KVIG Informative

The strategy hasn’t changed in 70 years: outbuild every other city chasing the same conventions, and let hotel guests cover the bill. Nevada lawmakers started that bet in 1955 with a tax on hotel rooms. The agency they created is still making it, most recently with a $1 billion hall and an underground tunnel system built by Elon Musk’s Boring Company.

The Nevada Legislature created the Clark County Fair and Recreation Board in 1955, financed through a tax on hotel rooms, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s own account of its founding. That board later took the name it still holds today, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, according to the same source.

The board’s original Las Vegas Convention Center opened April 12, 1959, with the World Congress of Flight as its first event, according to LVCVA figures. The building totaled 20,340 square feet with 18 meeting rooms and a 90,000-square-foot exhibit hall; in its first year it hosted eight conventions drawing 22,519 attendees, the same LVCVA figures state.

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The Nevada Legislature authorized Clark County to issue $26 million in general obligation bonds for expanding the county’s exposition and convention facilities under a special act passed in 1977, according to the Nevada Legislature’s own published text of that act. The same act identified the Clark County Fair and Recreation Board as the body already operating under the name Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority by that year, the legislative text states.

The LVCVA now owns and operates a 4.6 million-square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center, which it describes as the most productive convention center in the country, according to the authority’s own published account of its current operations. That is more than 200 times the floor space of the building that opened on the same job in 1959.

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The authority’s newest expansion, the West Hall, debuted June 8, 2021, at a cost of $1 billion, adding 1.4 million square feet including a 600,000-square-foot exhibit hall, according to the LVCVA’s own announcement of the opening. The exhibit hall includes 328,000 square feet of column-free space, which the LVCVA’s announcement describes as the largest column-free exhibition space in North America.

The LVCVA paired that expansion with a $52.5 million underground transit system built by the Boring Company, connecting the West Hall to the center’s North and South Halls through two one-way tunnels and three passenger stations roughly 40 feet below ground, according to the LVCVA’s own announcement. All-electric vehicles move riders between halls in under two minutes, compared with about 20 minutes on foot above ground, the same LVCVA announcement states.

Seven decades separate the World Congress of Flight in a 20,340-square-foot hall from Tesla vehicles running through a tunnel 40 feet beneath a 4.6 million-square-foot complex. The financing tool has not changed: Nevada still taxes hotel rooms to keep building bigger than whichever city is chasing its convention business next.