Dust bowl: Planners consider paving alleys in city’s downtown area

Jeffrey Libby

Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2002 | 11:03 a.m.

About twice a year, Henderson resident Michael Sager, 65, climbs between two sawhorses and sits in a chair balanced on an old door. Using a screwdriver, he pokes new holes in the dust-caked pads of the swamp cooler outside his downtown home.

"I get a lot of dust in the cooler from the alley," Sager, a retired Nevada Test Site administrator and real estate salesman, said. "Most people change the pads out more often, but I don't."

Cheryl Sanchez, a laid-off casino manager who lives on Tungsten Street, said she changes filters on her air conditioner three times a week. She's downwind of another dirt alley that runs between Tungsten and Basic Road, and she has an asthmatic son.

"I dusted my bedroom yesterday and I can already write my name on the TV," Sanchez said Monday. She was in her driveway Monday washing her pickup.

All but a handful of the 20-odd alleys in downtown Henderson have remained dirt since the federal government built 1,000 "townsite" homes in the early 1940s to house workers from the magnesium processing plants. The plants produced materials for incendiary bombs and for lighter, faster aircraft employed during World War II.

But as city planners assemble requests for the next budget -- fiscal year 2002-03 -- they are for the first time weighing the cost of paving downtown alleys as part of ongoing efforts to revive the oldest residential and commercial neighborhood in town.

"The town is almost 50 years old and this is a first, honest attempt," Bob Wilson, manager of the city redevelopment agency, said. "We may not get the funding, but it's something people want and it fits in with the city's priorities" of reinvesting in downtown and other mature areas.

Today, empty garbage cans blow in the belly of alleys bordered by fences in every style imaginable -- chainlink, chicken wire, cement block, barnboard, bamboo, picket and rebar, to name a few.

The yards the fences enclose are often as dusty as the alleys, and many are packed with cars on blocks, burned-out vehicles and mobile homes guarded by dogs in twos and threes. Occasionally there's a thriving rose bush or a shiny plastic swing set.

The fences and the hulks of cars do little to keep the dust from clogging home air filters, freezing up cooling system fans and blowing through ducts into living rooms.

Asphalt alleys may not change everything, Wilson said, but they might help reduce some of the dust.

The redevelopment agency and the Public Works Department initially estimated costs of improving 23 downtown alleys at between $1.6 million and $13.2 million, although Mark Calhoun, assistant city manager, on Monday asked the two departments to check the numbers again. The project costs could be spread over several fiscal years, Wilson said, but no final word on funding will be available before the City Council approves the 2002-03 budget in May.

In both scenarios, paving would cost about $500,000, which would likely be covered by $24 million in federal funds appropriated in 2001 as part of a valleywide mandate to reduce traffic congestion and dust pollution. Henderson's share for paving dirt roads is $6 million, and it must be spent before 2006.

The more costly estimate would also allow the city to bury power, phone and cable lines and to remove the power poles. Those poles get clipped often enough by garbage trucks negotiating the narrow lanes that many have been girded with aluminum. Others are braced to a "stub" pole -- the remainder of an earlier pole that didn't make it.

Those close quarters are what make it difficult to estimate the costs, and what forced the city to use 1999 numbers to estimate the cheaper route, which would leave utilities above-ground but move poles to the edge of the alleys.

Nevada Power and Cox Cable declined to provide the city with new estimates on short-notice, city planners said, instead asking the city to re-survey property lines in the neighborhood.

"As soon as you decide to move poles, what if you then find out there's a tree in the way now that's been there for 50 years?" Jonna Sansom, a city engineer, said. "It's great to improve those areas, but it's going to take some work."

Ryan Bandics, a 27-year-old art teacher for the city parks and recreation department, said the legwork would prove worthwhile.

Bandics and his son Cavan, 5, on Monday afternoon were out in a clearing where three alleys meet behind Atlantic and Pacific Avenues. They were trying to get Cavan's first kite airborne. Bandics said paving the alleys would help the neighborhood.

"It'd be one step closer, if they're going to redevelop the downtown," Bandics said. "Right now, on weekends, guys come through with four-wheelers and ATVs. It's noisy. They do brodies (spin-outs). It sets all the dogs off."

Sanchez said she'd be willing to pay more in taxes in exchange for the paving. In the long run it might save money in doctor's bills and air filters, she said.

Sager, however, who remembers dragging boxes behind his bike as a child to plague a grumpy Magnesium Street neighbor with the kicked-up dust, wasn't convinced.

"What's the end result for old townsite?" he said. "The city wants to tear down all these old houses. So what do they want to spend all that money for?"

Ben Benell may have an answer. He lives at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Magnesium Street, downwind from one of the rare sections of paved alleyway.

"No, no problem with dust," he said. When the wind blows past his home Benell hears music from the dozen sets of chimes hung along the roofline.