LVCC Over NFL Las Vegas Oakland Raiders Stadium For Public Funding In Polls

For some reason the topic of NFL stadium financing and team relocation brings with it the annoying bugaboo of incomplete and incorrect reporting, sprinkled with the untold bias on the part of the reporter. In this blog, I will make it clear, even though I have before, that I am a fan of the Raiders in Oakland, and not in Los Angeles, San Antonio, Las Vegas, Outer-Mongolia, or The Moon. My blogs and video-blogs are written from that perspective.

That said, let’s turn to the problem presented by the latest reports on the efforts of Oakland Raiders Owner Mark Davis to move his team somewhere and not focus on staying in Oakland – the latest city is Las Vegas.

On April 28th 2016, the same day as The NFL Draft, Mr. Davis gave a speech to the Southern Nevada Tourism and Infrastructure Committee, or SNTIC. In the aftermath of the Davis speech, where he joined soccer star David Beckham, a flurry of news reports emerged that said a $750 million subsidy request and the use of a proposed increase in the hotel tax would be considered over the summer by the Nevada Legislature.

Well, that’s not true. Indeed, the out-of-town media acted as if the Oakland Raiders Owner’s speech was the only item on the SNTIC agenda.

On the same agenda as the Davis speech, but completely ignored by the media in attendance for the Raiders Owner’s appearance, (but not the major Las Vegas newspapers) was the SNTIC’s discussion of and review of a report on the $1.4 billion plan to renovate and expand the Las Vegas Convention Center, or LVCC.

The report prepared for the meeting (included here) is 155 pages long, and tells the story of the nationwide competition the LVCC is in the middle of, and where the average expenditure for expansion on a per-city basis is $700 million. The same report also has a detailed consideration of how hotel tax may be increased and its impact on hotel room rates – that means the same source that would be used for the NFL Stadium in the Raiders’ proposal.

The real situation is that, first, the room tax that Davis and his business partners including Majestic Realty want to use, currently goes to the following entities: Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority,Nevada Education, Clark County School District, Local Jurisdictions, Clark County Transportation, Nevada Department of Transportation, and the Nevada Commission on Tourism.

The Raiders request would, if even granted, add an eighth organization, the proposed Clark County Stadium Authority, collecting a portion of the hotel tax. That ask by the NFL team is not automatic: as this is written, the proposals from both the LVCC and the Raiders are being evaluated by the SNTIC, but the difference is the LVCC is ran by it’s own authority which has as it members some of the same civic and hotel organizations that make up the board of the SNTIC, most notably the City of Las Vegas, Ceasars Entertainment and Wynn Resorts.

There is no document, calculation, or statement from someone in a position of decision power with respect to the issue that would at this point even imply that the Nevada Legislature would be asked to approve, let alone consider, a hotel tax increase so large it would or could fund both the $1.4 billion LVCC expansion and the $750 million subsidy for the Raiders NFL Stadium. Even if the public wanted that.

There were two polls conducted prior to the Davis speech, and that were missreported by the local Las Vegas media (and both polls are included here). One poll was conducted by Global Strategy Group, compared the desire to use a hotel tax for LVCC expansion versus the NFL stadium.

The other poll, conducted by Morning Consult, (and reportedly paid for by billionaire Sheldon Adelson who’s partnered with Davis) was a wide-ranging survey of opinion of Nevada residents on everything from President Obama to Congress, oh and the NFL Las Vegas Raiders stadium and the possible use of a hotel tax for it – but it did not mention LVCC expansion plans and its need for a hotel tax increase.

Even with this, the Las Vegas Sun Times called the two polls not complementary, but “dualing”, when nothing could be further from the truth.

The Morning Consult Poll, while not mentioning the LVCC expansion plan, has one set of questions that show 68 percent of Nevada residents would prefer a privately financed stadium over one with a public subsidy – the Nevada version of the ‘let the billionaires pay for their stadium’ song. (And the Morning Consult poll also revealed that the economy was the most important issue to Nevadans, and should send a signal to Mark Davis that the same drivers of public sentiment against the use of tax money for stadiums are at play in Las Vegas, just as they are in Oakland. In the have-versus-have-not-economy, Davis has to understand that no one wants to make someone they already see as a rich person more of a rich person at their expense.)

When matched with the Global Strategy Group poll, which shows that 67 percent prefer the hotel tax be used for LVCC expansion, what we have is this: no strong support at all for public financing for an NFL stadium in Las Vegas. Yes, Nevada residents want the NFL in Las Vegas, and a state-of-the-art retractable-roof stadium capable of hosting a Super Bowl game, but they don’t want to pay for it. And that points to the other idea that the Nevada Legislature will consider this matter in a summer special session – and the other media reporting problem.

