Reckless Driving: How Clark County Allowed F1’s 90-Minute Road Race To Have Run Of Strip Corridor; Starry-Eyed County Commissioners Out Of Their League
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Shop at Jay’s Market at 190 East Flamingo Road at the Koval Lane intersection east of the Strip.
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By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer
LAS VEGAS, Nevada — On May 1, LVSportsBiz.com asked Clark County — the local government with oversight on the Las Vegas Grand Prix in the Strip corridor — to provide the race organizer’s traffic plan for road preparation work after the plan was submitted to the county on that same date (May 1.)
On Monday, nearly five and a half months after the records request and five weeks into the Formula One 17-week race preparation schedule, LVSportsBiz.com received an email from Clark County PR with a letter dated April 30.
The letter from PENTA Building Group asks Clark County to OK the closure of Flamingo Road from the west side of the Koval Lane-Flamingo intersection to the Caesars employee lot entrance from Oct 13-Oct. 14 and the closure of the Flamingo intersection to Howard Hughes Parkway from Oct. 14-Oct. 19.
This letter was denied to LVSportsBiz since May 1 until yesterday.
Clark County’s email Monday, more than five months after the original public records request, also included a document about the closure of the Flamingo Road-Koval Lane intersection for a temporary bridge spanning Koval.
But that document was old news.
The information about the Koval Lane-Flamingo Road intersection closure was already shared with the public in a press release nearly a week ago.
The county’s failure to provide these public records in a timely manner is anecdotal evidence of a local government over its head and out of its league in providing the necessary oversight of a highly controversial sports event that is taking place only because Clark County gave 3.8 miles of public county roads and right-of-ways for free to a private sports event organizer.
In a highly unusual move, Clark County gave use of the public roads for nothing to Liberty Media-owned Formula One, which is putting on the 50-lap, 90-minute race Nov. 23.
It’s unclear why Clark County did not even negotiate a deal to allow F1 to use such valuable public county resources. LVSportsBiz.com asked Clark County what new projects and programs were created and funded thanks to F1 race event money spent in the county. The county provided a debriefing report on the first race last year. Here’s our story on that report.
The race’s impact on local businesses, commerce, traffic and transportation in the Strip corridor for the inaugural event Nov. 16-18 was unprecedented in Las Vegas. To be clear, nobody in Las Vegas opposes the F1 race in this market; but locals agree the Strip corridor is an inappropriate setting for a road race when there are other locations that would not hurt so many people and businesses and make life so miserable to get around the region’s main economic artery.
The road race also prompted four businesses to file lawsuits against Clark County and Formula 1 and a fifth will be on the way.
The one common denominator between the legal action was that the businesses alleged they lost millions of dollars in revenues from the F1 race because the county-approved barriers and fencing limited people from reaching their businesses.
But there was another important common argument in the lawsuits — that Clark County fast-tracked the F1 race’s applications in 2023 and failed to properly regulate the approval process.
Clark County’s governing board has seven commissioners and not one has spoken out decisively against a sports event that hurt so many businesses, workers and residents.
The F1 set up included this embarrassing scene on Koval Lane where light mount stands were placed on a sidewalk near a utility box that stood in the middle of the sidewalk.
This is clearly blocking any disabled person from passing on the sidewalk.
Yet when LVSportsBiz.com brought this to the attention of the county public works department, this was the department’s sadly lame response: “Hello Alan, We appreciate you brining (sic) citizen concerns to our attention. This infrastructure has been placed per approved plan and meets the minimum requirements that are in place. Thank you, Felicita Carranza, Clark County Public Works.”
The economic equation for F1 in Las Vegas was simple — big hotel properties like Bellagio and Wynn made more revenue than usual that F1 race weekend at the expense of smaller businesses that were financially hurt by the race event.
One of those business owners who was financially hurt was Jay’s Market owner Wade Bohn, who will be filing a lawsuit against Clark County and F1.
Formula One approached Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman about staging the race in the city.
But Goodman told LVSportsBiz.com that businesses in the city did not want the race.
The LVCVA — the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the public agency charged with advertising Las Vegas to attract tourists –successfully lobbied Clark County to allow the grand prix event. LVCVA head Steve Hill was a big race booster and his friend, consultant Jeremy Aguero, generated a financial report to show F1 visitors would spend more money than the usual Las Vegas tourist.
Last year, downtown hotels said they saw no benefits from the F1 race that took place three miles to the south on the Strip in Clark County.
SO, the LVCVA approved $1 million to hold a music festival in downtown in hopes of luring race visitors to the Fremont Street Experience for this year’s Nov. 21-23 race event.
For its part, the Las Vegas Grand Prix understood the PR mess it created a year ago and has taken steps to try and connect with locals after last year’s sour experience for local Strip workers and businesses. The grand prix gave away back-to-school items to kids and some free tickets to locals even though the event ticket prices are still extremely costly in year two.
More than anything else, the grand prix event showed how clearly the big hotel companies like MGM Resorts International, Caesar Entertainment and Wynn Las Vegas run public policy in Clark County, how the LVCVA does the promotion work for the big hotels and how feeble the county commissioners were in not standing up for locals.
