A train leaves the Convention Center station during the Las Vegas Monorail’s 10th anniversary celebration Saturday, July 26, 2014.
Thursday, Dec. 10, 2020 | 11:25 p.m.
The city’s tourism authority on Thursday paved the way for the development of an ambitious underground tunnel transport system that could connect key tourism points like McCarran International Airport and downtown Las Vegas.
By a 12-1 tally, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority board voted to eliminate a monorail transit system noncompete agreement designed to keep companies from creating transportation options to the east of Las Vegas Boulevard.
Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman was the lone dissenting vote.
The move came a day after the authority closed on its purchase of the Las Vegas Monorail Co., the private firm that had owned the 3.9-mile elevated train system, through a bankruptcy court transaction.
Although the noncompete clause was expected to be tossed, it had stood in the way of plans for the Boring Company, an Elon Musk firm, to expand its soon-to-be-finished underground tunnel transport system at the campus of the Las Vegas Convention Center.
The $52.5 million “people mover” will shuttle passengers around the campus in Tesla electric vehicles. The system is expected to be finished in the coming weeks.
The plan is for the people mover system to eventually carry passengers to other tourist corridor stops, including Strip resorts, downtown Las Vegas, Allegiant Stadium and McCarran.
The expanded route is expected to be known as the Vegas Loop, although plans have not been finalized.
“This will go down in Las Vegas history as an important step not only in our transportation infrastructure, but also to allow Las Vegas to take that next step forward to have a system that is groundbreaking, cutting edge, and an attraction in and of itself,” said Steve Hill, president and CEO of the LVCVA, during a conference call broadcast of the meeting.
During a pre-pandemic year, the Monorail would transport up to 5 million passengers annually, although it fell on hard times when the coronavirus began to decimate visitation to Las Vegas in the spring.
It was shut down in March and has yet to reopen.
The Monorail was launched in 1995 as a service that ran between the MGM Grand and Bally’s using trains that had previously operated at Walt Disney World in Florida.
The system was expanded in 2004 to add stops at several more resort corridor landmarks, including the Flamingo, Westgate Las Vegas, what is now Sahara Las Vegas, and the Convention Center.
The sale of the Monorail to the authority was approved by U.S. Bankruptcy Court on Nov. 24. The authority agreed to pay a little over $24 million for the system.
The authority plans to operate the Monorail once there is “visitor demand” again in Las Vegas, according to officials, although they have also admitted that the Vegas Loop is likely to eventually take over as a more preferred method to transport passengers around the resort corridor.
As she had earlier this year when Hill divulged that the LVCVA was in talks to purchase the Monorail, Mayor Goodman voiced her opposition to the cancelation of the noncompete zone during the conference call.
“I’m worried about practicality and funding,” Goodman said. “In my opinion, the reality is that the LVCVA is in the convention business, it’s not in the transportation business or the infrastructure business.”
Hill has said previously that he doesn’t expect the Monorail to be operational for much longer than the next decade or so.
