Raiders Find New Financing For Las Vegas StadiumBank Of America Steps In After Adelson Pulls Out |
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About a month after billionaire casino boss Sheldon Adelson withdrew his $650 million commitment to a proposed Las Vegas Stadium for the Oakland Raiders, the team has found new financing from Bank of America that could save the project.
Raiders owner Mark Davis told the league Monday that the project is still on track thanks to a $650 million loan from BoA. The team hopes to play in Las Vegas for the 2019 season.
The NFL is still considering whether the Raiders could relocate to the gambling capital of America, but that hasn’t stopped the team and the state of Nevada from getting everything in order for potential league approval.
NFL owners will meet in late March to potentially hold a vote, though the decision could be delayed until May.
Silver State lawmakers last year controversially approved $750 million worth of public money for the $1.9 billion stadium that would sit on the south end of the state’s main casino corridor. An additional hotel room tax would go into effect to fund the public contribution.
It was widely speculated that Adelson, one of the richest men in the world, would seek an equity stake in the Raiders and/or the stadium. However, the NFL is still pretty opposed to gambling and it has restrictions on a casino boss owning a franchise. The Raiders and Adelson had been negotiating for quite some time and never were able to find a deal. Adelson characterized their negotiations falling through as “certainly shocking.”
“[The Raiders] want so much,” Adelson said last fall. “So I told my people, ‘Tell them I could live with the deal, I could live without the deal. Here’s the way it’s gonna go down: If they don’t want it, bye-bye.’” Adelson has a net worth of $31 billion.
Davis and the NFL would contribute $500 million, far less than the public contribution. Supporters of the hefty public subsidy argued that tourists would primarily be paying it.
The city of Oakland is still trying to keep the team, but there doesn’t appear to be anything it can do if NFL owners sign off on the move sometime this spring.
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