Vegas council delays decision on soccer stadium funding challenge

Plans to spend public money on a proposed Las Vegas soccer stadium might have flat-lined, but city leaders aren’t quite ready to sign the death certificate.

City Council members on Wednesday delayed a proposed challenge of District Judge Jerry Wiese’s Feb. 6 ruling upholding the public’s right to vote on some $56 million in taxpayer dollars that would be used to build the long-planned 24,000-seat, $200 million downtown stadium.

That means the city still might fight a stadium funding ballot measure, but won’t be able to do so until early next month.

That’s despite the fact that the development group contracted to build and manage the project failed to land a major league soccer team to play there and won’t be moving ahead with a proposed development deal stricken from the City Council agenda Wednesday.

That deal doesn’t expire until Feb. 20 and could be revived by City Manager Betsy Fretwell, though Fretwell said she has no plans to breathe life into the project.

Four city leaders — the same four who supported public spending on the stadium deal — have said they still might look to appeal a court-ordered referendum on the apparently moot issue.

Two others fear stadium subsidy supporters might try to resuscitate plans for the venue, whether voters like it or not.

None of those still weighing an appeal provided specifics on how, when or with whom they would look to revive hopes for a downtown soccer venue, or whether it would even be intended for soccer.

Mayor Carolyn Goodman, perhaps the stadium deal’s most prominent mourner, said Friday she would not be opposed to appealing the ruling for technical reasons, explaining that if the ballot initiative were allowed to move forward, it might set a dangerous precedent that would allow voters to routinely overrule council decisions.

“Down the road, as this (petition) moves forward with all of its intricacies, if you get to the end and there’s some little piece of it that’s wrong, you can’t appeal, it’s too late,” she said. “If in fact this (ballot question) changes the charter, then it’s a field day for anybody. … The charter can only be changed by the Legislature.”

Goodman’s vote to put off action on the appeal comes more than a week after she held a press conference to announce that she would “love to hear from the people” on the stadium financing plan.

It comes more than a month after she passed on a chance to author a ballot question of her own on the project, sparking a weekslong ballot petition signature gathering campaign sponsored by council members and stadium subsidy foes Bob Beers, Stavros Anthony and Lois Tarkanian.

That campaign failed initially, but only on a signature-gathering technicality that since has been overruled in District Court.

Two city leaders who backed the ballot petition say they will continue fighting to put the issue to voters. One, Mayor Pro Tem Anthony, has turned the topic into a campaign platform for challenging Goodman in this year’s mayor’s race.

Fellow stadium subsidy foe Beers, who has accused the city of deploying “egregious unfair play” in alleged attempts to stymie his ballot question, said he always expected the city to challenge the question’s wording.

Beers said there likely isn’t time to rewrite the initiative. Besides, he’s not sure he should have to.

“I don’t think we should be here in the first place,” the Ward 2 councilman said. “The law is very clearly not contradictory with the constitution. (Stadium supporters) got bad legal advice. I hope that’s not continuing, as we speak.”

Beers remains far from convinced that stadium supporters have lost interest in bringing a soccer venue to downtown Las Vegas.

“This letter the mayor got from the MLS just says ‘we won’t start up with this again until after the election,’” Beers said.

Stadium supporter and Councilman Bob Coffin has, like Goodman, expressed concerns over the ramifications of allowing voters to override elected leaders’ decisions at the ballot box. Both he and Councilman Steve Ross agreed that ballot language asking voters to help change the city’s charter, as opposed to amend the city code, could be challenged in court. They contend the city needs state legislative approval in order to directly revise its founding document.

Reached for comment Tuesday, Councilman Ricki Barlow said only that he was “weighing all options” when it came to appealing the ballot question ruling.

None of the four council members still open to an appeal volunteered a reason for putting off a vote on the move.

City Attorney Brad Jerbic, who held a closed-door legal meeting with those four Wednesday morning, declined to comment on the legal reasoning behind the decision. He said “nothing about the appellate process” was meant to interfere with a June vote on the stadium funding question.

Contact James DeHaven at jdehaven@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3839. Findw him on Twitter: @JamesDeHaven.