Oakland A’s future stadium. Education. Hollywood coming to Las Vegas. 

These are a few of the major stories local journalists expect to cover in the new year.  

Nevada Week sat down with Howard Stutz, gaming reporter for The Nevada Independent; Alan Snel, journalist and Publisher, LVSportsBiz.com; and Jessica Hill, politics reporter for Las Vegas Review-Journal to discuss how these stories will impact Las Vegas in 2025 and beyond.

Here are some highlights from our conversation.

On Oakland A’s stadium groundbreaking and funding

Alan Snel/LVSportsBiz.com: "Some things to show it might happen: The A’s did meet with vendors, they actually did have a construction meeting a couple of months ago to explain to the potential vendors and builders and subs that these are all the different jobs we need, so that seemed to be in line with that timeline. Right now we have to stick with what the A’s schedule is, which is second quarter of 2025."

Howard Stutz/The Nevada Independent: "The financing seems to be in place. Mr. Fisher [Oakland A’s owner] issued a letter through his representative that says the family is going to put up $1.1 billion. Now, the family is going to be responsible for any other costs, overruns. Originally the stadium was $1.5 billion, now it’s $1.75 billion. Let’s remember, Allegiant Stadium started out much smaller and ended up at $1.9 billion."

On education being a major focus of 2025 legislative session

Jessica Hill/Las Vegas Review-Journal: "We saw Senator [Nicole] Cannizzaro basically pitch this whole education reform bill this week. It includes maintaining raises for teachers, it includes universal pre-K for four-year-olds, it also includes these whole plans to really help maintain teacher retention and bring more teachers to the state .… I think this will be a bi-partisan issue. I talked with some Republicans who have expressed wanting to maintain those raises and salaries for teachers. It will be interesting to see how they will work across the aisle to get this done."

On Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. competing for Nevada’s film tax credit with separate bills 

Howard Stutz/The Nevada Independent: "The first bill came out in the 2023 session, and it didn’t go anywhere. So now they’ve had two years to build up, now we’re going to have this big fight .… Its two leaders in different houses are each carrying one of the bills. So this maybe is something we are going to see debated about throughout the session. The big question is they all want film tax credits .… They talk about it as an economic boom, but a lot of the economists that Tabitha Mueller from The Nevada Independent talked to have said they largely downplayed those economic benefits. So we’ll see how that all plays out in the session."

On covering President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promises to Nevada

Jessica Hill/Las Vegas Review-Journal: "I think the biggest thing we are going to be looking at is his plans and calls for a mass deportation program. You know he wants to have the biggest deportation program in U.S. history. It’s very unclear how he plans on fulfilling that, and a lot of governors for instance are waiting to see what happens. Governor Lombardo said recently he is waiting to see, he wants more details.  And then just a couple days later he agreed with over 25 other Republican governors that they are fully committed to Trump’s mass deportation plans, including using the National Guard in any means possible to basically help fulfill that."

On the NBA potentially forming a Las Vegas team

Alan Snel/LVSportsBiz.com: "Adam Silver [Commissioner of the NBA] was in town, he did not indicate any direction on the NBA coming to Las Vegas. He loves to call the NBA Summer League, which is kind of a 10- to 12-day … really the Woodstock of worldwide professional basketball right here at UNLV … he calls that the 31st franchise. And the fact that they had the Summer League along with this semi-final, final NBA Cup tournament deal at T-Mobile Arena, there’s a pretty good NBA presence. We still have no expansion, real expansion infrastructure set up in the NBA to talk about Las Vegas."