RTC OKs monorail to downtown

Friday, Nov. 10, 2000 | 10:40 a.m.

Bob Broadbent, whose management firm is building a monorail on the Las Vegas Strip, said the Regional Transportation Commission's decision Thursday to extend such service downtown would help modernize local transportation.

However, Broadbent, a former Clark County aviation director, assistant county manager and county commissioner, cautioned that the RTC's expansion plan is still in its formative stages and its financing is still up in the air.

The commission approved plans to construct a downtown arm to the $100 million-per-mile monorail that Broadbent's company, Transit Systems Management, is building on the Strip, starting at the MGM Grand at Tropicana Avenue to Bally's at Flamingo Road.

The proposed new arm would stretch from Fremont Street to Sahara Avenue. An already approved monorail expansion is to be built from Flamingo Road past the Las Vegas Convention Center to Sahara.

There is no guarantee Broadbent's management company will be hired to do the downtown expansion, but he says he is interested in the proposal.

"Nothing is for certain, but we could do it a lot less expensively because we have the infrastructure," Broadbent said today. "Also we already are in negotiations for the trains, and that too would be a lot less expensive.

"Besides, there are not a lot of companies out there building monorails"

Broadbent, who for 40 years as a public servant played a role in the growth of Southern Nevada, including assisting in the creation of the charter for Boulder City, said such projects are needed if the valley hopes to meet its 21st century transportation needs.

"We have to do something to get people to work on the resort corridor where 60 percent of our employment is," Broadbent said. "Our system is environmentally better because it runs on electricity."

Broadbent, who served as assistant secretary of Interior for water and science under President Ronald Reagan, said he felt "the RTC made the right decision (Thursday) because it chose the preferred alternative in its environmental impact statement," including approving the monorail as the technology.

"But everything depends on the financial plan -- where the money is going to come from to build it."

In May 1997 Broadbent left the aviation post where he had overseen McCarran International Airport through $1 billion of improvements in more than 10 years to help expand what in effect was a monorail ride into a transportation mode.

At the time, the RTC was considering its own system, but halted plans to see how the privately funded project would work.

Broadbent says he hopes to have his monorail up and operating by January 2004.