LVRDA giving away the farm...again
The Las Vegas Redevelopment Agency has renewed talks about how to take money away from local police, fire and education services in order to hand it over to private developers. The LVRDA has begun talking with the Baltimore-based Cordish Companies, a large commercial real estate development firm, about building a 20,000-seat stadium in downtown Las Vegas. This project was previously pursued in 2007 by another development firm, REI Neon, which failed to secure adequate funding for the project primarily because investors didn't consider the project to be profitable - despite the fact that the city had pledged to provide at least $265 million in taxpayer subsidies for the project. Now, in a maniacal attempt to ensure that the elitist politicians' centrally-planned vision for downtown becomes a reality, the city will likely offer a similar, if not larger, amount of free loot to Cordish for completing the project.
The project would ultimately be subsidized through a complicated mechanism called tax-increment financing (TIF). City planners claim that TIF is "free money" that would impose no extra burden on taxpayers. However, NPRI research has demonstrated how the TIF agreements used by the LVRDA take money that would have otherwise gone to fund schools, police and fire protection and transfer it to private developers in a corporate welfare scheme. Often, this can lead to tax increases in order to finance the services that taxpayers were paying for in the first place.
The real kicker in this debate is that, as was the case previously, the arena will be billed as an NBA arena, but there is not even an agreement with any NBA team. The project would likely impose a higher tax burden on local area residents and is being pursued on the purely speculative notion that an NBA or NHL team could decide to relocate there at some future date. It's entirely possible that the arena could just sit empty - a monument to mock the taxpayers who are forced into a higher tax burden in order to finance it.
In a time of economic hardship, this is government lunacy at its finest.
