Convention expansion shifts slightly
The Las Vegas Convention Center expansion is moving — only slightly — and it hasn’t even been built yet.
The planned 600,000-squarefoot exhibition hall footprint will shift about 50 feet west, thanks to a land deal finalized Tuesday by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
Steve Hill, president and chief operating officer of the LVCVA, said the design of the building wouldn’t change with the minor shift.
“It barely fits (under the existing plan),” Hill said after the meeting. “We had a pinch point next to the Springhill Suites and the southern end of the exhibition hall. … We just kind of picked the plans up, shifted it 50 feet or so to the west and then put it back down.”
The board had one other approval related to the $1.4 billion convention center expansion and renovation project to head off a potential cost increase.
At the recommendation of the LVCVA’S pre-construction services consultant, Turner Martin Harris, the board authorized spending up to $40 million for a structural steel package. Usually the authorization would come after review by the Las Vegas Convention Center District Committee and the Oversight Panel for Convention Facilities in
CONVENTIONS
an era in which people spend more time watching video on phones and tablets and less time on traditional live TV on a big screen.
Leon said the government failed to prove that the merger would lead to higher prices and other harm to consumers.
“The government here has taken its best shot to oppose this merger,” Leon said, speaking to a packed courtroom in an unusual session weeks after the trial ended. But, he added, “the government’s evidence is too thin a reed for this court to rely on.”
Leon rejected the notion of temporarily suspending the merger for a possible appeal by the government. The “drop dead” deadline for completing the merger is June 21. If it’s not wrapped up by then, either company could walk away, and AT&T would have to pay a $500 million breakup fee.
The ruling is a stinging defeat for the Justice Department. The proposed merger was so big and consequential that it forced federal antitrust lawyers to reconsider legal doctrine that permitted mergers of companies that don’t directly compete.
First floated in October 2016, the deal also brought fire from then-candidate Donald Trump, who promised to kill it “because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”
Dallas-based AT&T is a wireless, broadband and satellite behemoth that also became the country’s biggest pay-tv provider with its purchase of Directv. It claims about 25 million of the 90 million or so U.S. households that are pay-tv customers.