Budget Watch Nevada

Kudos to Governor Gibbons for publicly questioning the necessity of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. The organization, known by many only for its famous catchphrase, “What happens here, stays here,” spends tens of millions of dollars each year on expensive ad campaigns and promoting LV to convention planners and tourists.

The problem with this operation is that it is funded by a hotel room tax, a fee paid by millions of people who would come here anyway and may not have ever seen a TV or newspaper ad for our fair city.

The bigger problem is that the LVCVA promotes use of the Las Vegas Convention Center by convention planners. The Convention Center is a competitor to the newer convention facilities at the Sands/Venetian and Mandalay Bay, among others. So those named hotels and their captive customers MUST PAY the tax to support, in effect, their competition. This is a patently unfair situation, one typical of government-knows-best mentality and one that is a classic example of an entrenched, politically juiced-in organization that has long outlived its usefulness.

Let’s support the Governor in pushing to abolish the LVCVA, or at least reducing it to a size that is funded by its management services to the L.V. Convention Center.
By kicking out this taxpayer-subsidized monopoly, and the free market kicking in with marketing LV’s best assets, you will see more and better promotions than ever before. And instead of paying a tax for which they get no benefit, our valued tourists/conventioneers/visitors will spend that extra money elsewhere in our economy.