A Stadium for a Billionaire: How Reno Subsidized Greater Nevada Field
Reno’s leaders have pointed to Greater Nevada Field as proof that the City can “partner with private development” to revitalize downtown, but when you lay out the numbers...
Dec 09, 2025
For more than a decade, Reno’s leaders have pointed to Greater Nevada Field as proof that the City can “partner with private development” to revitalize downtown. The story goes like this: build the ballpark, crowd in private investment, attract out-of-town visitors, and watch the Freight District bloom into a thriving urban core.
But when you lay out the numbers, history, land deals, bond obligations, and redevelopment outcomes, a very different picture emerges.
This wasn’t a catalytic investment.
It was a public subsidy for a billionaire.
And the benefits promised to the public never materialized.
The Financial Backbone: Public Bonds, Private Benefit
When the ballpark was pitched, the original construction price was publicly referenced at about $85 million.
The developer behind the project — billionaire retail magnate and real-estate investor Herb Simon — financed approximately $55 million through private loans. He then requested $30 million in public financing assistance from the City of Reno.
Reno issued two bond tranches:
$18,500,000 — Tranche 1
$9,999,845 — Tranche 2
$28,499,845 total bond financing by the City
Once you add private financing and public bonds, the total project cost exposure is about $83.5 million.
The bonds are paid from a tax on car rentals, not from ballpark revenue.
But bonds are only the face value.
The real cost is what the City has to repay over time.
As of 2023, the City of Reno still owed approximately $17.1 million on the stadium bonds. Based on the City’s repayment schedule, by the time the final payment is made in 2054, Reno will have paid roughly: $84,858,715 in principal and interest.
That long-term obligation exceeds the originally advertised construction cost of the ballpark itself. The repayment cost comes to about $1,358,870 above the stadium’s estimated construction cost.
And at no point does the public gain ownership of the stadium.
The debt is ours. The asset is his.
Reno’s $24 Million Deficit: What It Really Means
The True Cost Per Game
Assuming a standard 72-game home season, from the ballpark’s opening through the final bond payment year, Reno will host approximately 3,240 home games.
Divide the $84.8 million total repayment by those games:
The City of Reno pays about $26,190 in debt service per home match.
That’s before considering the annual subsidies Reno paid directly to the stadium operators — reportedly $1 to $2 million per year — which continued until 2015.
The ballpark holds about 9000 fans. Reno is paying $3.0 to $4.0 per fan per game.
The Back Taxes Case: Forgiveness for a Billionaire
When Simon’s entities fell behind on property taxes, Reno negotiated a settlement:
About $1.9 million in delinquent taxes were paid
Roughly $800,000 in interest and penalties were waived
Penalties that would crush a regular homeowner evaporated for one of the wealthiest developers ever to operate in Reno.
Property taxes for the stadium are now listed as current, and the annual tax bill for the site is approximately $109,727.
Reno is Giving Away Our Tax $ with Tax Incremental Financing
The Parking Lot Deal: Public Support, Private Extraction
One of the overlooked pieces of the stadium agreement was the transfer of control over the parking lot directly across from the ballpark.
That parcel — intended initially for stadium use — was later redeveloped into the Ballpark Apartments, a privately owned residential project that monetizes stadium views and proximity.
This is often cited as evidence of “redevelopment.”
In reality, it’s something else entirely:
land granted as part of the stadium deal
converted into a private revenue-producing apartment complex
benefiting the same developer who leveraged public bonds to build the stadium
Meanwhile, stadium parking capacity shrank.
Game-day attendees lost the large lot and were left with a smaller replacement, more street spillover, and less convenient access.
If redevelopment were the goal, the result would be backwards:
The public financed the stadium, but the private operator privatized the land around it and captured long-term value.
That isn’t catalytic revitalization. It’s vertical integration.
Ballpark Apartments Pivot to Hotel in Slow Market for High Rent Units
Redevelopment Claims vs. Reality
At the council dais and in public briefings, officials routinely suggested that the stadium would trigger a neighborhood transformation.
The “Freight District” name became shorthand for a promised future full of:
restaurants
bars
hotels
mixed-use projects
rising commercial density
But more than a decade later, that district never appeared.
There was no cascade of surrounding investment.
No dense urban core. No destination corridor.
Just a privately built apartment complex on land tied directly to the stadium deal.
That’s not redevelopment. It’s an internal portfolio expansion.
The Economic Impact: Modest, Diffuse, and Hardly Transformative
Greater Nevada Field draws around 500,000 annual attendees.
How many of those are true out-of-town visitors who book rooms because of the Aces?
Minor-league research suggests only 5–20%.
If we use a reasonable 10% range, and then assume about half actually stay overnight, the result is about:
25,000 hotel-staying ballpark visitors per year
roughly 37,500 total hotel nights
estimated local spending (hotel + food + incidental) around $10 million annually
That’s the mid-range model — and it’s generous.
The takeaways:
The economic activity is real but modest
It’s diffuse, not concentrated
It doesn’t come close to covering public costs
And study after study shows much of this money replaces spending that would have occurred elsewhere in the City
Most importantly:
Minor-league stadiums are not conclusively shown to increase overall employment or taxable economic output in their cities.
The strongest independent assessments describe stadium subsidies as ineffective public investments that rarely pay for themselves.
Reno fits that pattern perfectly.
The National Bowling Stadium: Reno’s Little Understood Property
What Actually Happened Here
When you strip away the slogans, the stadium deal looks like this:
A billionaire developer sought help building a private sports venue.
The City of Reno issued nearly $28.5 million in bonds to support it.
Car renters repay those bonds through 2054.
Total repayment cost will exceed $84.8 million.
Subsidy payments flowed between 2009 and 2015.
Penalties on delinquent property taxes were forgiven.
Adjacent land was transferred and later converted into private apartments.
Parking for the public shrank, while private long-term ROI increased.
Promised downtown redevelopment did not materialize.
The stadium remains privately owned.
It’s a textbook example of public risk and private gain.
The Accountability Question
Should Reno subsidize recreation?
Should cities help build cultural anchors?
Those are policy debates worth having.
But when the arrangement is built on the promise of economic upside and redevelopment — and neither occurs — the public deserves transparency.
Here, the numbers tell the story clearly:
The public financed the stadium
The public will keep paying until 2054
The developer retained the asset, the land next to it, and the ability to profit
The redevelopment claims proved hollow
The single most concrete project tied to the stadium — the Ballpark Apartments — now generates rental income and long-term equity for the billionaire developer who benefited from the public subsidy.
That’s not community revitalization. It’s an extraction dressed up as urban planning.
Final Thought
Reno residents should enjoy the Aces. That isn’t the issue. The issue is governance. When a billionaire wants a stadium, we should ask why he needs public financing and public land transfers to build it. When the promised returns vanish, we should ask whether the councilors who approved the deal were blinded by vision statements rather than by complicated math. And when millions in bond obligations stretch to 2054 — in a city facing projected structural deficits — we should ask why Reno accepted risk that private capital refused to take on itself.
Because the stadium isn’t the problem.
The way we funded it is.