With the Nevada legislature preparing to kick off its special session to consider a $750-million-plus subsidy for a stadium to lure the Oakland Raiders to Las Vegas, boosters of the plan have launched a PR onslaught involving, well:
- A new name for the group of business and political leaders endorsing the deal: the Win Win Nevada Coalition, presumably because spending three-quarters of a billion dollars on a private NFL stadium would be a “win-win” (which really should have a hyphen), or because Nevada gambling is all about winning (even though most gamblers lose), or because something about one of these.
- Former Raiders star Howie Long, who knows something about leaving Oakland in search of more money, having done so with the Raiders when the team moved to Los Angeles after his rookie season. Long explained at a rally the logic of moving the Raiders to Vegas: “If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 14 times since I’ve landed. To me, this is a no-brainer. This is like a trick SAT question: ‘Spell cat,’ and I’m saying, ‘Where’s the trick here? Where’s the problem?’” None of which means anything, but I’m especially intrigued by the idea of an SAT question asking for the spelling of “cat,” since the SAT is a written test, so test takers would be reading and … you get the picture. (Unless you’re Howie Long, I guess.)
- A column in would-be stadium subsidy recipient Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Review-Journal that acknowledges that there are lots of legitimate questions to be asked about the stadium deal, but this could be the only opportunity to throw this much money at the Raiders, so “pumping the brakes isn’t an option.”
No, the level of political debate in the U.S. is not good at all. Added to the statements by the anti-stadium side last week, it’s clear that we’ve entered into the “see who can shout louder in hopes that the legislature will listen to them” phase of the discourse, and while you can hope for one side or the other to prevail, watching it unfold is going to be ugly regardless.
Its seems to me that pumping the breaks is definitely an option. A really good one, actually.
I love the concept that, “we’ll never have the opportunity to throw this much money at a bad idea again!”
This feels quintessentially American.
The same argument is being used for the Virginia Beach arena. “We’ll never have another opportunity to build an arena, and we need one sooo bad! Right now, we have to drive all the way to Norfolk to see Beyonce. Hideous!”
The “spell cat” analogy is likely a reference to the Cowboys player who taunted Terry Bradshaw. (“[Terry] couldn’t spell cat if you spotted him the C and the A.”)
Maybe “Spell ‘cat\'” is a multiple-choice question?
I’ve seen 2 newspaper ads and heard about 10 radio ads for this…quite a blitz considering its only been two days. Obviously whomever gets this built (plot twist: richest person in Nevada) is going to stand to profit big time.
(Not so) Curiously, the radio ads mention that the project will raise $32,000,000 for schools (all for free! they claim) – as if acknowledgement (at least to Northern Nevada) of the dire situation the schools are apparently in, and that one could easily question why we are giving away $750,000,000 to the local Monty Burns without a vote while we vote on the same amount to improve schools.
I had a thought….maybe we could just give $750,000,000 directly to the schools, instead of through an intermediary, and get less return? Nah…that’s crazy talk.
They gave that much and more to schools back around 2009, by increasing this same hotel tax by about 3%. That’s not to excuse raising it by 0.7% to benefit the richest man in the state, but schools are about the second largest beneficiary behind the convention and visitors authority.
The correct way to get their ears if Nevadans is that this is one of the few taxes we have, and raising them too high can push us into having to adopt business taxes on non-casino businesses [audible gasp] or even on personal incomes [shrill screaming], but the people opposing this have next to no political experience.
But they are already doing that in the form of a business tax of 2.5% on gross receipts. Granted the threshold is $4 million, but you know it will be lowered to pay for the social services bill that is coming. The politicians are so pathetic it makes the Southern politicians look like geniuses. The giveaways to the rich are beyond the pale.
If this ridiculously bad deal goes through, get ready for your property taxes, sales taxes, and gas taxes to go up; as well as an introduction of a personal income tax. Who in their right mind gives any entity outside of a church money for free, especially $750 million? And since these bonds are GO bonds, the state is on the hook for any shortfalls; whereas, the private entities collect all the money.
Heck, the police already got their hands out, despite having over $100 million in reserves and hiring half of the 1,200 officers they were suppose to hire during the last sales tax hike. NDOT and Las Vegas Paving already threatened to stop existing infrastructure projects if the fuel indexing program isn’t extended for another decade, even though the thing isn’t properly indexed for inflation.
And what does political experience have to do with this? The problem is the politicians who have zero business sense or have been compromised. That Pro-Forma submitted to SNTIC is beyond disgraceful and would have been thrown out by any reputable financial institution.
No one has yet to answer this question when I bring it up: if this is such a good deal, then why won’t Adelson/Magestic/Davis fund it themselves? I’ll wait.
