Tanner has ‘major’ news on LV dome

Friday, Jan. 10, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

Texas businessman Paul Tanner has an intriguing way of dismissing rumors about his proposed 110,000-seat downtown domed stadium.

When reports surfaced this week that Tanner would announce a major-college football game, similar to the annual "Kickoff Classic," to be held at the stadium, he denied the rumor in somewhat cryptic fashion.

"I think it's a little more ambitious than that but I really don't have any further comment," Tanner said Thursday from his Polyphase Corp. headquarters in Dallas.

Tanner will be in Las Vegas next week to address the Chamber of Commerce at Preview '97 and had said earlier that he would make a "major announcement" concerning an event at the domed stadium at that meeting. Tanner did not back down from that statement Thursday.

"We should be able to provide you with some good information next week," he said. "We will announce an events schedule that will be interesting, that's all I can say. I'm going to be speaking at Preview '97 and I don't want to give out too much information right now.

"But I think you'll see that we will have a very strong events schedule."

Although the purchase of the Union Pacific Railroad land by Tanner's group was delayed for several months last year, Tanner said that groundbreaking on the retractable-dome stadium is on schedule for the first quarter of this year. The high-tech venue is set to open in 1999.

"I think we will start some construction within that time frame," Tanner said. "We should have already started some preparation and other building activities out there but we're so busy right now and we haven't started.

"It's a massive project and we're kind of at the mercy of the builders and the architects but it looks like we're on a fast-track program. We should be able to start pretty quickly, but they're not starting as quickly as I want them to. We really expected to have (construction) under way a little quicker."

In the wake of the major traffic problems that greeted the opening of the Las Vegas Motor Speedway last summer, Tanner said his group is confident it will develop a plan to ease traffic congestion around the downtown stadium.

"We're addressing the traffic problems, which we don't believe are going to be nearly as tough to solve as a lot of people think," he said. "Things are looking great right now and we're moving forward."