A small preview of the 2011 show during an official announcement at the Long Beach Convention Center this summer. Photo by Bob Maguglin.
9:45am | A new report in the Reno Gazette-Journal indicates that city officials are still concerned that the popular auto show hosted in their Nevada city every year will permanently move to Long Beach.
The car show, Hot August Nights, annually brings more than $350 million in economic impact to the city of Reno and Sparks. Hot August Nights announced earlier this summer that they will hold a six annual shows in Long Beach beginning in 2011, but organizers’ refusal to make the agreement public has Nevada city officials worried that they may lose the show altogether.
Hot August Nights organizers have maintained from the beginning that they want to stay in Reno, and simply expand with additional shows in Long Beach for the next six years. Long Beach officials in June announced a massive event schedule over three days that will essentially take over Shoreline Village. The shows in Reno typically draw 800,000 people and more than 6,000 cars.
Reno and Sparks officials began to get suspicious in July, when they realized that next year’s Long Beach show is scheduled for the week that the show is typically held in Nevada. Reno officials demanded to see the contract agreement between Hot August Nights and the City of Long Beach but could not legally force the contract to become public because Hot August Nights is a non-profit organization and the agreement is with the Long Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau, not the City of Long Beach.
Reno officials in July threatened to pull the plug on the 2010 Hot August Nights if the contracts weren’t made public, but that never happened and the show went on as planned. The Reno Gazettes-Journal reported that police handed out 450 traffic citations and made six felony arrests during the event.
Tonight, the Reno City Council will consider a resolution to work with the show’s organizers to come to an understanding.