Editorial: Blight must be focus of new agency

Thursday, Dec. 19, 2002 | 8:53 a.m.

The concept of redevelopment is a late bloomer in the Las Vegas Valley. While other cities and counties in the country were forming redevelopment agencies in the 1940s and 1950s, the city of Las Vegas waited until 1986. New to the game, it made some high-profile blunders, including getting involved with dubious developers and misusing its power to seize private property. It's also had some high-profile projects -- the Stratosphere, Main Street Station, the Fremont Street Experience, and the Neonopolis and Charleston Plaza shopping centers are examples. On Tuesday the Clark County Commission voted 5-2 to create a redevelopment agency. We hope the county studies the experiences of other jurisdictions and avoids their missteps.

Redevelopment agencies have done more good than harm, as dozens of areas around the country can prove with before-and-after pictures. Their blunders, however, are what tend to linger in people's minds. It's the costly mistakes by the Las Vegas redevelopment agency -- particularly its use of eminent domain downtown -- that prompted commissioners Bruce Woodbury and Chip Maxfield to vote no on Tuesday. Their concerns are valid, but we see a redevelopment agency for the county as a positive development if its plan is sound.

That plan will be written over the next several months and it should focus solely on improving blighted areas. A valid criticism of many redevelopment agencies is that they serve well-off developers and corporations at the expense of taxpayers, while never really reducing blight or poverty. The county must also find a competent redevelopment administrator, one who will avoid such pitfalls as misuse of eminent domain.

Patience will also be needed. Redevelopment is primarily funded by making improvements within targeted areas, and dedicating all increases in tax collections within those areas to the agency. The agency uses that money to cover expenses and pay off the loans that financed the improvements that generated the tax increases. It can be decades before those tax increases can be used to help fund roads, social services and other public needs. The redevelopment agency can become a success, but only with oversight from a County Commission that understands its limitations and potential problems.