Vegas Wins, and Also Loses

A championship for the Golden Knights and a big loss for Nevada taxpayers.

Photo credit: Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com

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There’s perhaps no more fitting example of the wonder and horror of professional sports than Tuesday night.

Consider: The National Hockey League’s Las Vegas Golden Knights won their first Stanley Cup championship — just six years into their existence, the fastest a new franchise has ever won an NHL title — while several hours drive north, in Carson City, Nevada, lawmakers were rapidly advancing a plan to spend $600 million in public money on a new Las Vegas stadium for the moribund Oakland Athletics of Major League Baseball. At the same time, fans in Oakland were protesting the likely departure of their team, asking the owner to sell rather than move the franchise, while their last-place A’s topped the league-leading Tampa Bay Rays.

The ultimate win for some fans, a win and yet a likely loss for others, and the ultimate loss for the taxpaying public, all in one night.

The Golden Knights are everything right about the sports world: Hoisting a trophy on their home ice on the Vegas Strip after defeating the Florida Panthers, this is a team whose first game took place just days after one of the city’s darkest hours — the 2017 mass shooting at Mandalay Bay — and whose inaugural season ended agonizingly shy of the perfect Cinderella story, as the expansion franchise lost in the Stanley Cup final.

Six years later, with a few members of that original squad still around, they’re finally on top.

But the Nevada legislature, at the same time, is everything wrong with professional sports: Lawmakers doling out huge subsidy packages to entice in teams from other cities, making loads of false claims about the economic effect a new stadium will have, and ultimately lining the pockets of ultra-wealthy sports franchise owners with hundreds of millions of dollars in public money — money that could be put toward almost literally anything else and be a better use of limited resources.

Should the A’s deal go through, and it’s looking increasingly likely that it will, it will mark the second massive sports subsidy package approved by the state in the last six years, the first being a $750 million deal to build Allegiant Stadium for the Las Vegas Raiders (which hilariously enough, coincided with that last Golden Knights run to a final, as I wrote here).

The Nevada legislature is currently in special session to push through the A’s deal. The State Senate “debated” and banged through its version late Tuesday night, and the Assembly seems well on its way to follow suit on Wednesday. (UPDATE: The Assembly did indeed pass the bill Wednesday, sending it to the governor, who is expected to sign it.)

The process has had all the hallmarks of a stadium subsidy debacle, and closely mirrored the Raiders deal, which was also approved in a special session. There have been outlandish predictions about economic benefits, shady tactics meant to hide information about just what the project would entail, and a lightning-fast legislative process that gives opponents almost no time to marshal arguments against any of the specifics. Some initial hesitation on the part of the Senate was mollified by the governor giving in on other bills he had opposed, as well as the attachment of some amendments that are supposed to protect the public investment, but ultimately won’t.

Remember, a survey of 130 studies on stadium subsidies that was released last year found that “welfare improvements from hosting teams tend to fall well short of covering public outlays.” There’s no reason to think the A’s, playing in what will be Major League Baseball’s smallest stadium, will be any different. The A’s owner has been fishing for a publicly-subsidized stadium for years, and finally found a place willing to play ball, if you will, even as his team flirts with being historically terrible at playing actual ball.

The saddest part of this is that, for a long time, Nevada legislators refused to engage in the stadium subsidy game, even as those in states and cities all across the country fell into the trap. Pro sports leagues were also generally wary of Las Vegas, because of its association with gambling. But that’s all over now.

As Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com wrote, “For decades, metro Las Vegas and Clark County held back from spending big public money on big league sports. Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Major sports organizers perceive Southern Nevada’s political and tourism leaders as easy marks to massage public dollars out of public agencies and governments.”

The A’s bill isn’t even the only publicly-subsidized sports deal heading for the finish line in the state: Formula One racing is asking the Clark County government (which encompasses the Vegas Strip) for $40 million for road paving ahead of a race there in November.

The wildest thing is, Nevada already has an example of how to do professional sports right: The Vegas Golden Knights. They play in an arena that was privately funded, receiving no public handouts whatsoever. In just six years, that arena became the site of a championship win.

And yet lawmakers have been convinced that they have to ditch that model and throw huge subsidies at pro sports teams in order for them to move to Sin City, the obvious business case for doing so aside. The Golden Knights ownership did the correct thing, and for their trouble saw two sports franchises receive giant legislative gifts within a few short years.

The saying is that the house always wins, but in Vegas, the likeliest winner of them all at the moment is the super-rich owner of a pro sports team — and taxpayers get left holding the cards.

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UPDATE: Last year I wrote about a group of folks in Maryland who successfully defeated a secret plan to bring an Amazon Web Services data center to their community, and along the way got their local officials reprimanded for violating state open meetings laws. Well, the story gets better: Last week, a judge ruled that the Frederick County government has to turn over a bunch of undisclosed documents in response to two public information act requests connected to the case.

"From all appearances, these records will provide some fairly substantial answers to the long-running questions about Amazon's intentions in Frederick County," said Steve Black, president of the Sugarloaf Alliance, the local group organizing against Amazon.

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— Pat Garofalo