Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
WILL THEY COME? IF WE BUILD IT,
Entrepreneur who tried to bring Expos to LV in ’04 says new stadium would lure MLB
SIX YEARS AGO, while giving a deposition in a New Jersey sports betting case, then-Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig spoke steadfastly against ever placing a franchise in Las Vegas and railed against gambling as “evil.” Today, a group is working with investors to build a stadium and bring a major-league team to Las Vegas. Those efforts come as Selig’s successor, Rob Manfred, calls Las Vegas a viable market for the sport and baseball’s decision-makers descend on the city for the league’s winter meetings taking place Sunday through Thursday at Mandalay Bay. Behind the scenes, Lou Weisbach, a Chicago-area entrepreneur who led the charge to bring the Montreal Expos to Las Vegas in the early 2000s, and Chicago White Sox television announcer and former Cy Young winner Steve Stone are among those working to make their vision of bringing a team to Southern Nevada come true.
Weisbach said the people he is working with, including some in Las Vegas whom he declined to identify, are engaged in ongoing conversations with investors and landowners. He said people involved also have been talking with local leaders. Gov.-elect Steve Sisolak, the longtime Clark County Commission chairman, was asked if he’d had discussions about a major-league team in Las Vegas. “Not that I can talk about. … I hope you understand sometimes I have to sign NDAs (nondisclosure agreements),” he said.
Can it work here?
The jury is still out on whether Major League Baseball would thrive in Las Vegas. Some say no — that the entertainment dollar would be stretched too thin for 81 home games to sell out. Then there’s Weisbach. “We have a lot of different locations that we continue to work on and that are available and so it’s not a question of whether Vegas is going to get Major League Baseball,” he said, “it’s a question of when.” After a more than 30-year absence, Major League Baseball returned to Washington, D.C., as the Expos became the Washington Nationals, who settled into a temporary home at RFK Memorial Stadium. Whether Las Vegas was being used as leverage or was seriously close to becoming a major-league city in 2004 remains up for debate, and the answer varies depending on who is asked. One thing was for certain: Washington, D.C., had a stadium (and since has built a baseball-specific one). Las Vegas didn’t. “I really believe in the few times that I’ve tried to actually do this, I think it was too early and we didn’t have a facility,” Stone said. Weisbach went further, saying he believed that if Las Vegas had a stadium at that time, the Expos would have moved west. This time, the plan is to build a stadium first and deal with securing a team — whether by expansion or relocation — second. “We’ve got people who are willing to fund it and are excited about it,” Weisbach said. “We want to actually build a stadium that not only would accommodate a Major League Baseball team but also would accommodate all forms of entertainment and would really be the kind of stadium that you would expect Las Vegas to have.” Because of the temperature during the summer , a stadium almost assuredly would require a retractable roof, raising the price dramatically. When Chase Field, which has a retractable roof, was built in downtown Phoenix in the late ’90s, it cost $354 million. Safeco Field in Seattle, which opened in 1999, cost $517 million, and Miami’s Marlins Park, which opened in 2012, cost $639 million. Those numbers pale in comparison to the price tag Weisbach has in mind. “It’s our view that you can’t build a generic stadium in Las Vegas,” Weisbach said. “We want the stadium to be a place … people from around the world will view as a destination site and so it’s got to be really unique and so it’s going to be at the higher end of any baseball stadium that’s ever been built so in excess of a billion dollars.”
How would it be funded?
Cranes rise next to Interstate 15, just west of the Strip. Pillars are up, and the structure for the Raiders stadium has begun to take shape. The project, which will take two years to construct, has a $1.9 billion price tag. A significant amount — $750 million — is coming from the public, leaving less of an appetite to pour more public money into another stadium. “I haven’t heard any proposals,” Sisolak said. “We have one stadium coming that (will) serve our public purpose for UNLV and for other events. I don’t know if we really need a second one for public use.” Asked if his plan would include public money, Weisbach said, “Absolutely not.” “Our group generally feels strongly about the fact that taxpayers should not have to pay to build stadiums for wealthy people,” he said. Weisbach said the group has been trying to build a model that would be solid and profitable, with the stadium able to accommodate all kinds of events year-round. In addition to funding the stadium, a group would need to acquire land, which gets pricier the closer it is to the Strip; pay for the territory, which the Triple-A Las Vegas 51s occupy; and fund potential expansion costs, among other things.
Is there a location?
CBRE Senior Vice President Michael Parks said there may be a “handful” of sites near the Strip that are large enough to accommodate a Major League Baseball stadium. “It’s going to be all over the map right now, anywhere from let’s call it $3 million an acre up to $10 million an acre is going to be the range,” Parks said.