Las Vegas Stadium Authority approves $63.8M budget
The Las Vegas Stadium Authority zipped through approval of its $63.8 million budget for the 2018 fiscal year, conducting a public hearing and unanimously adopting the plan in less than 15 minutes on Monday.
No one addressed the authority board in the hearing, which is largely procedural and undertaken by every local government entity.
Monday’s meeting was anticlimactic following Thursday’s approval of a lease agreement with the Oakland Raiders, who plan to build a 65,000-seat stadium on 63 acres at Russell Road and Interstate 15. The lease deal approved unanimously by the authority will be reviewed Tuesday by NFL owners at their spring meeting in Chicago.
The owners are expected to give their OK since NFL attorneys monitored back-and-forth negotiations between the Raiders and the authority every step in the process.
The budget includes revenue from a 0.88 percentage-point increase in Clark County’s hotel room tax, estimated at $49.9 million, plus $100,000 in interest. The rest of the revenue is carryover from the current fiscal year.
In the first two months the tax has been collected, $8.4 million in hotel room tax has been generated compared with $7.9 million anticipated in estimates produced by the Southern Nevada Tourism Infrastructure Committee last year.
Stadium Authority Chairman Steve Hill said he’s happy with the outcome so far.
“Two months really don’t make much of a trend, but it’s better to start ahead than behind,” Hill said after the meeting. “We intended to be conservative and did not want to overestimate in order to inflate the numbers and make it look easier that it potentially could be.”
Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on Twitter.
