Nevada gov says he’d only spend indirectly on Vegas A’s stadium, if he’s still Nevada gov much longer

Happy election day, for those who celebrate! (For those who are stuck holding their noses and voting for the lesser of two evils, you have my sympathies.) Let’s see what the news brings today, oh look:

Sisolak, county officials: No tax money for A’s ballpark

Reading further into the Las Vegas Review-Journal article, it turns out that Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak, who previously said back in April he wasn’t interested in putting any public money into a Las Vegas stadium for the Oakland A’s but might consider “other things that can be done that can help on the funding” such as a tax-kickback district or infrastructure money, now says he doesn’t want to put any public money into a Las Vegas stadium for the Oakland A’s but might consider “infrastructure that we can help with, exit on-ramps … that sort of thing.” That leaves out the possibility of a TIF district, but in the same article, Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom floated that one as well, saying if the A’s built on the Las Vegas Festival Grounds, that site “is in a redevelopment area, so we could give them some tax increment financing and do other things with our redevelopment authority that might help them out.”

So, that’s not actually a shift so much as a restatement by Nevada officials of their existing stance, which is “we’re not going to do a Raiders deal for the A’s, but we might throw in some tax breaks.” It’s still a far cry from the imminent move that MLB commissioner Rob Manfred keeps talking up, but the door to Las Vegas isn’t entirely shut, anyway.

Then there’s also the aforementioned election day, where Sisolak stands a good chance of losing to his lookalike, Clark County sheriff Joe Lombardo. Nobody seems to have asked Lombardo his position on funding an A’s stadium — most public attention has been focused on his positions on things like abortion, immigration, and, uh, catalytic converter thefts — but his campaign site says he’s for “pro-business policies” and “the recruitment of new businesses to Nevada,” so he certainly seems open to the concept, at least.

And this, in a nutshell, is the problem with the “Why don’t people just vote the bastards out?” argument that people must want to give money to sports team owners (or electric car company owners or movie studio owners) or else they wouldn’t keep electing politicians who keep doing so: It’s very, very hard to get nominated to run for a major public office without subscribing to the idea that the business of government is using government money to fund business, where “business” is defined as less mom-and-pop store owners than corporations big enough to afford their own fleet of lobbyists. Anyway, gotta run, it’s time for me to try to make sure the wrong lizard doesn’t get in, have a good day exercising the democracy your Supreme Court says you deserve!