It’s a tough time for wealthy casinos and Vegas’ lucrative tourism agency. Casinos face tax initiatives, and a casino mogul is pushing for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s death.
Petitions filed by the state teachers union and Las Vegas lawyer Kermitt Waters would raise gaming taxes by 3 percent and 13.25 percent, respectively, generating between $250 million and $2 billion for education and public-improvement projects. (Taxes would be levied on casinos generating more than $1 million a month.)
Meantime, Las Vegas Sands Corp. President and Chief Operating Officer William Weidner wants to funnel half of the LVCVA’s $220 million operating budget into public-service projects. Since everyone’s throwing out numbers, we tossed in a few.
6.75 percent: Rate at which gaming is taxed now.
$1 billion: Gaming taxes collected in 2006.
$1.7 billion: Taxes paid by the state mining industry from 1987 to 2005.
$26 million: Combined taxes paid by the banking and mortgage industries in 2006.
$44 million: Tax relief sought over two years by the banking industry; efforts to repeal a 2005 law on franchise taxes failed.
$2.1 billion: Net gaming-tax revenue in 2006.
$2 billion: What lawyer Kermitt Waters’ petition would raise (on top of $1 billion in existing gaming taxes) for public improvements by tripling the gaming tax.
$2.4 billion: Cost to build the Venetian Macau.
$2.14 billion: Clark County School District’s 2007-08 budget.
36 percent: Gaming tax rate in Macau.
$7.8 billion: Cost of MGM Mirage’s Project CityCenter.
$7 billion: Spending plan proposed by Gov. Jim Gibbons earlier this year.
12,000: Jobs CityCenter is expected to create.
58,628: Signatures needed for each gaming-tax petition by May 20.
49,565: Rooms scheduled to come online by 2012.
The problem of floating all these numbers, says Guy Hobbs, is a general lack of context.
“No one would have conceived of the number of rooms we have today, so putting an absolute finger on where that ends is impossible to do,” says Hobbs, managing partner of Hobbs, Ong and Associates. Hobbs is the former chief financial officer for Clark County .
“Secondly, there is a correlation between rooms and the need to fill them. Whether the number of rooms stays static or you add rooms, you still need to fill them. If the number stays static, you still need to attract new clientele. The lines of logic by Weidner and Waters are somewhat questionable, because there is no basis for the amounts of money they want to pump into specific areas. Obviously there are many areas where we need additional revenues—schools, transportation, etc.—but the determinations for the amounts needed should be made by people in those areas.”