This is an excerpt from the radio show Our Metropolis, a half-hour issues and affairs program that airs Tuesdays at 6 p.m. on KUNV 91.5-FM and is hosted by Las Vegas Weekly writer at large John Katsilometes. Tune in next week to hear the rest of this interview with Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce Director of Public Relations Cara Roberts:
We have Preview Las Vegas coming up on January 31 at Cox Pavilion, which is a lot like a giant business seminar mixed with a Las Vegas pep rally. Is that the best way to describe that event?
It’s the perfect way to describe it. It really is a business-community pep rally. We get more than 2,000 business executives to show up every year, and we have speakers who do economic forecasting—fun economic forecasting [laughs]—to tell attendees where the economy is going. We have [Applied Analysis principal] Jeremy Aguero, who is one of the top analysts in town, who is going to focus on economic trends. Certainly real estate is going to be a big topic. We’ll have Richard Lee of First American Title of Nevada, who will be forecasting where he sees the real-estate market going. Rossi Ralenkotter of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority will be there to talk about tourism trends and to unveil the latest marketing campaign [which is “Your Vegas is Showing”] ... and our keynote speaker is Guy Kawasaki, who is a marketing guru from Apple who is one of the people who first got the Macintosh brand into the marketplace. And he will talk about the art of innovation, which is important in a down economy, to be creative about how you market and getting your name out there.
The big topic of discussion coming into Preview Las Vegas is obviously going to be the real-estate market in Las Vegas, because of its high foreclosure rate. When does the Chamber of Commerce expect the real-estate market is going to right itself?
I think we’ll find that answer at Preview, but from what I have been seeing we probably have another 12 months of a volatile real-estate market, but the good news in the next two years is we have a lot of properties opening up. The Palazzo just opened up. And that means jobs. We have 30,000-40,000 new rooms coming online in the next two to three years, and that means about 140,000 new jobs, which will help improve the real-estate market.
We’ve been dealing with a revenue shortfall in Nevada, and there has been a call for a more broad-based tax system across the state, which is tilted heavily toward the casino industry. Terry Lanni of MGM Mirage has been particularly critical of the Chamber for not paying its fair share of taxes to help the state fund services. How do you counter the argument that you are promoting the city but not contributing to its upkeep?
Our businesses contribute a great deal. They are the engine that drives the economy. They provide the jobs that help people buy homes, buy cars and educate their children, and we are in a unique business climate in Southern Nevada, and at the core of that is really our pro-business policies and our low tax base. That is unusual in this country. Look around the country—look at Michigan, for example. They kept raising and raising taxes, and eventually those businesses went away, and they aren’t coming back.