Lake Las Vegas residents play where they stay

Sunday, Dec. 19, 1999 | 10:07 a.m.

Thirty years ago it was just a dream: An oasis built around an artificial lake in some of the rockiest, must visually stunning geology of the Las Vegas Valley.

Today nearly 400 luxury homes and a just-opened hotel-casino attest to the fact that Lake Las Vegas is more than a desert mirage.

Developers say it is the first planned community in Southern Nevada to incorporate gaming, golf and water-based recreation side-by-side with housing. The $4 billion-plus planned community around the 320-acre lake is going up on 2,245 acres a few miles northwest of downtown Henderson.

The resort community's ambiance and target market are a world apart from Henderson, which is striving to abandon its old, honky-tonk image. Near downtown, many residents are living in homes built to house workers in factories that sprang up during World War II.

Just down the road, a 4-acre plot on the highest elevations over MonteLago -- the North Shore of Lake Las Vegas -- is for sale for $5 million. Sherri O'Boyle, Lake Las Vegas vice president of marketing, says she expects some families to buy multiple plots to establish "family estate compounds."

The high-priced Mediterranean-themed resort isn't having any trouble attracting buyers.

"We are just about 40 homes short of sold out" in the residential community of 360 homes already up on the South Shore, O'Boyle says.

At build-out, the South Shore will have about 900 homes, a mix of custom-built and production models, Lake Las Vegas spokeswoman Karen Summers says.

Home construction hasn't started on the north side of the lake, and development executives say they don't know how many homes will eventually be there. The number of homes depends on the market, Summers says.

People from all over the world have purchased property at the resort. A number of Pacific Rim countries are represented; Europeans and people from throughout the United States own property at Lake Las Vegas. But most of the owners are from Nevada -- 54 percent -- and California -- 20 percent.

Sue Brand and her husband, Richard Brand, are typical of those locals who have moved into Lake Las Vegas.

Sue Brand is a 40-year resident of Las Vegas who worked as a principal for the Clark County School District for 30 years. Richard Brand was a gaming-industry executive.

The couple searched the West to find a place that combined their love for the desert, golf, and a comfortable place to retire.

"I think this is the most exquisite spot in five states," Sue Brand said. The couple wanted to live in Southern Nevada, but before Lake Las Vegas was developed there wasn't a place that fit the bill.

"There was nothing else available that was anything like this in Southern Nevada," she said.

"The visual splendor of the place was the first thing that attracted us," she said of the lake. Privacy inside the gated community was another factor.

"It's like waking up to a symphony every day," Sue Brand says. "There's a different picture outside your window every day.

"We have a sense of community, a strong sense of privacy, all surrounded by exquisite beauty," she says. "What more could anyone ask?"

One of their new neighbors is the 496-room Hyatt Regency hotel-casino, which opened on Friday. Hyatt Regency Marketing Director Robert Purdy says the serenity of the lake and the setting's distinct difference from casinos elsewhere in the Las Vegas Valley are what drew the company to Lake Las Vegas.

The addition of the $150 million hotel-casino is the element that makes Lake Las Vegas complete, says Ronald F. Boeddeker, president and chairman of Transcontinental Corp., owner of Transcontinental Properties, the subsidiary that owns and is developing the project.

The Hyatt "brings balance for the first time to what we're creating, which is a destination resort," Boeddeker says. "The idea is to create an environment where people will live, work and play."

And two other up-market hotel companies are waiting in the wings to establish resorts on the shores of the lake, Boeddeker says.

Lake Las Vegas is master-planned for up to six hotel-casinos, but the community may end up with four, he says.

Boeddeker says he expects total purchase of all properties at the lake in six to eight years, and construction of the last hotel-casinos in eight to 10 years.

O'Boyle says the key to Lake Las Vegas is offering something different, even in the resort-choked atmosphere of Southern Nevada. It already has two Jack Nicklaus-designed golf courses -- one for the South Shore, one for the North.

But the obvious centerpiece is the lake itself, which sports bass and trout fishing, swimming, and sailboats and electric boats -- although no gasoline-motored vessels in order to protect lake's ecology.

While other planned communities, such as Summerlin, include resort features in the overall design, at Lake Las Vegas the resort is the community. It is a resort where people can live, O'Boyle says.

