NEW DAM FEE: Hoover May Charge Visitors Just to Drive to It

Posted on: July 15, 2024, 10:49h. 

Last updated on: July 15, 2024, 10:57h.

Corey Levitan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas.

Guided tours of the Hoover Dam currently cost $30 per person — only $10 if all you want to do is enter the visitor’s center — plus $10 to park a vehicle you’ve driven there. Now, a newly built toll plaza suggests that another Hoover Dam fee is on the way.

This toll plaza was recently opened on the access road leading to the Hoover Dam, a popular tourist destination 40 miles southeast of Las Vegas. (Image: John Morrow/flickr)

Entering the Hoover Dam by car or foot is currently free, as it always has been. From there, visitors can access the scenic walkway along the Pat Tillman-Mike O’Callaghan Memorial Bridge — from which they can get a breath-stealing view of the 726-foot man-made wonder from 164 feet above it — and the 3.7-mile hiking trail through the twin railroad tunnels used to build the dam.

This $240 million bridge was named both for Mike O’Callaghan, Nevada’s governor from 1971-79, and Pat Tillman, an American football player who left his career with the Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the United States Army and was killed in Afghanistan in 2004 by friendly fire. (Image: Wikipedia)

The toll plaza completed earlier this year by the Bureau of Reclamation just inside the security checkpoint opened after 9/11, is currently inactive and unstaffed. However, this is bound to change since government infrastructure is always built for a reason.

“We don’t have congressional authorization to charge an entry fee for noncommercial vehicles,” a Bureau of Reclamation spokesperson told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, adding that she has not been briefed on any plans to charge noncommercial vehicles. Since 2020, tour buses have been required to pay $5 per passenger to enter.

As anyone familiar with government-speak knows, these are classic nondenial denials.

The toll sits on what was once US 93, which crossed the Colorado River by winding along the top of the dam itself.

The inadequacy of that route was identified as early as the 1960s. However, the Hoover Dam Bypass, which whisks cars along US Route 93 and Interstate 11 over the Colorado on the longest arched bridge in the Western  Hemisphere, wasn’t opened until October 2010.

The relevant lesson here is that the federal government takes a long time to do things.