Nine Years After Arena Groundbreaking, Proposed All Net Arena Project On Strip Is Benched By Clark County Commissioners
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By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer
It looks like the proposed All Net arena on the Strip was more of an air ball of a project than a real sports venue.
More than nine years after Las Vegas businessman and former UNLV basketball player Jackie Robinson held a groundbreaking for a retractable roof arena and nongaming hotel project on the north end of the Strip, Clark County commissioners decided unanimously Tuesday to deny Robinson an extension for his proposed arena development.
“Breaks my heart to do it,” said Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom, who made the motion to deny Robinson the extension for the proposed 22,000-seat arena project.
The commissioners voted, 7-0, to deny the extension after Clark County’s governing board voted in favor a few times in the past to give Robinson more time.
Segerblom tried to soften the bad news for Robinson by describing him as a “visionary” for seeing the potential for major league sports in Las Vegas before the county commissioner declared it was time to deny an extension on Robinson’s ambitious arena and hotel project that never saw any construction after an Oct. 14, 2014 groundbreaking.
Robinson’s former UNLV basketball coach, Jerry Tarkanian, attended that groundbreaking — one of Tarkanian’s final public appearances before Tarkanian died in Feb. 2015.
Robinson, who played in the NBA after his UNLV basketball career, thought the arena could potentially attract an NBA team to the proposed venue.
Robinson was trying to build his All Net arena and hotel project at the site of the former Wet ‘n Wild water park on the east side of the Strip just south of the Sahara Avenue intersection with Las Vegas Boulevard. This is the rendering he used to try to show the arena project was the real deal.
Right to the end, Robinson insisted he had the funding. But the absence of any construction work countered that claim in the more than nine years after the groundbreaking.
The best Robinson and his group of representatives could do Tuesday was show the county commissioners a photograph of a piece of equipment and that they were grading the land.
Representatives of the site’s next-door neighbor, the Sahara hotel-casino, said they’ve heard the “song and dance” of project funding before, but the construction never began. “We’d love to see anything on that property . . . Let’s see a real project go there,” one of the representatives told the county commissioners during the public hearing Tuesday afternoon.
A homeowners association representative from a neighboring condo tower spoke in favor of granting Robinson an extension.
But a Sahara hotel speaker told the commissioners there were mosquito traps set after a big rainstorm at the site this past year and he said the empty site “looks derelict.”
This time, Robinson told the county commissioners he had money in a bank in Monterrey, Mexico to help fund the arena project.
And Robinson’s lawyer, Christopher Kaempfer, tried to convince the county commission that the arena was happening because a traffic study was conducted, test wells were drilled on site, and $14 million were invested in the project, including $6 million in the last year.
But in the end, the county commissioners had seen enough.
They voted to not allow Robinson to continue the project.
Segerblom did tell LVSportsBiz.com after the meeting that he could within five days request a commission vote to reconsider today’s action if arena funding comes through before Dec. 6, but he believes it’s the end of the line for the Jackie Robinson arena proposal.
There is an NBA arena project proposed by Tim Leiweke and his Oak View Group for a site at the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and Blue Diamond Road south the Strip. Leiweke, a familiar name is arena development, wants to build a hotel, casino and amphitheater with the proposed NBA arena.
