How Las Vegas spends your public dollars:
The LVCVA meets Tuesday May 12 and the public tourism agency board will vote on giving more than half a billion dollars over five years to R&R Partners for advertising, marketing and communications services. There’s a three-year deal for $309 million with an optional two-year extension of $221 million.
Remarkably, the LVCVA is not putting this out to bid. It’s just an agenda item at Tuesday’s meeting.
By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer
LAS VEGAS, Nevada — The sports industry, indeed, is booming in Las Vegas. Mega-events like the Final Four in 2028 and the Super Bowl in 2029 are coming, an A’s stadium is being built on the Strip and Las Vegas’ publicly-funded tourism board is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the sports bonanza.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) has an annual budget approaching $1 billion and the public tourism agency functions as the unofficial marketing arm for the privately-controlled hotel-casino owners of the Strip in a growing market reliant on a single economic sector, tourism.
The LVCVA has seen the departure of two sports marketing staffers and has replaced them with three new employees: Janis Burke, chief sports officer; Will Hunter, vice president of events; and Jennifer Hawkins, vice president of sports business development.
And there’s more. One of the LVCVA’s two previous sports marketing executives, Brian Yost, who supposedly left the agency last year is actually an LVCVA consultant hired for as much as $200,000 a year to work for the government agency on college football’s national championship game at Allegiant Stadium in January 2027.
But we are not done. The LVCVA is also paying $651,600 to sports marketing company Position Sports to work on the College Football Playoff title game here in Las Vegas under a contract awarded last summer after LVSportsBiz.com uncovered problems with LVCVA’s bidding process for that job several months earlier.
The LVCVA is governed by a board made up of both elected officials and private hotel/hospitality leaders, but it rarely publicly quizzes LVCVA staff at the agency’s public meetings on its sports promotion expenditures and hirings.
LVSportsBiz.com has repeatedly asked the LVCVA for the salaries of new sports marketing hires Burke, Hawkins and Hunter for weeks, but has not received any salary information from the public agency that is required under law to provide public records to the public. We tried again Wednesday.
It’s standard for local government to tell the public how much public workers are making. It’s public information. When the LVCVA sent out a press release on the hiring of Burke, it did not include her salary.
In contrast to the LVCVA not responding to LVSportsBiz.com worker salary request, UNLV provided guidance on finding the public record for Athletics Director Erick “Harp” Harper’s contract extension extension in ten minutes on Tuesday. The contrast between UNLV and the LVCVA providing access to public salary records was stunning.
Also unlike other local governments like the school board, city council and county commission, the LVCVA board does not stream its meetings even though the public tourism agency moved into an expansive meeting room equipped with high-tech meeting presentation gear. The LVCVA board meets monthly on the second Tuesday morning at 9 AM on the east side of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Many people are working at that time.
LVSportsBiz.com has spoken during the public comments period of LVCVA board meetings to advise board members that streaming meetings would be good government because the LVCVA pends so much public money.
When local governments hire people from private business in the communications office, the workers often treat public information as private and do not have a proper understanding that records are public and need to be accessible.