The vote to approve the stadium will rank as one of the top 5 most corrupt things to ever happen in our city... which was formerly ran by the mob.
And think about this... the capacity of the stadium is 65,000. If all 8 games are SELLOUTS, and every single attendee looses $100 to the casinos after every single game, that's 52 million dollars. So it would take about 20 years to pay for the Billion dollar stadium.
Obviously thats disastrously simplified, but if you think we can pay for this stadium with just a small tax on the increased revenue.... that's way way off.
Now the new traffic on the other hand...
Obviously those people will spend a lot of money, but even if they ALL fly here Airport visitation stats won't go up 1%.
If we wanted to bring more visitors to Las Vegas pretty much any other way to spend a Billion dollars would have been more productive. The politicians never even tried to make that argument, at least to a sophisticated audience.
It's all about legacy, and home town spirit. Apparently a lot of people can't really be proud of a city that doesn't have an NFL team to root for.
Bottom line is we spent more to get an NFL team than any other city, and we are getting less out it than most cities, because we already have to many things to compete for a tourist's dollar and we didn't need a "star attraction" to revitalize an aging downtown or some of the other rationalizations other cities have used.
So it would take about 20 years to pay for the Billion dollar stadium.
This is a really low bar for redistributing money from taxpayers to wealthy owners. It also ignores opportunity costs.
As far as Olympic revenue, I wonder how the stadium's income from a day of the Olympics will compare to a Rams game or a Taylor Swift concert? Supposedly LA isn't giving the stadium any money for capital improvements, just whatever they get for renting it out and a few million for a temporary archery building. Maybe the stadium gets a cut of the $2,000 opening ceremonies tickets, but I imagine that'll be less than they make from the 2022 super bowl. I know a lot can change before 2028, but I'm cautiously optimistic that LA won't screw anything up too bad.
*which IMO are pretty tame— Inglewood pays for police overtime, shuttles to train stations, utilities improvements, etc but only for the first 5 years that the city makes $25+ million from the stadium
Building stadiums with public money and then charging the public to enter is really crappy, but in the end it does in fact benefit the location in some cases.
And you can see the pushback already starting. San Diego and Oakland wouldn't build new stadiums, so those teams moved. One went to LA, where they are building a new stadium with Olympics money which will be used by the Chargers, and Las Vegas was happy to bring in all the extra people to gamble. So in both cases those stadiums will probably be net positives for their cities.