Things have been a bit quiet on the are-the-Oakland-A’s-really-moving-to-Las-Vegas front lately, with team owner John Fisher reportedly filing his relocation paperwork last month despite continued questions about where he’ll get the money to pay for stadium costs not covered by $600 million approved by the state legislature in June and what the stadium will even look like or cost, while the state teachers’ union’s threats to challenge the deal with either a lawsuit or a referendum remained unfulfilled.
One other shoe dropped yesterday, though, as the union’s new PAC, Schools Over Stadiums, officially filed to put a referendum on the ballot to overturn the public stadium funding:
“The referendum petition targets specific parts of Senate Bill 1 to strip public funding for the proposed stadium regardless of what State and County officials agree do in any sort of development deal,” said Alexander Marks, spokesperson for Schools Over Stadiums. “We’re excited to get out there and start gathering signatures from Nevadans who want to put our schools first. We’re confident that a majority of Nevadans will join us in taking action to put Nevada’s priorities back in line so we can address an education system that ranks 48th in funding with the largest class sizes and highest vacancies in the country.”
While most of the coverage of the referendum campaign has been parroting the union press release — Sports Illustrated literally just reprinted the thing — Alan Snel’s invaluable LVSportsBiz did some actual journalism, reporting that the campaign needs “102,362 signatures split evenly between Nevada’s 4 congressional districts” to get on the ballot, and that it would specifically strip out the bonding language in Sections 29 and 30 of the bill passed in June. And we have that language, which is way too long to reprint here, but suffice to say that it’s the part pledging specific tax money to pay off the stadium bonds.
Why not just repeal the whole bill? Stadium proponents, particularly Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill, have been arguing that the stadium bill is irreversible once Fisher and the state enter into a development deal, because that’s a binding contract. But Schools Over Stadiums spokesperson Alexander Marks told Snel that this referendum would evade that issue by allowing the state and county to sell stadium bonds, but not to pay them off, which would undermine the “house of cards” financial deal and make the bonds unsellable.
This is, let’s just say, an interesting argument, and one that I’m not nearly enough of a Nevada legal expert to evaluate, not that it’s going to stop me from trying. The most direct precedent for the Nevada referendum is the 2002 vote by St. Louis residents to require public approval for any stadium subsidy, which was eventually ruled to have been passed too late to affect the Cardinals stadium subsidies that had been approved weeks earlier. (Referendum backers tried the trick of demanding a public vote on each subsequent bond payment, but that didn’t fly, either.) The Nevada referendum would be different in that it would actually repeal part of the original funding bill, which is allowable under state law, but also the referendum might not take actually place until late 2024, so … yeah, still not any more of a Nevada legal expert here than I was at the beginning of the paragraph.
I’ll see what I can find out today, as this head cold (apparently not COVID, thanks for your well wishes) allows. In the meantime, continue to file the A’s move to Las Vegas in the “ain’t over till it’s over” drawer.
Ah, yet again… we find that “No” is never binding, in fact it’s barely an inconvenience for stadium extortionists. “Yes”, on the other hand, forces the poor franchise owner into immediate and perpetual contractual arrangements that would be prohibitively expensive to extricate said owner from…
The shell game continues.
The contractual agreement here is actually designed to lock in the “yes”: The plan was that since contracts can’t be abrogated by referendum, voters would be SOL. The union’s counter, then, is to say, “Okay, then we’ll take away the funding, and good luck selling those bonds.”
I’m still not entirely clear what happens if the county tries to sell bonds while the referendum is still pending, but the above is the basics of the legal throwdown, anyway.
Hmmmn. Interesting. Wouldn’t the selling of bonds (at least in the mind of stadium proponents/beneficiaries) be a binding act just as the signing of a contract (even one with hardly any terms in it…) would?
The union points out that the bill says the county can’t sell bonds until the tax revenues in Sections 29 and 30 are determined to “reasonably generate sufficient revenue” to cover double the annual bond payments. What happens if those tax revenues are determined to be worth that much, but are up in the air pending a referendum, is a question I expect everybody’s lawyers to be fighting about very soon.
Swing for fences Nevada teachers !