Howie Long is one of Sheldon Adelson’s hired circus monkey’s. You can tell he was scripted to spout the company line that this is “no brainer”. In other words, anyone without a brain should support this
Unsaid, presumably because Neil and nearly all FoS commenters are maniacally opposed to public stadium subsidies: The hotel tax was going up, anyway. If you believe in taxation with representation, then a Las Vegas hotel tax should primarily be used to pay for something tourism related. So, which makes more sense for Las Vegas’ tourism industry: renovating and expanding a redundant convention center or building a new type of tourist attraction that will likely attract the rare type of business (the NFL) that actually stimulates ancillary economic activity (jersey sales, sports bar business, etc.)?
“If you believe in taxation with representation, then a Las Vegas hotel tax should primarily be used to pay for something tourism related.”
Huh? “Taxation with representation” means that the public gets to approve what taxes are levied and what they’re spent on, neither of which would be the case for this stadium project. (Not directly, anyway — they’d get to have their wishes known indirectly by trying to vote people out of office after the fact.) And in any case, it’s not like income taxes are used solely to boost jobs, or sales taxes to boost consumer spending, or cigarette taxes to boost … tobacco usage, I guess?
Either the hotel tax wouldn’t have gone up without the stadium, in which case it’s a new tax, or the hotel tax would have gone up anyway and the money would have been available for whatever else the state wanted to do with it. “We have the money sitting there, we might as well spend it on a stadium” has always been a puzzling argument to me.
I’m actually not against publicly funded stadiums at all.
However, politicians should argue for what it is–a luxury that is expensive and essentially a status symbol–and budget that way. Every dollar spent goes down the drain, but hey–football.
The problem with these efforts come when politicians try to say that they are either 1) self funding or 2) worth it for all the great things they bring to the city/state/region, etc. so that it pays for itself anyway.
I’m guessing in most markets #1 wouldn’t fly, so politicians go with #2 as a means of providing an alibi in the end when it doesn’t work out.
I would vote for renovating and expanding the convention center, given that demand for business spaces here is still so high that MGM dramatically expanded Mandalay Bay’s convention center, plans to sacrifice Aria’a theater for more business meeting space, and is pushing for more convention space. The only person who opposes it is Adelson, who is running the REAL redundant convention center with his 1990s-vintage Comdex hall.
We don’t benefit from the NFL. All their games are played on weekends, and the tourists tend to show up on Friday evening and leave on Sunday after lunch. We don’t benefit from the Super Bowl being locally at all because every Super Bowl raises occupancy to 99.x% at heavily gouged rates. Every Super Bowl is a big money win for Vegas already, we don’t need the actual game here to profit from it.
We’re not most cities, and a football stadium by the strip does very little for a lot of money here.
Agree 100%. I don’t understand why this is so difficult to understand. Vegas is not a NFL market. If anything, we are a NBA market. Look at the turnouts for post-season college basketball tournaments, NBA Summer League, and NBA preseason games. The NFL being played on a Sunday will not work. You have the weekend crowd leaving with the convention crowd coming.
Simple – the convention center. Reason: sustainable business model that benefits multiple supporting industries servicing one main industry. The things you just named regarding the NFL benefits the NFL, Raiders, Adelson, and the developers. You do realise there will be a TIF near the arena and all those revenues would go to the private interests do you? Sports bars? Really? The sports bars are already packed without a team here. So they are going to be more packed because of one being here? Right….
If so, then we’re back to: “Why Vegas?” For Adelson, the answer is obvious: free money, and a chance to block the convention center expansion. For Davis … because they’re the only ones offering? Because he’s hoping that it will allow Goodell to turn the screws on Oakland and/or Kroenke to make a more lucrative offer? Because he’s an idiot?
Lots of colossally dumb decisions have been made for reasons that come down to “somebody thought it was a good idea at the time, and nobody with any power had incentive to oppose it.”
You’re correct with Adelson. He’s been warring with the LVCVA for nearly 20 years. For Davis it’s two-fold. He wants to put the NFL in a no-win situation concerning new stadia. Davis is widely considered an idiot within NFL circles and is burdened with his father’s baggage. What better way to prove his mettle than doing this.
Personally the politicians are feckless in this state regarding the wealthy, yet when it comes to criminalising the weak and the poor; they’re as tough as a Texan. Nevada is being played yet again; the Raiders are going to LA.
I’m not against spending 20 million or so in public money to improve infrastructure around a big private project like a football stadium. I can see spending 250 million in private money on a stadium for 10 to 20 events a year.
Oh, they want 750 million? Its going to cost a billion and half? You’ve go to be kidding.
Too bad there isn’t a like button, or laughing button here. Some of these posts are that funny