Governor Gibbons has proposed taking a portion of future growth in room tax proceeds to increase spending on Southern Nevada highway projects. In this way, he can answer the demands of highway construction contractors to “FIX OUR ROADS!” without raising taxes. Nevada’s local governments have become so flush with revenues that they can afford it.

Today, the objections are rolling in, all from people whose paychecks are drawn from LVCVA or the businesses that profit from its activities. Here’s a sample:

I urge you to refrain from the temptation of taking money from the LVCVA funding. Although Las Vegas is at the top of the Convention and Tourism Industry in the U.S. and the world, it will take the largest CVB budget in the U.S. and everyone’s efforts to keep us at the top.

Taking $424 million from future revenue for the LVCVA will threaten the $890 million renovation of the LVCC. Without this renovation our outdated facility will become even less desirable than many new state of the art facilities of equal size in other cities.

Future convention business is jeopardized.

This inhibits the LVCVA’s ability to aggressively market the destination when competition is fiercer than ever before.

The Las Vegas tourism business model is viewed as the benchmark for other destinations around the country.

The proposal will hurt the tourism industry and increase unemployment in our industry.

The LVCVA’s efforts support over 1200 fulltime and part time employees that work for our company alone. The trickle down effect for the hundreds of thousand of employees in our industry and the taxes generated by this outside money coming into the state is the engine that drives our economy.

Why do we want to jeopardize our future economy by taking money (earned by a bed tax on our own industry) away from our marketing efforts and killing our LVCC renovation??

Here is my response:

Thanks for writing, Sharron. The LVCVA’s expansion project pencils out at $10,000 construction cost per square foot of functional, billable convention space*, so it might not be all bad if this controversy causes a second, more deliberate, examination of their project.

However, the Governor’s proposal does not do that. Since it guarantees future LVCVA room tax revenue growth, how in the world could it require any budget cuts?

LVCVA does an excellent job marketing the Vegas brand, and we should do everything we can to promote their efforts in that arena. However, their convention facilities business should be privatized. I believe it has dropped to the third largest floorage vendor in Clark County. Not only would the sale produce a nice chunk of change for our community’s infrastructure development, the room tax subsidies that now fund its operations would be freed up to bond for roads, with no impact on our county’s sterling marketing efforts.

But = that’s just my opinion. I appreciate hearing yours.

You may also be interested in reading that it appears our road construction
“crisis” appears exaggerated. See the other entries in my blog’s transportation category.

* Here is LVCVA’s brochure on the project. At the bottom of page 9, LVCVA reveals that the project will increase meeting space by 86,810 sq. feet. Dividing this into the $890-million project cost yields just over $10,000 per square foot.

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