UNLV stadium panel members begin puzzling out funding solutions

UNLV’s stadium consultant Thursday served up 114 pages of demographic data on everything from Las Vegas’ tourist-driven economy to how other universities paid for football venues on campus.

Tucked inside that mountain of numbers and slides about available hotel rooms, occupancy rates and local market venue attendance were stadium funding tidbits, such as Baylor University’s new McLane Stadium raising $60 million just by selling the rights to a half-dozen “Founder’s Suites” for a $10 million contribution each.

For the first time, the 11-member stadium panel at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas began scratching the surface of ideas to pay for UNLV’s proposed football stadium and entertainment center.

The members began understanding the deft political touch it will take to raise public money for a stadium when the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority has launched its journey toward its $2.5 billion Las Vegas Convention Center makeover project.

“We have to look creatively,” said stadium board Chairman Don Snyder, UNLV’s acting president. “We can’t get in the way of the (convention center project). … There’s a tremendous scramble for limited resources.”

No longer was Snyder rolling out his pet phrase of “game changer” to describe the stadium wish. Now, he’s using another phrase — “thinking outside the box” — to describe what it will take to pay for the proposed venue.

It’s one thing to draft a plan to build a stadium of 45,000 or more seats that could be covered, or at least equipped with a sophisticated shading system like the shading technology at Baylor’s new football stadium.

That’s the easy part for the 11 members, who include executives representing five of the six biggest gaming companies in Las Vegas.

It’s quite another thing to find public dollars to pay for the venue that Snyder said is pivotal to UNLV’s aspirations.

When Snyder was working with Majestic Realty during the university’s previous go at a stadium, he ran into dead ends every time he floated ideas such as the resort industry contributing tens of millions of dollars toward a prior unsuccessful $900 million stadium proposal called a “Mega Events Center.”

The panel’s consultant, Bill Rhoda, principal of CSL International, didn’t have great news for the board on the funding front, noting there are limited public-money options at the local level.

And he doubted that any high rollers would be willing to cough up millions of dollars in suite and seat rights.

“It’s not going to be easy to raise $200 million in seat rights,” Rhoda told the Review-Journal after the 2½-hour meeting.

The glimmer of good news is that Rhoda’s presentation showed that the current batch of local sports venues and entertainment centers — including the planned MGM Resports International-AEG arena for the Strip — would not pose much competition to a UNLV stadium.

And Las Vegas ranked third among major comparable markets in the number of shows and total attendance in 2013, according to Rhoda’s report.

Las Vegas ranked only behind New York and Los Angeles, and way ahead of bigger Sunbelt cities such as Dallas and Phoenix.

Contact reporter Alan Snel at asnel@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5273. Follow @BicycleManSnel on Twitter.