The owner of Major League Baseball’s Athletics franchise, John Fisher, now says his planned Las Vegas baseball park will cost more than $2 billion which means the cost of construction has risen by a half billion dollars from the original ballpark cost estimate. But Fisher has the “what, me worry?” attitude, at least publicly. Fisher told the Nevada Independent it’s no big deal. “The costs have gone up as more detail comes in. That’s fine,” he said. “From the very beginning, we wanted a design that was unique. Vegas is one of the most unique towns in the world. We wanted a building that would symbolize the excitement and uniqueness that is the market.”
Fisher’s former team president, Dave Kaval, once said that he expected that tourists would buy about 8,000 tickets per game in a stadium that would seat 30,000 customers. That is a pretty risky strategy for any sports team. Right now, that looks like a losing bet as Las Vegas tourism is falling. Just under 3.1 million tourists were in town in June, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. That is a drop of 11.3 percent compared to June 2024. Hotel occupancy is off by 6.5 percent and the average daily room rate fell by 6.6 percent to $163.64. Las Vegas has had a bad year attracting tourists. Month by month there has been a tourism drop. Some of the money to pay down the state’s $380 million of stadium debt of the planned Athletics baseball park costs are supposed to come from Nevada taxpayers from tourism money. Franchise President Marc Badain said in June, construction costs going up would be no problem. “I’m not concerned about costs. You always run into unknowns and you build emergency plans.” Fisher needs to find $1.6 billion and that cost figures to rise for his share of stadium debt.
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