Expanded northeast roadway proposed

Thursday, March 28, 2002 | 11:14 a.m.

Meetings The Nevada Department of Transportation will hold two informational meetings on the Northeast Corridor Study on proposed road systems in the northeast Las Vegas Valley.

The first will be 4 to 7 p.m. Tuesday at the North Las Vegas City Library, 2300 Civic Center Drive.

The second will be 4 to 7 p.m. April 9 in the student activity center, Desert Pines High School, 3800 E. Harris Ave., Las Vegas.

A Nevada Department of Transportation-funded study is recommending a potentially controversial new roadway as one way to ease traffic congestion in the Las Vegas Valley's northeast.

The "Interstate 15 Northeast Corridor Study" looks ahead two decades and finds that roads in the area, already overloaded, are neither numerous nor wide enough to handle projected traffic demands.

One of two proposals recommended for further study includes an Eastern Beltway to run from North Las Vegas to Henderson through the valley's east side. The proposal would cost about $1 billion and displace 900 to 1,500 homes and businesses, according to the NDOT report.

The area studied roughly encompasses Martin Luther King Boulevard on the west to Hollywood Boulevard and Nellis Air Force Base on the east, and Grand Teton Drive on the north to Charleston Boulevard on the south.

The study evaluated four proposals and recommended two:

Alternatives that would include building the Eastern Beltway closer to the city of Las Vegas, or building an Eastern Beltway without widening I-15, were not recommended in the study.

The Eastern Beltway recommendation will almost certainly prompt political and public opposition since it would run through heavily populated neighborhoods, mostly in unincorporated Clark County.

Clark County Commission Chairman Dario Herrera is one of at least three commissioners whose districts would be affected by the proposed course of the Eastern Beltway.

"Obviously, I want to reserve final judgment," Herrera said. "But I would give great deference to the residents of the area that would be impacted by this."

He said road planners would have to study the impacts closely. NDOT Assistant Director Kent Cooper agreed.

"The impacts would be fairly large," Cooper said. "There does appear to be some need, but there's a lot of questions left unanswered."

He noted that any action, including widening existing roadway arterials, will impact people in the east side of the valley.

"The people on the east side of the valley face some decision," Cooper said. "Transportation to work, for recreation or shopping: What type of facilities do they want? They all are going to have impacts."

Development planned in North Las Vegas and Henderson will take an already congested traffic system and make it worse, he said. Expansions of U.S. 95/93 and I-15 are almost certainly going to be needed, but probably won't be enough to handle all the increased traffic.

"We're anticipating a lot of future development," agreed Mira Brown, an NDOT transportation analyst. "We still get approximately 6,000 people moving here a month. We're anticipating traffic to increase, really every day.

"What this study is, is just anticipating what in the northeast could happen and coming up with some kind of plan to alleviate congestion."

Cathy Razor, a consultant working on the project, stressed that the study's results don't mean construction would start anytime soon.

"It's not a sure thing," said Razor, who is a veteran of years of fights over the widening of U.S. 95 in the northwest valley. "Further evaluation needs to occur, especially on all of these impacts."

Cooper said another ongoing study on the southeast valley's traffic system will try to answer the question of how an Eastern Beltway would connect to the existing Interstate 215, Las Vegas Beltway, to the south.

NDOT and its consultants will present the study to the Clark County Commission Tuesday and will hold two informational meetings for the public in April.