My opponent in the Assembly District 41 race, Vinny Spotleson, wants Nevada to build a light rail system. He’s been saying so for years, most recently pointing to Seattle’s system as the model to follow.
This week, the passenger rail industry handed him a real-time example of exactly how these projects tend to go, and it isn’t pretty.
Brightline, the private train operator running Florida’s Miami route, is preparing to file for bankruptcy.
The company has piled up roughly $5.5 billion in debt built on promises of strong ridership and revenue that never showed up.
Its bonds are now trading at a fraction of their face value, and a bond insurer is stepping in with emergency financing just to keep the trains running while the company reorganizes.
Here’s what makes this one sting a little more than most cautionary tales.
Brightline is privately run. It wasn’t a government agency making rosy projections with someone else’s money. It was a private company with every financial incentive in the world to get the math right.
And it still ended up staring down bankruptcy.
If a private operator with skin in the game can misjudge ridership and revenue that badly, what should Las Vegas expect from a government-run light rail system built on the same kind of hopeful projections?
We don’t have to guess. We’ve already seen this play.
The Las Vegas Monorail opened with mechanical problems, never generated enough ridership revenue to cover its debt, and landed in bankruptcy by 2010.
Someone had to buy it out of that bankruptcy just to keep it running, and to this day it still doesn’t connect to the airport.
And Seattle, the very system Vinny holds up as his model, is its own warning sign.
What voters approved at $53.8 billion in 2016 has ballooned toward $142 to $185 billion for the same mileage. Sound Transit is now $34.5 billion short of what it needs over the next 20 years just to finish lines that were approved nine years ago and still haven’t broken ground.
That’s three separate rail projects, three different cities, three different operators, public and private alike, all landing in the same place: debt piling up faster than ridership can justify it.
And one of them already happened right here in Las Vegas.
Vinny wants Nevada to run that same experiment twice. And while he’s at it, he’s attacking the one transportation project in this state that’s actually working.
When a debate broke out recently about tourism spending, Vinny used the moment to take a shot at Elon Musk, writing that Nevada shouldn’t “subsidize Trillionaire Elon Musk’s Vegas Loop with even more of our tax money.”
That gets the facts backward.
The original convention center segment of the Vegas Loop did get financing years ago through the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, paid back through the authority’s own tourism revenue.
Everything built since then, the full 68-mile, 104-station expansion now underway across the resort corridor, is privately financed. The Boring Company and the hotels connecting to it are the ones paying for it, not Nevada taxpayers.
So Vinny’s got it exactly backward.
Private money is already flowing into this state to build something that works. It’s Vinny’s own preferred project, the light rail, that would need taxpayers to cover the bill for decades, the same bill that’s currently sinking Brightline in Florida.
This isn’t a coincidence, either. Vinny is a self-admitted, dues-paying member of the Las Vegas Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization that’s never met a government spending program it didn’t like and never met a successful private company it didn’t hate.
Betting big on a taxpayer-backed rail system while trashing a private one that’s actually delivering fits that instinct perfectly.
Nevada families don’t need a second cautionary tale from their own backyard. They need a representative who looks at what’s happening in Miami, Seattle, and our own Las Vegas Monorail history and asks the obvious questions before committing billions of taxpayer dollars, not after.
Vinny’s still asking Nevada to trust his pie-in-the-sky environmental Nirvana. Brightline is proof that trust alone doesn’t keep a train running.
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