A shared vision for downtown Las Vegas: Group focused on supporting business connections

Liam Dwyer’s restaurant, 7th & Carson was in its first few years of operation as a successful new eatery, blocks from Downtown Las Vegas’ Fremont East district, when the COVID-19 pandemic changed his expectations, his business model and his downtown neighborhood.

Dwyer remembered working with other restaurant owners to agree on staggering hours – his restaurant pivoted to serving brunch and selling produce as a cornerside market. Not long after the worst of the pandemic, a year-long road construction nearby slowed business again.

All the while, he applied for every loan and grant he could to keep the cashflow coming in. That’s where he was able to lean on the Downtown Vegas Alliance for help.

The nonprofit business league represents stakeholders in the roughly dozen neighborhoods that make up Las Vegas’ urban core. Dwyer said he turned to them for information and support in finding employee retention grants, loans from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and more.

“It was like, ‘Here’s where you need to go, here’s what you need to do,’” Dwyer said. “If I had trouble and came to a block in the road, I would call and they would point me in the right direction.”

That kind of support is Audrea Hooper’s vision for the DVA, of which she became executive director in August. Hooper, a downtown business owner, resident and former event executive with Zappos for 13 years, said she wants to focus the organization’s ability to “cross-pollinate” the community of business owners in downtown’s roughly dozen different districts.

“Downtown is the first area that I’ve ever really felt that’s very communal – you understand what the community is,” Hooper said. “That’s really why I wanted to get involved with the DVA, so I could really bring what I feel and what I know to be downtown, help a lot more people feel that way as well, and connect more people in that way.”

Establishing a downtown voice

DVA was founded in 2008, when business operators and property owners wanted to push for a shared vision in the district.

Joe Woody, chief financial officer at El Cortez, said the Fremont East hotel-casino was one of the founding partners. He recalled how stakeholders in different areas of downtown – those building the Smith Center, property owners in what would soon become Fremont East and others – felt they needed a common organization that “brought everything together.”

Woody said the alliance’s advantages are focused on networking and information sharing. He said city and business leaders can regularly meet, learn about changes at the government level and formulate a unified response.

“Instead of having all these property and business owners attend the (government) meeting, now you can have one voice,” Woody said. “You can have someone like Andrew Simon (CEO of the Fremont Street Experience) on our board, he attends and reflects the voice of the entire area.”

Furthermore, the information gets filtered back to the organization’s roughly 85 members. Dwyer said he’s learned of plans around the city through DVA newsletters, mixers and casual conversations.

“I’m a hands-on operator, I spend most of my time on site building my business,” he said. “I don’t have time to go to a lot of the meetings to get all this information, so DVA is where I get most of my information that helps me.”

Connecting downtown businesses

Memberships range from $400 annually for nonprofits to $7,500 annually for steering membership, typically chosen by larger downtown businesses. Current steering committee members include Circa, Downtown Grand, CIM Group (the real estate owners behind Downtown Grand) and law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck LLP.

Hooper said connecting businesses to each other is also an important part of her goals for the group. Recent efforts have included connecting members to vendor opportunities during Neon City Festival, the new, free concert and food festival in downtown Las Vegas that will take place during Formula One race week. She said Medellin Empanadas, a Colombian restaurant based in the North Las Vegas Premium Outlets, secured a vendor spot in the festival’s food truck area on Fremont Street Experience through connections it made in the group’s small business incubator program.

The connections aren’t only to help small businesses. Woody said El Cortez benefits from its stake in the DVA because it can connect the hotel to new business partners as well as elevate rising stars in the company by involving them in the alliance.

“All that really comes back to help El Cortez,” Woody said. “We’re a community partner, we’re the voice of Fremont East and we thrive on this kind of thing. That’s what we like to do, is just to be included and meanwhile, we can stay up on current events.”

Contact McKenna Ross at mross@reviewjournal.com. Follow @mckenna_ross_ on X.