Growth woes mount in LV

Larry Henry

Saturday, Jan. 11, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

On West Sahara Avenue, near a neighborhood bar and casino named Big Dog's, signs have been posted announcing that the Tiburon subdivision is on its way.

In Spanish, tiburon means shark.

Another prominent name on the local development scene is Falcon Homes. Atlanta's professional football team notwithstanding, falcons are trained hunters.

To critics who say Las Vegas is growing too fast, and without planning, those words -- tiburon and falcon -- perfectly describe many of the 6,000 newcomers flocking every month to Southern Nevada.

A new breed of predators, toting cellular phones and looking for a fast buck, are moving in by the carloads, critics say, and with them come a bundle of problems.

"The question is, 'Who's out to screw who?'" said Diane Cantor, a 37-year mother of two and resident since 1978.

Her husband, Scott, has lived in Las Vegas since 1964. They plan on staying -- "The job opportunities are excellent," said Scott, "and I miss the excitement when I'm away" -- but they feel frustrated that no one has stepped forward with a realistic plan to contain growth.

Then there are locals like Jay Bingham. He and other civic boosters generally applaud what's happening here.

They'd rather live in a city like Las Vegas, where jobs are plentiful and where a spirit of optimism is driving commerce, than in a place like, say, Detroit, where the urban landscape and civic spirit seem equally blighted.

"What does quality of life mean?" asked Bingham, an owner of Falcon Homes and former Clark County commissioner. "Quality of life means having your family around you. It means having enough jobs so that your children will be able to stay home and work in the town where they grew up and where their family lives."

At issue is how to strike a balance between those like Bingham who think growth is beneficial and those like the Cantors who fear it's gotten out of hand.

An Assembly committee created late last year to tackle growth in Southern Nevada will begin hearing testimony after the Legislature convenes Jan. 20.

As of now, the committee, to be chaired by Assemblyman David Goldwater, D-Las Vegas, seems to lack direction and a clear mandate.

One lobbyist, speaking on the condition that he remain anonymous, said the committee was set up at the request of gaming lobbyist Harvey Whittemore.

Whittemore supposedly was looking for a way to avoid any chance that the Assembly Taxation Committee would seek an increase in casino taxes.

Education advocates and others have called for casinos to pay more to alleviate major needs for new road and school construction, especially in Clark County.

The top tax rate on casino revenue in Nevada is 6.25 percent, while the rate in Missouri, Iowa and Indiana is 20 percent.

Taxation Committee Chairman Bob Price, D-Las Vegas, has been a critic of the gaming industry, but he has said he won't call for a gaming tax hike during the 1997 session.

Whittemore said he and Speaker Joe Dini, a Democrat who owns a casino in Yerington, discussed forming an Infrastructure Committee before it was created, but both denied it was done to avoid Price.

Dini named Price to chair the Taxation Committee and could have chosen someone else if he were trying avoid him, one political observer noted.

Dini said he created the committee to focus attention on what is expected to be among the most important issues at the Legislature.

"Growth is a serious problem down there," Dini said.

Despite what action the Legislature takes, advocates on both sides expect the growth knot to be unraveled at the local level, because that's where the problems are.

And there are plenty of problems.

Complaints about shoddy home construction are on the upswing, and parents are upset that schools have gone begging for textbooks. (A note in a recent Clark County School District newsletter said, "Knudson MS needs 15-20 copies of Macmillan/McGraw Hill 'Language Arts Today,' 8th grade level (purple). 1993.")

Crime is driving more residents into an increasingly popular feature in Las Vegas: gated communities. While the murder rate nationally has dropped 7 percent, it has soared in Clark County by 38 percent.

The police department itself is wracked with big-city controversy. One officer has been accused of sexual assault, and one has been charged in a drive-by shooting that left a Las Vegas man dead.

"I won't even walk to Albertson's anymore without my husband," Cantor said.

Water shortages are expected to become critical by 2030, and air quality is, at times, abysmal.

A recent two-part series about Western growth in the New York Times noted that Las Vegas had the country's second-worst "unhealthful air days." Only Los Angeles, where barbecue pits and gas-powered mowers are sometimes banned, had worse air between 1991 and 1995.

