Sun Coverage
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority board of directors on Tuesday agreed to sign a pair of transportation agreements to assure the city’s tourism community is heard on highway development plans and airline route scheduling.
In unanimous votes, the board approved a three-year, $1.08 million agreement with two one-year extension options with longtime highway transportation consultant Tom Skancke, and a similarly termed $900,000 deal with Washington-based Seabury APG for aviation services.
The LVCVA also approved an early-retirement separation program aimed at saving $2 million over two years.
The authority has worked on Interstate 15 transportation issues with the Las Vegas-based Skancke Co. since 2004. Skancke will represent the LVCVA to lobby for future highway projects and to monitor project schedules, alerting prospective visitors of construction delays.
Southern California highways are important to the LVCVA because they carry road traffic to and from the city’s largest tourism market.
Skancke said his top priorities will be to monitor “the overused and underdesigned” intersection of I-15 and California Highway 91 west of Riverside and to work to get highways from Phoenix to Seattle through Las Vegas designated as Interstate 11.
He said once the Federal Highway Administration designates a route as an interstate highway, it would become eligible for federal funding that would upgrade U.S. 93 to interstate status.
In the past, Skancke has recommended projects for I-15 south of Las Vegas, the so-called “High Desert Corridor” between Victorville and Palmdale, Calif., to develop a second access to Southern California via Interstate 5, and to monitor construction progress and how it would affect Las Vegas-bound traffic at the Devore interchange of I-15 and Interstate 215 in San Bernardino County.
Skancke also has been an advocate for high-speed rail transportation and helped found the Western High-Speed Rail Alliance between Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Colorado.
The LVCVA’s contract with Skancke is $360,000 a year, an amount negotiated down from $450,900 a year in 2009.
The Seabury contract is new to the LVCVA, but not to Las Vegas. The company has worked with McCarran International Airport on air service development for nearly 10 years.
Damon Hylton, vice president of Seabury, said his company’s resources would be used to guide the LVCVA in its efforts to recruit airlines to fly routes internationally and domestically to McCarran.
Hylton said changes are ahead in airline planning because McCarran’s Terminal 3, built to accommodate international carriers, will open next summer and Boeing’s 787 aircraft — a plane Hylton said is ideally suited for long-haul flights to Las Vegas — will be delivered to several airline customers in the months ahead.
“The problem with the 787,” Hylton said, “is that it’s also ideally suited for flying to Boston and New York, so Las Vegas has to compete.”
The LVCVA board also unanimously approved a voluntary separation program.
The plan is a money-saving tactic during the recession and will be directed at full-time employees with at least 10 years of service and will be offered to employees whose age plus years of service equal or exceed 65. Mark Olson, vice president of human resources, said records indicate 144 workers would be eligible for the program and that he expects 30 would participate.
Olson said in the current fiscal year, the LVCVA would save an estimated $2.6 million in salaries and benefits and the cost of the severance settlement would be about $1.5 million. He said positions either would be eliminated, left vacant or filled with workers at a lower salary.
Participants in the program would receive one year of base pay for every four years of service. Prospective participants would have to sign up by Nov. 14.
The program is the second early-out program in two years for the LVCVA. A similar voluntary separation program completed in November 2009 resulted in net savings of $2 million through the 2011 fiscal year and 18 employees participated.
In other business, the LVCVA’s advertising consultant, Las Vegas-based R&R Partners, gave a year-end review of its marketing and ad efforts and promised to return to the authority’s October meeting to give an 18-month plan for 2011 and 2012.
The board also unanimously approved a prospective new revenue stream, awarding a digital advertising contract with Las Vegas-based Smart City Networks LP. Smart City, which already has a telecommunications contract with the LVCVA at the Las Vegas Convention Center, will place 87 monitors in 12 locations at the Convention Center and sell advertising to convention vendors and local businesses.
Smart City and the LVCVA would split the advertising revenue. The LVCVA is projecting revenue of $125,000 in the 2013 fiscal year increasing to $445,000 in the 2016 fiscal year.
The contract includes three additional one-year contract extensions if mutually agreed.