Major gamers spend more than $1 million in off-campaign year, mostly on arena fight, Sandoval, Sisolak

Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012 | 3:44 p.m.

Nevada’s major gaming companies reported spending more than $1 million on political activity last year, more than half of it by MGM Resorts International and Boyd Gaming to block an arena proposal proposed by Caesars Entertainment.

The costs of that legal and political fight are detailed below, as are the totals for the major casino corporations. One caveat: Some individual property donations are not included in the tallies, but they were minimal and generally went to one of the two fundraising juggernauts of 2011, Gov. Brian Sandoval ($700,000) or Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak ($1.2 million. Who knows? That could be the 2014 gubernatorial race matchup….

(These numbers were tallied using the secretary of state’s great new search engine, Aurora, the first time folks can comb through a searchable database. Try it for yourselves. And kudos to the SOS.)

Station: $80,000, $30,000 of which went to Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak

Also, many Democratic legislative incumbents don’t seem to fear the wrath of the Culinary union as they happily accepted money from the company. That includes Speaker-in-Hoping Marcus Conklin.

Wynn: $115,000, almost half to Gov. Brian Sandoval, either for him or his inauguration.

MGM Resorts: $446,000, nearly all of it to try to fight that arena proposal by Caesars Entertainment.

Caesars: $136,000, about a third of it on pushing that arena and about half on Gov. Brian Sandoval or his inauguration.

Las Vegas Sands: $195,000, about half in in-kinds to the Clark GOP and conservative Keystone and $35,000 to Sandoval or his inaugural committee. (Interesting note: The company gave $5,000 to County Commissioner Steve Sisolak, a rare donation to a Democrat, perhaps because Sisolak went after public sector unions.)