The county could lose federal highway funds and other money if the air isn't cleaned up.

Those problems and more have left residents like the Cantors wondering whether there is an end in sight.

Experts predict Clark County will need $10 billion into the next century to build enough roads and schools, and to hire enough cops, to handle growth.

"We're going to find ourselves with an aging infrastructure and a declining quality of life and getting to a point where we're going to have to raise more taxes just to keep up," said environmentalist Jeff van Ee.

He is among many who worry that no one in public office locally is giving the problems more than lip service.

While the valley loses 1,000 acres a year to development, some government officials are conceding that projects essentially are rubber stamped if builders have their paperwork in order.

"It's a first-come, first-served type of approach," said County Manager Pat Shalmy.

In Las Vegas, the overriding perception is that politicians are puppets, with developers and casino owners pulling the strings.

"If you want to get re-elected, you need their money," said former County Commissioner Don Schlesinger.

He and others think growth will remain largely ignored until a crisis occurs.

"When people see that the net gain is not as great as the net loss, they'll want politicians to do something about growth," said Jim Denton, a political consultant in Reno and Las Vegas.

Dennis Myers, a Northern Nevada journalist, remembers when Reno residents almost overnight adopted a slow-growth mentality.

He said Reno politicians had always gotten elected by touting growth -- until the summer of 1978. That's when six casinos were built, leading to a huge population spurt. An influx of workers and new residents created a housing crunch that caused tent cities to sprout in parks and along river banks.

"You could work two jobs if you wanted to," Myers said. "You just couldn't find a place to live."

A new breed of politicians began running then, and winning.

Former Mayor Pete Sferrazza plastered billboards around Reno bragging that he had "kept the growth rate under 3 percent."

"That's when I fully understood the difference between Reno and Las Vegas," Schlesinger said. "You couldn't put that sign up in Las Vegas and expect to win."

Over the years, a civic ethic took hold in both cities, centering on different environmental attitudes, said van Ee. In Reno, for example, grocery stores give shoppers a nickel for every used paper bag they return. In Las Vegas, where recycling is an afterthought at best, baggers frequently place single items in individual plastic bags. Even the newspaper is placed in a separate plastic bag.

Other evidence of the differing viewpoints surfaced during the November election. Presidential candidate Ralph Nader's Green Party collected about 4,200 signatures to qualify for the ballot. All the signatures came from Northern Nevada except for 100 from Clark County.

Ironically, Denton, the political consultant, said both cities might be turning a corner.

Average citizens in Reno and Las Vegas are beginning to express views that, five years ago, would have typified the other city, he said.

Renoites are electing pro-business City Council members, and Las Vegans are saying in election surveys that they're tired of runaway growth, he said.

What will it take to bring a sense of reasonableness to growth in Las Vegas?

According to Schlesinger, nothing short of an uprising, as happened in Reno 19 years ago, will do the trick.

"Right now, the citizens don't have the appetite or the vision to get beyond bitching and moaning," he said. "There is restlessness, but it hasn't converted into a citizens' movement."

If that ever happened, public officials might be inclined to embrace realistic solutions, Schlesinger said.

He said an easy problem-solver would be to pass an ordinance requiring developers to chip in more toward "public facilities" such as parks and schools.

He also suggested that regional governments impose a hiring freeze and place the money from salary savings into an "infrastructure pot."

In its two-part series about growth in the West, the New York Times noted that Portland leaders have drawn a line around the city and said, in effect, "Growth can't go beyond here."

Many in Las Vegas think that a Portland-style no-growth circle is as unlikely here as a cold day in July.

The most realistic solution will come when casinos, which thrive only if Las Vegas projects a favorable image to the world, begin to feel the heat, said van Ee. More than 30 million people visit Las Vegas each year.

If casino owners sense that tourists are afraid to come here, they'll lean on politicians to impose a moratorium on new-home construction or to develop other dramatic measures.

"At some point, tourists are going to say that Las Vegas is not a place to get away from it all," van Ee said.

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