Still Early Innings For Athletics Stadium Project On Strip; Stadium Groundbreaking Is April, Clark County Commissioners To Vote On $120 Million In Bonds In 2025 1Q

     Story by Alan Snel    Photos by Hugh Byrne

Lots of private talk, chatter and drama about an Athletics stadium on the Strip.

Not much public action about the A’s stadium during a 49-minute Las Vegas Stadium Authority Board meeting Thursday.

But Steve Hill is not worried.

“We’re on track,” stadium board chairman Hill said after the session.

The A’s, receiving $380 million in public assistance to help build their stadium on the Strip, want to break ground in April, Hill said. The $380 million in government aid for the A’s includes $120 million in bonds that will be voted on by Clark County commissioners in the first quarter of 2025, Hill said.

The A’s owner, John Fisher, is seeking investors to help pay for the $1.5 billion stadium slated for the Tropicana hotel-casino site on the Strip. The MLB team, which hopes to have the domed stadium ready for the 2028 season, plans on having 33,000 seats with the highest percentage of luxury seating in the majors. Hill said Fisher can afford to build the stadium even without investors.

The Athletics do not know the exact location of the nine-acre stadium footprint on the overall 35-acre site at the southeast corner of Tropicana Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard. They did present drawings of the stadium in March.

Without the stadium financing finalized and the ballpark’s exact location not set on the site, an opponent to the A’s stadium subsidy of $380 million had this to say to the stadium authority panel.

“This project gets riskier by the day,” said Alexander Marks, a spokesman for Schools Over Stadiums, a Nevada teachers union PAC that is challenging the stadium bill’s constitutionality.

Hill, the LVCVA tourism agency chief who helped present the Athletics’ stadium subsidy case before state lawmakers last year, called the relationship with Athletics  “professional and productive.”

Hill has been through this before with the NFL Raiders and their stadium project on the west side of I-15 across from Mandalay Bay. The big difference is that the Raiders always had a representative at all stadium board meetings — typically former team president Marc Badain — but the A’s had no representative to talk to the media and public today. A’s team president Dave Kaval was not at the stadium board session Thursday.

It was a quiet meeting.

The board acknowledged Major League Baseball’s approval of the Athletics’ move to Las Vegas.

The agenda included the topic of the non-relocation agreement that has to be set for the A’s to use the $380 million in public assistance to help build the stadium.

There is no stadium board meeting in June.

Bally’s Corporation hopes to demolish the Tropicana hotel-casino later this year and the A’s hope to have a groundbreaking on a clean slate of land in April. The A’s are playing their final season in Oakland and will play at a minor league ballpark in Sacramento in 2025, 2026 and 2027. GLPI (Gaming & Leisure Properties, Inc.) owns the 35-acre site and the A’s say they can build a stadium on nine acres of it.

The stadium board also took a look at the Raiders stadium’s activity for the first quarter of 2024: two NFL games including Super Bowl 58, a concert and a rugby match. Plus there were 22 private events inside the stadium like corporate gatherings.

Here’s a look at the hotel room tax revenues, especially those that spiked in February 2024 thanks to the Super Bowl being staged in Las Vegas.