The Oakland A’s, seeking $500 million in public financing for a new baseball stadium site just west of the Strip, could have paid only $1 for another site in the resort corridor.
Eric Birnbaum, CEO of New York-based Dreamscape Cos., which acquired the Rio Hotel & Casino in 2019, told The Nevada Independent the company offered to sell the A’s roughly 22 acres of the nearly 90-acre, off-Strip site for $1.
Birnbaum said the transaction could have greatly reduced some of the costs associated with the land acquisition.
“I’m a developer. That makes the development deal look a lot better,” Birnbaum said. “I’m pretty good at math [and] I would assume that if you had no land price, and another site did have a land price, that the total sum of dollars needed for a development of a stadium would be less than the site that did have a land price associated with it.”
