Last night, I saw a story that made me literally laugh out loud. The Las Vegas Raiders recently released their 2023 Impact Report. In it, they claim to have had an economic impact on Las Vegas and Nevada that totaled $2.3 billion dollars. Nowhere do they tell us where this number comes from. They even repeat this number again further into the report, but once more do not go into any more details about it.
I will get to the total in a second, but I want to just note that the Raiders President kicks off the report by claiming that the Impact Report would “provide an in-depth look into our impact”. But the report does absolutely nothing of the sorts. The stats they give on so many additional pages are never explained. The Raiders created $25 million in additional advertising value for the city and local businesses? Great. Where did this come from? Are we supposed to just guess?
In the photo above, do you see where it says that 88% of visitors who went to Allegiant Stadium for an event came primarily for that reason? The Raiders love to use stats like this with no evidence whatsoever. Last year, a city tourism official claimed that more than 50% of visitors would stay longer or add a future visit BECAUSE the Raiders and Golden Knights (NHL team) were in town. When FieldOfSchemes wrote about this, they also seemed to find “no actual data at all”.
We are talking about the Raiders, right? The same team who took $750 million from taxpayers and promised to hire 18,000 construction workers to build the stadium? Then hired half the amount of construction workers that they guaranteed they would? More shocking is when you look at the stadium contractors report. Here, we can see how many hours that construction workers spent building the stadium. The total amount of time worked on the stadium by construction workers was 5,656,218 hours. As the Nevada Current figured out, that is “just 2,719 full-time equivalent jobs, or approximately 900 in each of the three years of construction”.
The report says that Allegiant Stadium ranked 4th in the top-earning stadiums for 2023. Specifically, Beyoncé played multiple shows in August that were the “highest-grossing events at the venue this year, making about $25.8 million”. This is impressive. Yet, that still leaves us a few billion short in finding out where the other money came from.
Do the local leaders really believe this type of stuff? Because history would say that they do believe it with all of their heart. These are the same people who this year used $440,000 in pandemic recovery money to purchase future airplane seats for corporate CEOs who go to the Super Bowl when it is hosted in Las Vegas. Who could forget the Stadium Authority Chairman praising the stadium for being a “hit” with everyone…as it sat empty during the pandemic? Let’s just be happy that the Stadium has always been super-awesome and never caused hotel receipts to be so low that the city must pay the team out of the city’s reserve fund. Wait a second.
All of this hiding and scamming reminds me about the time that the Raiders came to Las Vegas in 2016 to pitch themselves to the Governor and other city/state leaders. In the presentation, the Raiders never mentioned that taxpayers were going to pay the team $750 million. When the team was asked how much help they would get from locals, the team used this graphic as an answer to that question.
As one local reporter wrote at the time, it is not difficult to see how Davis was trying “to elide the actual taxpayer contribution with a misleading chart”. In fact, the $750 million dollar number was not publicly known yet at this time and would not have been known for some time after this if not for one person, the State Chairman. After some digging in and persistence, he was able to get it out of the team.
Tell me this doesn’t sound like what happened in Dallas?
“The Dallas Cowboys’ stadium in Arlington, Texas, illustrates what really happens: The city promised $325 million in subsidies and displaced families and businesses through eminent domain to make room for the stadium, anticipating $238 million in annual economic activity. However, the fiscal impact – the increase in government revenue – is only $2.9 million each year, not nearly enough to cover the over $20 million annual subsidy cost” — US News, 02/27/17
The number is so bad that LVSportsBiz.com, a fantastic site, decided that they would stop posting economic impact numbers given to them by the teams/organizers/etc…unless they are told where the numbers come from and how they were put together.
There are so many things that annoy me about the Las Vegas Raiders owner, Mark Davis. He is the type of person who gets $750 million from taxpayers yet still charges taxpayers almost $700,000 to renovate his never-been-used-before stadium suite. Mark Davis comes off as the type that thinks it is hilarious to fleece taxpayers for almost a billion dollars and then spend $14 million building a mansion that looks like the stadium that taxpayers paid for.
