Las Vegas Sun

March 19, 2024

If Raiders stadium fizzles mid-project, county wants no eyesore left behind

Raiders Stadium Neighborhood

Christopher DeVargas

Construction is in full swing at the site of the future Raiders stadium in Las Vegas, Thursday, Feb. 8, 2018.

The Clark County Planning Commission is expected to approve rules tonight that would safeguard the land the Raiders stadium is being built on.

If the 65,000-seat stadium — slated to host Raiders and UNLV football games — goes belly up before completion, the plan compels the Las Vegas Stadium Co. to return the land back to its original form. The plan is part of the stadium’s development agreement.

“OK, say we haven’t finished the stadium, so we can’t use it and we’re not going to finish it, so how do we get it back to what it was?” said Steve Sisolak, Clark County commissioner. “This would, in effect, tell us how they would remove the steel and how they would pay for that.”

The stadium company proposed providing a $5 million bond, the highest estimated cost for the decommission plan, to the county to provide financial security in the case decommission is needed, county documents show. A 5 percent contingency is included in the proposed bond to pay for unforeseen costs over the budgeted amount.

There are various phases to the decommissioning plan, depending on if the project is abandoned before or after structures of 55 feet or higher are erected on the site.

The site will be enclosed with a 10-foot-tall wooden fence, and all material, equipment and trailers on the site will need to be removed within 90 days.

Cranes will be dismantled and removed from the site and any fixed equipment will be broken down into its original component parts, temporarily stored in a designated area, until ready to be transported via truck to various storage facilities.

Any structural component of the building still erect must be evaluated by principal design professionals every 180 days they’re still on the site to ensure structural integrity.

Security and safety staff are required to be on site monitoring the structure 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the plan states.

The stadium company must complete any work left to install, protect and maintain all working fire hydrants, per approved civil plans. Any external utilities on the site must be de-energized and isolated with the appropriate utility company.

Although a stoppage of construction on the stadium is not anticipated, Sisolak pointed out the importance of such a plan, referencing the failed 500-foot tall SkyVue observation tower on the south end of the Strip across from Mandalay Bay.

Three years after work halted on the site, a pair of 200-plus-foot tall concrete towers still stand on the site, leaving an eyesore reminding residents of what could’ve been.

“We don’t want that to happen again,” he said. “We didn’t have a decommissioning plan in place for that one, but we should have.”