Building a bridge to gridiron
Raiders agree to pay for infrastructure to support LV stadium
The Raiders have agreed to pay for pedestrian bridges or other infrastructure necessary for a planned 65,000-seat NFL stadium near the Strip, a Clark County official said Wednesday.
According to a development agreement scheduled for public discussion next week, the Raiders would be responsible for paying $1.4 million for public safety equipment, an emergency operations center inside the stadium and improvements to nearby roadways and sidewalks.
“Our district attorney is very comfortable the county is covered in all aspects,” county comprehensive planning director Nancy Amundsen said Wednesday.
County commissioners are scheduled to consider the development agreement for approval Jan. 3.
Doing so would clear the way for theraidersandthelasvegasstadium Authority to complete their own development agreement, which needs to be in place by February if the stadium is to be finished before the start of the 2020 NFL season.
“It’s a major step in the process,” Amundsen said.
Parking and improvements
Although the development agreement does not say where the Raiders will find the nearly 14,000 off-site parking spaces necessary to comply with county code, the team must have an updated transportation study in place by September.
The study will identify parking locations and include plans for reducing the impact of pedestrian and vehicular traffic to and from the stadium. That could include improving roadways and widening sidewalks.
Design consulting firm Kimley-horn and Associates previously estimated almost a third of all NFL game attendees will walk from hotel rooms located within a mile of the stadium.
The Raiders also have agreed to pay for the construction of any pedestrian bridges necessary to bring ticket holders to the stadium. A 30-foot-wide bridge linking the stadium to Mandalay Bay over Interstate 15 is already being discussed.
How much the team will pay to make these improvements won’t be known until the master transportation study is published, Amundsen said.
“There’s no way for us to estimate
RAIDERS
tive uses for their cash.”
Says Steven Ricchiuto, Mizuho Securities chief U.S. economist: “The reason why you haven’t had that much in terms of share buybacks is because the equity market has done so well. The equity market has done better because of the upticks that we’ve had in the economy in the last two quarters and that’s taken some of the pressure off of them to have to do the share buybacks.”
Not so fast, say others. One problem
with these theories is that high equity valuations have never kept corporate executives from repurchasing shares in the past. During the internet bubble, the dollar amount of buybacks steadily rose for nearly a decade — even as the S&P 500 traded at 25 times projected earnings.
Tax bill an issue
To Gina Martin Adams, chief equity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, something else is at work in this year’s decline in buybacks. It’s the tax bill itself — the uncertainty it’s created for companies. Adams says that last time U.S. companies
got tax a break on overseas profits, in the mid-2000s, most of the extra money was put to stock buybacks, which is unlikely to change this time.
It may not even be true that companies are meaningfully lightening up on repurchases, at least not broadly. Adams notes that the volume of repurchases among energy companies, which have seen their earnings drop following lower oil prices, is going down. Financials, which are recovering after regulatory pressure in 2016, are seeing an uptick.
People shouldn’t even be looking at the corporate tax reduction to 20
percent for a fix on how cash use evolves. A much bigger factor is how pools of overseas money will be affected by the repatriation tax, according to Adams.
“What is important for the buybacks is the fact that tech companies who hold cash abroad are going to be more likely to wait to get the determination on the tax rate to figure out whether they want to bring the capital back from overseas to deploy in the form of a buyback,” Adams said by phone. “The decrease in the amount of buyback may have a lot to do with the uncertainty regarding the tax policy.”