to be perceived as a big league city.
Yup, another Las Vegas flick. But this time Las Vegas came off as a wide-eyed city addicted to major league teams and sports events. It was clear a majority of elected county and state officials valued major league sports over other pressing public issues like schools, health care, mass transit and parks. It was a bread and circuses public policy approach.
And $380 million later, thanks to not-even-close votes in the Nevada Senate and Assembly, the A’s are now writing a letter to Major League Baseball, asking the Lords of Baseball to green light their migration from Oakland to Las Vegas.
In its cryptic public statements, the Athletics did not mention a word about their colorful, expressive and passionate fans. And their consultants, Aguero and Hill, focused on tourists — not locals — in explaining the appeal of the $1.5 billion, 30,000-seat stadium on the Tropicana hotel site on Las Vegas Boulevard.
It’s bizarre that the Nevada Legislature approved $380 million when the team owner failed to publicly explain how he plans to finance his $1.1 billion share of the proposed stadium construction costs.
It’s also bizarre that one of renderings clearly shows that the ballpark will extend way beyond a nine-acre section of Tropicana’s 35-acre site at Tropicana Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard.
The bill says all types of taxes on the stadium’s nine-acre special sports and entertainment district — 17 fees and charges in all — will generate enough money over 30 years to pay off the $120 million in bonds and debt on those bonds.
It’s also unclear why MLB would waive a relocation fee of $200 million or $300 million when the owners can make more than $1 billion from an expansion fee that would be charged to the ownership group of an expansion ballclub in Las Vegas.
The Nevada Legislature’s approval of the A’s stadium subsidy bill happened against the backdrop of a homegrown big league sports team celebrating with the masses in Las Vegas. The secret sauce was the homegrown nature of the Vegas Golden Knights. The VGK name had a medieval theme with no intrinsic connection to the Las Vegas market, yet the love affair between team and market was in full bloom during the Stanley Cup celebration for the ages. This was Las Vegas’ team no matter what the name was.
In contrast, there was not so much local opposition to the Athletics stadium deal as it was indifference to it in Las Vegas. Not many people even seemed to care much.
Most stadium subsidy proposals and bills take years to be realized. Here in Nevada, it was measured in days,. The stunning, lightning-fast speed of how the hearing for the stadium bill went from being held on Memorial Day to 17 days later when Lombardo signed the bill into law ( two days after the Golden Knights defeated the Florida Panthers, 9-3, to win the Stanley Cup.). Republican Lombardo, by the way, vetoed 75 bills that were initially approved by a Democrat-controlled Legislature.
The speed of the stadium subsidy approval showed that the deal was inside-wired from the start by Lombardo and the Legislature. How else can you explain how quickly it all went down from Memorial Day through the special session approval?
