Las Vegas city councilmember Bob Beers, having seen his opposition to a $122 million soccer stadium subsidy outwitted by the developers’ clever “Let’s ask for two months to eliminate the subsidies and instead use the time to buy off one of the holdouts with parks for his district” plan, is trying a new tack: a petition drive to put a measure on the June ballot deciding whether to revoke the council’s decision:
Ballot language included as part of the petition drive asks voters to stop the city from “giving, lending or investing” any of its revenue or assets to a proposed Major League Soccer stadium in Symphony Park.
Beers and four other members of the newly formed “Parks Protection Committee” plan to start knocking on doors in Sun City in support of that proposition on Saturday. They need to collect 2,306 signatures over the next two weeks in order to get the question on the municipal election ballot.
(Beers actually first tried to get the council to put this to a June vote, but predictably lost by the same 4-3 margin that approved the stadium deal last month.)
Most after-the-fact stadium repeal referendums fail even when approved by voters, since courts have ruled time and again that voters can’t call backsies on money that’s already been spent. (Not that voters don’t keep trying.) What makes the Las Vegas case interesting is that the stadium project can’t go forward until MLS gives Vegas an expansion team, and that likely won’t happen until after June, so this might actually have legs. Councilmember-who-switched-his-vote-in-exchange-for-park-money-for-his-district Bob Coffin worries that a referendum will cause MLS to hand the expansion team to another city, but that’d be pretty silly when the league can just wait out the vote and see what happens.
Meanwhile, my favorite pair of sentences from the Las Vegas Review-Journal piece on all this:
[Coffin] said council decisions should only be taken to the public in “the gravest of circumstances,” such as a tax increase.
Some $90 million in hotel room tax fees would have to be plowed into paying down bonds used to pay for the project’s construction — dollars that are currently set aside for city parks.
So: tax increase = grave. Taking money from existing parks budget that will either have to be replaced via a tax increase or by cutting parks funds = not grave at all! Also, glass on democracy not to be broken except in case of emergency.
Why is it that the NHL (the league desperate to maintain its “Big 4” status) and MLS (a league desperate to join the “Big 4”) are the only leagues that seem to toy with Las Vegas? It’s as if the Big Three – let’s face it, there’s really only 3 major leagues – know better.