The sounds of progress: Residents say wall needed when highway is widened

Jeffrey Libby

Monday, March 19, 2001 | 11:19 a.m.

It's one of those jarring illusions you might rather leave at the funhouse, but Henderson resident Camille Randol sees it just about every time she looks out her back yard -- St. Rose Parkway traffic humming along the top of her peach-toned block wall.

The gravity-defying image will likely grow clearer, and louder.

The Nevada Department of Transportation is holding a public hearing Tuesday to discuss plans for widening the two-lane road to an eight-lane arterial hurtling southwest from Green Valley to Interstate 15 along a six-mile stretch of undeveloped desert.

By 2024 state planners project that more than 73,000 cars and trucks will travel the roadway daily, coming from as far east as Lake Las Vegas. About 12,000 cars use the road daily today.

With construction scheduled to start by fall 2002, the $60 million widening project will coincide with the city's plans to develop a handful of master-planned communities on 6,200 acres of newly acquired land sandwiched between St. Rose and I-15.

"It will be two years before we're doing anything (with the land)," Henderson planner Bristol Ellington said. "But we want to make sure we have an attractive front door to the community."

Randol, who moved into her Southfork home in 1996, one of 1,005 four-plexes and single-family homes on both sides of St. Rose Parkway, is more concerned with preserving what little peace she has left in her back yard.

"I think we've been duped," she said. "If you'll notice, we're the only development here. There's nothing around us."

At least nothing residential. The zonings at the intersection of Eastern Avenue and St. Rose Parkway, which was dirt when Southfork was built in 1994, have been for the most part changed to commercial.

The new Siena campus of the St. Rose Dominican Hospital sits kitty-cornered from the Southfork development, across the intersection of St. Rose and Eastern, bringing the inevitable ambulance traffic.

At each of the other corners, commercial developments are up or going up. Heavy traffic empties north along Eastern Avenue from Anthem Del Webb, Seven Hills and other recently built master-planned communities.

The Henderson Public Works Department has vague plans to widen city-owned Eastern Avenue from four lanes to six, but at an undetermined date.

Randol says when she bought her home, the developer never told her the state had plans to make a highway out of the two-lane road beyond her back yard. She contends, though, that the plans go back as far as 1994, two years before she moved in.

No one ever brought her attention to the state's 300-foot right-of-way couched around the road either. It was known then merely as State Route 146, or West Lake Mead Drive.

But since that time, both Eastern Avenue and St. Rose Parkway have been raised as they have been improved to meet the southwestward push of Henderson, residents say. They have minimized, almost to nil, the screening effect the ornamental block wall once had.

Planners deny that the roads have been raised. They acknowledge, however, that the road width of St. Rose Parkway will be extended north at the height it is now. For most of Southfork, which is situated at the lower end of a gradually declining slope, that will mean watching dump trucks spread several thousand yards of fill just beyond their block wall. It also will mean raising Eastern Avenue by several feet to meet St. Rose.

"What I tell people is that it's going to be like living inside a racetrack," Ron Hughes, another Southfork resident said. "The noise level is going to be absolutely atrocious."

NDOT doesn't think so.

Despite the planned expansion of St. Rose from two to eight lanes, no sound walls have been drawn into preliminary plans.

"We don't need them," Daryl James, an NDOT environmental administrator, said. James added that air quality issues shouldn't be a problem either.

Randol says the sound walls are needed, despite what the guidelines say.

"The plans from February are on display at the (Lydia Malcolm) library, and the road doesn't meet the federal guidelines for decibel levels," she said. "I know the road is going to widen no matter what I say. I know that. Because there was no vote. They decided on their own. But we want a sound wall. That's all we're asking for."

Stan Sidaris, another Southfork resident, also worries about the summer heat, which causes auto exhaust pooling above eight lanes of traffic to settle back in a brown haze. With just two lanes of traffic, the exhaust already bothers him.

"I come out to get the paper at 6 a.m., almost like clockwork, and the air is polluted with diesel," Sidaris said.

Pat Matthews, another resident, said one of her neighbors can now look out her second-story bedroom window and meet the level gaze of truckers looking back while stopped in traffic.

McKenzie said the purpose of the hearing is to get public input.

"Nothing has been decided yet," he said.

But many of the Southfork residents say they feel like plenty has been decided since the last public meeting in 1999.

Hughes said the Henderson Planning Commission has yet to take up a plan it tabled in December to amend city street master plans to reflect the widening of St. Rose Parkway to 154 feet. The commission also has yet to organize the neighborhood meeting it planned to air concerns about the proposed change, he said.

"They (the city and the state) have had meetings, because they are required to by law," Hughes said. "And they didn't give a damn what anybody said. First they said we're just going to talk about it. Then they said, well, let's do a study of Lake Mead Drive. Then it's let's do an environmental study. Next thing you know, they have an eight-lane highway running through your back yard."

Meanwhile, the city is going forward with plans to prepare the 6,200 acres bordering the widening project out to bid for developers.

Earlier this month, the City Council approved $52,500 to pay the Meyers Group to outline marketing plans for the development of Henderson's future front door and the new gateway to the Las Vegas Valley, which will be hard to miss as Californians and tractor-trailers steam up I-15.

The Meyers Group has worked previously as a liaison between the city and such major developers as Del Webb, Terrabrook and Sunrise Colony.

Within six months they plan to submit their report to the city. By 2002, roughly the same time the widening project is set to begin, the Bureau of Land Management, which still retains ownership of the 6,200 acres, will begin auctioning the land according to land use regulations drawn up by the city.

"It's just as if they shut their eyes to the people's rights and to the people's health," Richard Katz, a Southfork resident, said. "I thought a casino might be across the street. We all thought we could live with that. But these highways. It just isn't right."