Raiders expect to hit Allegiant Stadium milestones by Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a big day for families to get together and stuff their faces, but this year it also will be significant to the crews building Allegiant Stadium.

The cable net roofing system on the $2 billion, 65,000 fan capacity stadium is expected to be fully in place by Thanksgiving, Raiders Executive Vice President Don Webb said.

The roofing system has been raised most of the way to provide the construction team enough clearance over the ground floor to get the field level stadia precast portions in place. Those portions are sections of concrete precast into levels for the stadium, where seats eventually will be installed.

Webb said it was not critical to meet the original target date of Nov. 10 for raising the roof because the work being done beneath it is the current focus.

Once the precast is in place, the seat installation process could begin, which Raiders President Marc Badain expects to occur within the next couple of months.

“We’re filling the precast in the inner bowl, it will be (filled) in there in the next week or two,” Badain said. “You could start putting all the seats in essentially if you wanted, but we won’t do that for a few months. You’ll go in and that whole bowl will be complete and you’ll get to see how intimate the seating bowl really is and how close to the sidelines every single seat is.

“So, there’s a lot of progress going on, so yes you can only see the exterior, (but) when you go inside, there’s thousands of workers in there doing other things in the belly of the building.”

Another milestone related to the stadium slated to occur before Thanksgiving is the team selling through the personal seat licenses (PSL) and season tickets to the stadium.

A PSL gives the person who purchases a specific seat in the stadium exclusive rights to buy Raiders home game season tickets thereafter. The PSL fee is due only once, but holders are required to purchase tickets each season.

“We’ll be pretty much done by Thanksgiving,” Badain said. “There will be some stragglers; sometimes you get some singles or threes that are a little harder to move. But for the most part we’ll be done with the inventory by about Thanksgiving.”

Contact Mick Akers at makers@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2920. Follow @mickakers on Twitter.