Suits woo Goodman and council with plans for arena

Friday, July 13, 2007 | 7:21 a.m.

Men with delicate salt-and-pepper haircuts gripped black briefcases and spoke in hushed excitement as they waited in a lobby Thursday for their turns to pitch arena proposals to the mayor of Las Vegas.

The meetings were private (although City Hall must unveil the proposals after one is chosen, probably next week).

But don't mistake this privacy for the old days, when fear of embarrassment would cause a businessman to keep his intentions close to the vest because spending money on downtown Las Vegas was considered somewhat hare brained if not downright bad business.

Sure, the city is spending $5 million to seduce a supermarket into underserved West Las Vegas. And yes, Streamline, the towering high-rise condo project across from City Hall on Las Vegas Boulevard, is giving away $37,000 BMW convertibles to its next five buyers.

But these days, downtown Las Vegas is moving along at such a clip that the city feels it has the luxury of turning away developers with bad proposals, proposals from people who didn't keep the city apprised of what they were doing, or even proposals without all their i's dotted and t's crossed. That's precisely what the City Council did, more than once, during its Wednesday meeting.

These arena proposals, though, better be pretty ironclad. Because if the salt-and-pepper set doesn't have a solid business plan for making money and keeping the furnaces stoked, it'll be overrun by another developer who says it wants to build an arena, too.

Just not in the city, but more toward the Strip.

Anschutz Entertainment Group, owner/operator of the Staples Center in Los Angeles, which hosts games of the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers, as well as the NHL's Los Angeles Kings, has made clear that it will build an arena in the Las Vegas Valley, and by no later than 2010.

AEG is the most proven player because it has built an arena for sports teams. The remaining four player s courting the city - two met with Goodman on Thursday and two more will today - are Medallion Financial Corp., Paradium Sports & Resorts, Raul Walters Interests Group and Real Estate Interests Group.

If any of them has a chance, speed might prove the best move - get the thing approved by the city, get as many commitments as possible from sports franchises, concerts or events such as the National Finals Rodeo, and get it built.

That's about the only thing that might give AEG pause.

Then again, even the mayor wasn't talking with his usual steadfast certainty about any of the proposals he was about to hear.

"I'll be asking some tough questions this afternoon," Goodman said Thursday. "I'm going to feel very, very confident that whatever proposal is accepted is going to be solid. I'm not going to be going on a frolic on this one. This is as serious as anything I've done since I've been here."

In other words, this isn't your father's downtown Las Vegas anymore. And those guys with the proposals and the hair and the valises better be as sharp as their garb.