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To Entice Oakland Raiders, $750 Million Is Approved for Las Vegas Stadium
CARSON CITY, Nev. — The Nevada Legislature narrowly approved a plan Friday that would use $750 million in public money to build an N.F.L. stadium in Las Vegas that would be partly funded by the billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.
Lobbyists for the project worked hard to collect enough votes to meet the needed two-thirds threshold and scraped by with the minimum amount of support when lawmakers called for a quick vote without allotting time for the customary speeches.
Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican who has supported the project, was expected to sign the deal Monday in Las Vegas.
“It’s exciting,” said Andy Abboud, the chief lobbyist for Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands. “But this is really about jobs, and I think at the end of the day people saw this as a fantastic economic stimulus package.”
The Nevada Senate gave final approval to some minor changes after the Assembly voted in favor of the bill by 28-13; the Senate had previously voted in favor by 16-5. The measure would raise hotel taxes in the Las Vegas area by up to 1.4 percentage points to fund a convention center expansion and build a 65,000-seat domed stadium that backers hope will lure the Oakland Raiders.
N.F.L. owners would still need to approve the Raiders’ move to Las Vegas, which requires a three-fourths majority.
The project was nearly derailed late Thursday by a state report that said the Nevada Department of Transportation wanted to accelerate nearly $900 million in planned road work to accommodate stadium-related traffic.
Lawmakers, who had not previously been warned about the estimate, said they felt blindsided. Transportation officials clarified that the projects were already planned and would not require raising additional revenue.
Critics denounced the rushed deal and complained that the Legislature was applying new tax revenue to a stadium instead of reserving it to alleviate an anticipated state budget shortfall.
“We are funding luxury items before we’re taking care of our needs,” said Assemblywoman Teresa Benitez-Thompson, a Democrat who opposed the deal.
The public contribution will be larger in raw dollars than for any other N.F.L. stadium, although the public’s share of the costs — 39 percent — is smaller than for stadiums in cities of a similar size, such as those in Indianapolis, Cleveland and Cincinnati.
Some outside economists, including Roger Noll, a Stanford professor, had panned the deal as a boondoggle based on outlandish financial expectations.
Defenders of the stadium say Las Vegas’s outsize tourism economy, with 150,000 hotel rooms and 42 million annual visitors, is different from other markets that depend more on local residents and where stadiums are more likely to draw customers from other businesses. The average nightly hotel bill on the Las Vegas Strip will go up by about $1.50 if Sandoval signs the deal.
Proponents project that 451,000 new visitors would come to Las Vegas as a result of the stadium, with $620 million in economic impact. That calculation is based on the stadium hosting 46 events, including 10 N.F.L. games and six Nevada-Las Vegas games.
Laborers testified they needed the estimated 25,000 construction jobs the project would bring after the industry was devastated in the recession. The stadium is expected to bring 14,000 permanent jobs to the Las Vegas area.
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