R aIDeD Nevada hands out money to a $1.4 billion team and a $32 billion casino owner by DeNNis Myers
W
hen legislative police vehicles picked up Clark County lawmakers at the Reno airport and drove them to the capital for the special session of the Nevada Legislature, they passed a billboard on the freeway near the Damonte Ranch exit. It read: STADIUM, JOBS, & GROWTH! Hold Your Local POLITICIANS Accountable! Avoid Personal and Regional Issues and … NEVADA WINS! The billboard revealed a confidence in its sponsor’s belief that Reno locals would want to hold Washoe County politicians to voting for a huge sum of corporate welfare for an out-ofstate corporation to bring a pro football team to the other end of the state. North/south rivalry is nowhere near as sharp as it once was, but there are limits. Besides, the term growth does not sing as happy a lyric in Washoe as in Clark. But then, the billboard wasn’t really aimed at locals. It was part of a web of ways legislators were being coaxed into voting for a $750 million package that somehow turned into $1.1 billion before the session was over. At a time when state government was facing a $400 million shortfall, when Washoe residents were being asked to enact a sales tax hike to raise $780 million, the governor and legislature eased the plight of the truly needy—the $1.4 billion Oakland Raiders Inc., which claimed it could afford only $500 million for the project, and billionaire—32 times over—Sheldon Adelson, who held his fortune and his newspaper over the heads of the legislators. Businesspeople and their lobbyists who like to say, “Government should operate like a business” were on hand to make sure it didn’t.
14
|
RN&R
|
10.20.16
If the Nevada Legislature were a board of directors, its members would not take action on first examining the proposal, would not race into a decision, would not ignore experts or accept pie-in-the-sky claims. They’d adjourn after assigning a team to examine feasibility and come back when they actually knew something. The billboard, the expensive printed material laid out for legislators by the Raiders, the presentations before joint sessions of the houses, the attempt to suppress critics of the deal from being heard—all that seduction wasn’t really needed. Most legislators were anxious to be seduced.
Ocean’s 63 The special session agenda had to be punched and kicked to get the right combination of stimuli for the legislators. One item designed
to ease the shortfall in state schools had to be dropped since it would have been embarrassing for legislators to slap together patchwork funding for schools while aiding billionaires. A long hoped-for rehab for the Las Vegas convention center was tacked on to make the stadium more palatable—the convention center being real tourism bait and the stadium being dubious tourism bait. And some special interest items were eliminated as distractions that could wait. Among governments, the financial community and economists, arena and stadium deals have long been in poor odor. What was going on in Nevada unnerved them all. It was feared that, because of the Nevada giveaway, owner insistence on big welfare packages would become common when they had been declining. In the Raiders’ hometown, the mayor made clear she wasn’t going to subscribe to Nevada-style profligacy. “Oakland made that mistake in the past
Their master’s voice: Steve Wynn (at podium) tells legislators his connections will help.
and will not repeat it,” Mayor Libby Schaaf told the San Francisco Chronicle last week when it was suggested Oakland meet Nevada’s price. In Oakland, government was turning to the private sector to fund its effort to keep the Raiders. In Nevada, the private sector was turning to government to fund luring the Raiders. The team is seeking to abandon Oakland before the bonding on the last Oakland Coliseum upgrade—done to bring the Raiders back to the city from Los Angeles—is even paid off. St. Louis, which has lost the Rams to L.A., faces similar payments on a vanished team. In San Diego, the Chargers are demanding more money while the city still pays off the last stadium upgrade. Shortly after Sandoval called the special session, an interview with Roger Noll, Stanford economist, former senior economist with the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and co-editor of Sports, Jobs, and Taxes made news: “Their financial welfare would depend on selling 22,500 tickets every single game to people following the visiting team,” Noll told the Chronicle. “There is no team in the NFL that comes anywhere near one-third of their fan base being tourists. … You take away all that, you take away 75 percent of the economic benefit of the stadium.” We asked if he had ever seen results of the kind described in studies to Nevada legislators, which he had read. “The prospective studies about the financial effect of a sports facility on the budgets of local governments and about the effect of a facility on permanent jobs in the locality are always overstated,” Noll told us. “But I have not seen any impact study that is as wildly overstated as the one for the Las Vegas NFL stadium.”
