LVSportsBiz.com Editorial: With Hundreds of Millions Of Public Dollars Being Approved, LVCVA Board Meetings Need To Be Live Streamed
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An LVSportsBiz.com Editorial
You would think a publicly-funded government agency with a $460 million annual budget would have its monthly board meeting live-streamed from its snazzy new meeting room outfitted with a nice tech room.
But no, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) meetings are nowhere to be seen on the Internet. Live or tape-recorded.
LVSportsBiz.com has publicly commented directly to the LVCVA board at the end of meetings that the tourism agency should live stream its meetings just like other governments such as Clark County, the city of Las Vegas, the Clark County School District and the Nevada Gaming Commission.
The board members, who are both elected officials and hotel company execs, typically don’t have much to say. They rarely quiz LVCVA staffers on tens of millions of dollars in expenditures on tourism PR work, sports sponsorships and convention center building development.
Even if the board members are rubberstamps, LVCVA CEO Steve Hill, Chief Marketing Officer Kate Wik and Chief Sports Officer (that’s a new title) Brian Yost do give talks about how they are spending our public money and it’s worth it to actually hear how they justify the expenditures.
But you have to be at the LVCVA meeting room to hear what they have to say during these public sessions held at 9AM on the second Tuesday of every month at the LVCVA-run Las Vegas Convention Center.
It’s not exactly easy to get there. The LVCVA meeting room used to face Paradise Road on the west side of the convention center complex, but now it’s in a new part of the complex and the meeting room faces University Center Drive on the east side of the complex. It’s east of the Strip and there’s traffic in the area especially when a convention is being held during a board meeting.
And working people face a problem with the 9 AM start time because that when people, you know, work.
What’s bizarre is that the LVCVA spent our public dollars to build the facility section that houses the meeting room and there’s a nice tech room that could easily film the public meetings.
And that’s the problem — the “public” part is left out of the meetings because it’s not available on the LVCVA website or any website for that matter. It’s not on YouTube or any social media platform. Staff reports on everything from the publicly-subsidized Raiders and A’s stadiums to the hot topic of tourism declining in Las Vegas are not heard outside the meeting room doors.
You don’t think the LVCVA is trying to hide anything from us, do you?
PSA
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