LV business park offers rejuvenation

Debra D. Bass

Tuesday, May 20, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

In most Las Vegas neighborhoods, breaking ground on a new business park has become cliche, like three-digit temperatures and five o'clock traffic jams.

Few business complexes rank as stellar events for anyone but the owners, and even fewer still are saddled with the hopes of an entire community.

But a venture that broke ground Monday on the corner of Martin Luther King and Lake Mead boulevards -- Las Vegas Enterprise Park -- is being billed as a chance to reverse a cycle of poverty experienced by many residents in the area, who suffer from a lack of job opportunities and spiraling decay.

The new business complex hopes to attract 35 new businesses, making commitments to hire from within the community within the next six years. A City of Las Vegas business center will even launch an "incubator" program to promote residents to delve into small business ownership.

Jeffrey Maresh explained that the complex can help rebuild the area by starting a cycle of prosperity. New business means new jobs, and jobs mean more money available to be spent by residents. This in turn leads to more need for more business and the creation of even more jobs.

"This is a dream come true for me," said Edna Rose Crane, from whom the city purchased the land for the business complex.

She said she's been holding onto the land for years in hopes that such a center would be proposed.

In the 1950s, when Crane and her husband first sought land to purchase in the valley, she said they had no idea which way the city would develop. So they bought "hunks of land in the north, south, east and west" for practicality, she says.

Though the land in West Las Vegas was the first they purchased, she isn't remiss that it was the last to be sold.

Over the years, she admits that she could have sold portions of the 74 acres parcel intended for the business park a hundred times over. She didn't do that because she wanted what was best for the community.

She said there were numerous offers to build "cheap, inexpensive single family housing and other projects that would chop up the land. But those things would have made business opportunities on the rest of the site and in the area almost nil. I didn't want to do that because I didn't want this to become another ghetto in an urban city."

Holding onto the land was her way of guiding the development of the area, for which she received much praise from City Council members and Clark County commissioners at Monday's groundbreaking.

The Veteran's Administration Ambulatory Clinic will sit at one end of the complex and the Las Vegas Business Center will sit at the other. A McDonald's, complete with a play land facility, will also spring up along the border of the property.

Michael Majewski, director of the city's business development office, said he initially predicted that it would take 12 years to fully develop the complex. But the interest he has received in recent months suggest that time will be cut in half.

The success he says is in the planning. Few businesses would have been attracted to the property if there were no master plan, he said.

"Because of the infrastructure ... we will insure it now makes this a good commercial real estate investment," Majewski said. "Edna could have always sold the corner pieces, but she made a commitment to create a business development."