Las Vegas council votes for stadium-linked parking garage

Las Vegas leaders want a tourism improvement district in Symphony Park and they don’t much care whether anybody else likes it.

That was the consensus reached at City Hall Wednesday, a day after Clark County commissioners passed a resolution aimed at killing the proposed tourism district, one that would help the city build a 1,200-space parking garage meant to support a controversial 24,000-seat, $200 million downtown soccer stadium.

County leaders say the garage — which would be partially funded by the diversion of some $1.5 million in county sales tax revenue collected within the city-proposed district — would hurt their ability to fund critical county services.

Most City Council members fired back Wednesday, backing a resolution they said would help bolster downtown development at little or no cost to their neighbors. That vote sends the proposal to the Nevada Commission on Tourism, which will take up the issue in March.

Four council members — Bob Coffin, Steve Ross, Ricki Barlow and Mayor Carolyn Goodman, the same four who supported the publicly subsidized stadium plan — voted to approve the district.

They were joined by stadium subsidy opponent Lois Tarkanian, who said she believed the Smith Center for the Performing Arts could use the $20 million district-funded garage with or without a Major League Soccer team.

Stadium skeptics Bob Beers and Mayor Pro Tem Stavros Anthony opposed the proposal, citing concerns over both how much new sales tax revenue might be collected in the new district and from whom it would be collected. State law requires most of tourism district tax revenue to come from out-of-state tourists.

Anthony, who announced his bid for Goodman’s seat late last month, seemed wary of a 25-page city-commissioned study that projects retail development within the proposed district could see the city collect some $66 million in sales tax revenue over the next four years.

Most of those dollars are expected to come out of a near-finished 150,000-square-foot expansion at the Las Vegas Premium Outlets North, where study co-authors at Civitas Advisors say the vast majority of shoppers come from out of town.

The rest is anticipated to come from a head-spinning turnaround at long-vacant Symphony Park-area developments, one that would see the completion of three casinos, some 1,800 residential units and 257,000 square feet of retail space by the start of 2016.

Civitas economists admit those growth projections are “very aggressive,” though they say the study’s “preponderance projections” — estimates of the percentage of revenue collected from non-Nevadans — might actually prove to be conservative.

Anthony took a much dimmer view of the numbers.

“That’s fantasyland,” he said of the study’s growth forecasts. “I don’t know if we’ll have those (Symphony Park developments) in 10 or 15 years.”

County leaders have gone a step further in their criticisms of the district.

They say the city’s proposed district boundaries are “gerrymandered” — drawn up by connecting parcels that aren’t contiguous, using a road’s right of way to connect to an outlet mall with a 150,000-square-foot expansion already in the works.

County Commission Chairman Steve Sisolak has suggested the outlet’s mall’s inclusion in the district amounts to nothing less than a “disingenuous application of the law.”

Beers, a vocal opponent of using some $56 million in public funds to help pay for a downtown soccer stadium, sounded almost equally skeptical of the outlet mall’s role in the tourism district.

The Ward 2 councilman spent more than an hour grilling Civitas economists when the proposal first came before city leaders in December.

He didn’t go much easier on the idea this week.

“Based on the absurdity of the aggressive (growth) assumptions, I don’t think this holds up,” Beers said.

Tourism district backers didn’t shy away from critics.

Coffin, who provided the swing vote needed to move ahead with the soccer stadium that a district-funded parking garage is meant to support, pointed out that the county hasn’t yet lost a dime on the tourism district proposal before suggesting that those opposed to the effort just didn’t have the stomach to take a yes vote on the issue.

Barlow, who represents the district where the tourism district would be located, lined up behind Tarkanian, explaining that with or without a soccer stadium, council members would still “be having a conversation” on downtown parking amenities in the near future.

If the proposal is approved by the state tourism board, the earliest city leaders could take a final vote on an ordinance to create the tourism district would be April 1.

Contact James DeHaven at jdehaven@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3839. Find him on Twitter: @JamesDeHaven