Trash bag factory OK’d despite residents’ protests

Jeffrey Libby

Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2001 | 11:17 a.m.

A Texas-based trash bag maker received permission from a reluctant Henderson City Council Tuesday to build the largest manufacturing plant constructed in a decade in the Las Vegas Valley, just a stone's throw from an upscale rural neighborhood in southeast Henderson.

The proposed 380,000-square-foot plant was approved over a resident's appeal. Council members cited old obligations and the 500 jobs the plant promises to bring. But they said they wished things had been different.

About 100 residents who opposed the project went home empty-handed, some threatening lawsuits. One Mission Hills resident shouted insults as the crowd filed out of City Hall.

George Hall, vice president of manufacturing for the parent company, Poly-America, delayed his departure after the vote at the request of a deputy police chief, who wanted to let the grumbling crowd disperse first.

"It was not a happy evening. It was a difficult thing," Mayor Jim Gibson said after the meeting. "But one of the prices you pay when you aggressively recruit businesses is that in some respects, you're stuck with what you have."

In this case, the Henderson City Council was stuck with a 24-hour manufacturing giant butting up against homes on half-acre lots that fetch anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000. The plant will serve as Poly West's western regional hub for such clients as Wal-Mart and Costco.

The dilemma of incompatible uses, Gibson said, came as a result of "anomalies in land-use maps that could be improved."

Councilmen Jack Clark and Steve Kirk both wished aloud that Poly West had proposed the plant for the BMI industrial area. Councilwoman Amanda Cyphers, who represents the ward where the plant will be built, was absent.

Clark said had the application been new, he would have denied it. But since Poly West had proposed a similar plant in 1994 on the same 45 acres off Conestoga Way, he wanted to honor the expired permits.

Little time was spent reviewing major fires and labor problems at the company's Texas plant. Nor did the council discuss the relatively low wages the company will pay, compared with other Clark County manufacturing jobs -- about $6,500 a year less than similar industries.

The council approved the plant by a 3-1 vote with Kirk dissenting.

The vote overturned an appeal of a planning board decision in August to grant a variance for 32 75-foot high silos. The light industrial park allows a maximum building height of 50 feet. As a condition of the approval, Poly West must dig deep enough into the foothills to sink the storage silos to below 50 feet from the existing grade.

But many argued that the incompatibility of the plant went beyond the towering silos.

As a manufacturing facility that would be trucking in raw materials by rail each week for processing, the plant did not meet guidelines set out for the light industrial park, said Jack Jeffrey, a Mission Hills resident and former city councilman who helped establish the Wagon Wheel industrial park.

The park codes, approved in the mid-1970s, prohibited "raw materials processing or bulk handling," Jeffrey said. The council at that time, he said, wanted the park to co-exist with a newly created rural residential neighborhood -- Mission Hills.

But a memorandum prepared by Assistant City Attorney Liza Conroy refers to pellets that will be stored in the silos before being melted into bags as "previously prepared materials." That term, she writes, "is not defined in the code."

Jeffrey called the Hughes' opinion "word games" that would set a precedent for other developers to build plants similar to Poly West. Existing plants at the park are primarily distribution centers.

Poly-America's Hall could not say for sure if he could meet the condition that the silos be sunk 25 feet, but said, "We're going to work on it."

It was similar to much of his remarks before the City Council. Council members asked him to limit delivery times to meet concerns of neighbors. The plant expects deliveries from 30 rail cars and 375 tractor-trailers a month when operating at full capacity.

But Hall told them he couldn't control delivery times. Hall also resisted efforts by Gibson to find ways to cut the actual height, rather than the apparent height, of the silos.

He did, however, agree to move the mammoth building 60 feet toward the highway, to add landscaping and to spend an extra $750,000 in added excavation costs.