Is the A's Proposed Ballpark in Las Vegas Still Feasible?

Jason Burke | 2 Hours Ago

Nov 24, 2024; Paradise, Nevada, USA; The Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign on the strip. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-Imagn Images / Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

The Athletics and the Las Vegas Stadium Authority Board will meet on Thursday to run through three agreements that are up for approval, which "will set the terms of the A’s playing at the new ballpark, how the ballpark will be constructed, how many years the team will be tied to the ballpark, and what happens if it tries to exit Las Vegas before the initial lease term of 30 years."

There will also be discussions about how the A's plan to pay for their proposed Las Vegas ballpark, and the team is expected to provide four letters that show that they have the financing available for this project. One of the letters, as reported in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, will be from John Fisher, pledging $1 billion of his family's equity toward the project.

Yet, in a report from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the price of the proposed ballpark just went up by a significant amount, with the project now expected to cost at least $1.75 billion, an increase of $250 million dollars.

The LVRJ says that the cost increase is due to inflation, and "the addition of 70,000 square feet of ballpark features. New elements added during the stadium’s design phase include more clubs and suites, upgraded general admission spaces and player amenities. The A’s Las Vegas ballpark will be the first in Major League Baseball to offer under-seat cooling."

The way that the funding for this project shakes out inlcudes a $300 million loan from U.S. Bank and Goldman Sachs, plus the up to $380 million of public financing provided in SB 1, which was passed in June of last year. With Fisher's $1 billion pledge, the grand total that has been cobbled together is $1.68 billion, which is still $70 million short of what the projected total for the project is.

That's not a huge amount of money in the grand scheme of things, but it's awfully close to the $97 million gap between Fisher and Oakland that led to him walking away from the entire project.

It's also worth noting that the A's will be on the hook for any cost overruns, so if there are any tariffs imposed by the new administration on Canada or Mexico, then steel prices will increase, and they just happen to be the two of the biggest steel providers around. That would also make the price of the project jump up, even if everything else stays on schedule and within budget, which is really hard to count on.

There will be agreements made on Thursday that will yet again provide the illusion of progress for the A's to land in Las Vegas, but until money starts coming out of Fisher's pocketbook, it's important that this entire deal is looked at with at least a little bit of scrutiny.

The A's proposed ballpark in Las Vegas has always had some shaky math associated with it, in terms of making the deal make sense for the franchise, but if the cost to build keeps going up, that already shaky proposal could soon become untenable.