As of this writing, there is no special summer session to consider the Raiders proposal, and because the SNTIC hasn’t finished its evaluation of all of these plans – when it does, and if it’s needed, then the body will call for one. Indeed, the scheduled May 26th meeting of the SNTIC is a pivotal one for Davis, because then the topic of “Project Prioritization, Timing, Need and Legislative Requirements” will be front and center – the committee could decide not to recommend a special summer session. But here’s the catch – the Las Vegas Convention Center expansion plans are all but certain to be approved and can wait for the Nevada Legislature to resume meeting in February of 2017. No special summer session is needed for that.

So, as of this writing, and regardless of what anyone says, all of this Las Vegas Stadium talk and moves is mostly Mark Davis’ dream that he’s trying to make into a reality – that does not mean it’s going to become that. Indeed, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is legally bound by anti-trust law, and must give Mark Davis the chance to, as he put it, “explore” his options – but Goodell knows that, at the end of the day, if the NFL Owners vote no, Davis can’t just move or expect NFL financial assistance. Watch my interview with Commissioner Goodell:

But all of this does point to another giant problem, and that’s with the City of Oakland and the Oakland City Council.

While the Raiders can be blamed for some of the inaction problem, the City of Oakland has to shoulder its share of it too. The truth is that Oakland has come up with several stadium plans, and those plans have to be accepted by the Raiders before the City of Oakland and the County of Alameda can go ahead and get more detailed plans and permits and financing to start construction.

The Raiders (to date) have taken a consistent “Dr. No” approach to Oakland’s stadium ideas, with a nasty twist: Davis says no to a proposal, but then turns around and says he’s gotten nothing from Oakland or that he can’t get a meeting with the City and the County – indeed, he played that media game again the week before the Raiders Larry McNeil met with Oakland City Administrator Claudia Cappio. What Oakland can do to stop all of these problems is simply have made and issue a visual of what a new Raiders stadium could look like at the Oakland Coliseum. That has not been done.

Doing that would effectively rid Mayor Schaaf of what has become a national reputation as a ‘do nothing’ with respect to forming a stadium plan. Libby has remained friendly and supportive of the Raiders, and has taken more than a reasonable share of insults from the team, both publicly and privately via comments made to mutual friends and associates of Schaaf, Davis, and myself, and reportedly about what Mark Davis and the Raiders think of her. All because she says in public that she doesn’t want to use public money for the Raiders stadium in Oakland. (Wonder what Davis would say about Nevada residents?)

I have to note that Davis behavior toward Oakland would have resulted in a lawsuit flying out of the doors of Oakland City Hall and right to Raiders Headquarters in the past. In 1997, when I was the Economic Adviser to Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris, then Raiders CEO Amy Trask wrote a letter to the Coliseum JPA and cced to the Mayor, which was passed to me, and expressing displeasure with the way the master lease agreement was written, and with respect to the PSL sales problem which resulted in the City of Oakland and County of Alameda paying the $20 million annually to keep the bonds that brought the Raiders back from LA from going into default.

The response of the Coliseum JPA as ran by bond lawyer Deena McClain was to sue the Raiders and because McClain interpreted Trask’s letter as the Raiders threatening to break their lease – they just got back from LA. I wasn’t in favor of a court battle that I believed was due to a misunderstood letter, but I was outnumbered. Oakland, the Coliseum JPA, and the County of Alameda launched a ‘first-strike’ nuclear lawsuit – that’s what I called it at the time.

By contrast today, Davis has made moves that would have sent McClain into a major fit, and for which she would have figured out how several lawsuits were appropriate to file. Mark Davis is lucky. He’s fortunate we have a far less activist set of public executives in Oakland, today, with respect to sports. Moreover, some of them are so tired of the Raiders Davis’ games, they are resigned to waiting him out.

From my conversations, I can say there are some Oakland City Council people who actually (but wrongly) think Davis is going to get what he wants in Las Vegas. So, they are waiting to see what happens, even as the current JPA boss and the City’s Cappio are working with the Raiders.

The one hero in all of this is that boss, Oakland Alameda County Coliseum Joint Powers Authority Executive Director Scott McKibben. It’s his expertise and relationships with the Raiders and a number of people that have really kept Oakland in a good position to retain the Silver and Black in Oakland. All parties, from the teams in Oakland to the City Council and the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, acknowledge his role in all of this.

And while McKibben and Cappio work with the Raiders, another group has emerged and it’s led by NFL Hall of Fame Player Ronnie Lott. Lott intends to buy at least a portion of the team and to keep them in Oakland, but his investment group recently expressed an interest in what stadium plans were done for the Coliseum, and were told (not by me) about the plan I came up with at the behest of Mark Davis last year. But that written, overall, I am told (as of Sunday) they too are taking a wait and see approach.

So that is where we are as of today, May 16th, 2016: the Raiders are waiting on Nevada; the City of Oakland’s waiting on the Raiders, the NFL’s waiting on the City of Oakland, and Ronnie Lott’s waiting on everyone. That’s not to imply that parties aren’t talking or that the Mayor of Oakland’s not doing anything on her own – but until one of these groups or people make an announcement or some major information leak happens, that’s where everything is.

Stay tuned.