The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) spent $4 million of taxpayer-funded cash on 446 tickets for the 2024 Las Vegas Grand Prix, it was revealed this week by local media.
Some individuals were given tickets to the behind-the-scenes paddock area, costing $15,000. Besides paying for influencers and international marketing and leisure industry execs, five $10,000 race tickets were given to Clark County commissioners for “educational purposes.”
For the four days of the Grand Prix race weekend, the LVCVA rented out a Skybox suite that overlooked the start and finish line. Various people were given tickets to the exclusive box, including senior staff at the agency. In what may or may not have been a coincidence, the LVCVA chose this week to announce it is now an official partner of Formula 1.
“The business purpose of these sales and marketing employees was to retain current customers and clients, as well as attract new customers and business to Las Vegas,” LVCVA spokeswoman Molly Castano said in a statement to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The news about expenditures comes weeks after the WNBA began an investigation into the $1.2 million the agency spent on sponsoring all 12 individual players of the back-to-back title-winning Las Vegas Aces team. Other WNBA teams and some in the sports media questioned the fairness of the sponsorship, which was negotiated with individual players’ representation and without the team or the league’s involvement.
The Authority
The LVCVA was founded in 1955. It is tasked with promoting Las Vegas as a global destination for tourism, including gambling, dining & hospitality, and more recently, sports.
Historically, it spends around $4 million a year on flying out prospective investors in Las Vegas, and then wining and dining them. So, an extra $4 million spent on the first edition of what is likely to be a yearly event could very well be questioned.
That’s without mentioning the recent Las Vegas Aces controversy, which rankled several WNBA teams and Nevada politicians.
The Authority’s $600,000-a-year CEO Steve Hill defended that choice, and said that since the Aces story broke, the agency has been swamped with freedom of information requests about their spending. There were some things, such as how much it paid key influencer marketing clients, that Hill said qualified as trade secrets and would not be revealed publicly.
“We have been inundated with records requests,” he said. “We had a couple of attorneys look at it, and it is the standard definition of trade secrets.”
In 2017, investigative journalists at the Review-Journal published a deep dive into the LVCVA’s spending, which accused the agency’s then-CEO, Rossi Ralenkotter, of spending tens of thousands of taxpayers’ money on bringing his family to visit Las Vegas in style.
The reports sparked an internal review that ended with the appointment of a new director in Hill. He took a substantial pay cut compared to his predecessor, who was on a reported $780,000 a year salary.
Ralenkotter ended up facing felony charges over $90,000 in agency-funded airline gift cards given out to his friends and family. The prosecution dropped to a misdemeanor offense after he agreed to file a guilty plea on lesser charges.
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