"The people we're marketing to say they want to live where they recreate," O'Boyle says.

The people who are playing in and around the lake aren't Joe and Jane Six-Pack. O'Boyle says without hesitation that Lake Las Vegas' market is "1/2 of 1 percent" of the population -- "We don't market to the masses."

For those who bought into the dream early, it was a good investment. A quarter-acre plot in 1994 sold for $185,000; today that same plot will go for well over $500,000.

Homesites from a quarter-acre and up sell for a minimum of $300,000 -- plus extra charges depending on the view -- but a buyer can easily find multimillion-dollar deals for the land alone.

Finished homes start around $500,000 and go up quickly.

Support from the city of Henderson was key to making Lake Las Vegas a reality. Through a state-sanctioned bond program, the city sold close to $100 million in Local Improvement District bonds issued by the resort community. City officials and Lake Las Vegas executives are quick to point out that the bonds are backed by resort real estate, not taxpayer money.

As a group, the property owners at the lake are the biggest source of property taxes in Henderson, says Phil Speight, Henderson city manager.

Property taxes for the resort community were $1.2 million last year; those taxes go to the county and then are returned to the city. According to Oren Clarke, the resort community's accounting director, the total tax contribution to Henderson and the county from sales taxes, business permits, utility taxes and other sources was $4.7 million over the last year.

The real property taxes for Lake Las Vegas will give Henderson an estimated $11 million by 2015, with an estimated total tax revenue of $24.5 million annually, Clarke says.

Although the taxes are starting to roll in now, Lake Las Vegas wasn't always a sure thing.

More than 30 years ago, the late J. Carlton Adair, an actor and businessman, started buying property in the Lake Mead area with the idea of building a lakefront resort -- an impossible proposition because of federal control of the lake shore.

In 1966 he traded his land for more than 2,200 acres controlled by the federal government. Included in the deal was a pledge for more than 10,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River, water Adair wanted to use to build an artificial lake.

Adair failed to draw sufficient investors to his dream and went bankrupt in 1972. Succeeding investors also failed to capitalize on the land and water.

In 1990 Transcontinental Properties bought the property. The Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company, which has developed resorts in California, New Mexico and Hawaii, was able to finally turn Adair's vision into a reality.

Not everyone was, or is, a fan of the project. The resort buys 2,000 acre-feet -- 652 million gallons -- of untreated Lake Mead water a year from Henderson to replace Lake Las Vegas water lost to evaporation.

Before the 18-story dam was built to contain the water, some argued that the water would be better used for suburban subdivisions in the valley.

Others said the area would be better off as a marshy wetland. The Las Vegas Wash is now piped under the lake on its way to Lake Mead.

"The conservation community supports reconstructing wetlands in their natural environment," says Jane Feldman, conservation co-chairwoman of the Sierra Club's Southern Nevada organization. "We don't support open bodies of water that are designed for landscaping or to enhance property values."

She said that a recent series of "town hall" meetings around the Las Vegas Valley prompted one consistent theme -- people attending said artificial lakes, golf courses and other water-consuming efforts should be restricted.

In fact, the county did restrict the creation of more large, artificial lakes after Lake Las Vegas and Lake Bellagio were built in the early 1990s.

But Feldman says Lake Las Vegas represents a betrayal of the desert.

"We're losing what's here," and what's here exists nowhere else in the wild, she says.

Larry Paulson, a Henderson environmentalist who worked as consultant to create the lake, doesn't agree.

"I don't look at reservoirs as a negative," Paulson says. "If it's done right, it's a heck of an amenity."

The reservoir and accompanying water systems for directing the Las Vegas Wash prevented extensive damage downstream during last summer's flooding, argues Steve Weber, who is responsible for the environmental balance of the water and land at the development.

The biggest part of Weber's job is to keep the water's animal and plant life in balance at Lake Las Vegas. He argues that the lake is a wetland -- 320 acres that's a resource for life in the desert.

"Before the lake was here, there were no wetlands, nothing," he said. And at the western end of the lake, there are now 8 acres of desert marshland that didn't exist before, Weber said.

"The unique thing about Lake Las Vegas, we try to manage the lake through biological means rather than chemicals," Weber said.

"It works pretty well. Fish are growing at fantastic rates, which is usually a pretty good indication that things are working."

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