Parks first: Open space part of planning

Jeffrey Libby

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

The Las Vegas Valley has earned praise for its approach to preserving open space even as the pace of development continues to soar in the area.

"Everywhere else in the country where population centers are still growing, development occurs first and open space is an afterthought," said Destry Jarvis, executive director of the National Recreation and Park Association in Ashburn, Va. "(In Southern Nevada), it's a forethought."

Southern Nevada's success is a result of city, county, state and federal agencies sharing resources -- and a novel strategy on open space, Jarvis said. The idea is to ensure that every valley resident is within 500 yards of a trail that connects to a park. Access to parkland is more important than acreage, Jarvis said.

The praise comes despite the fact that Southern Nevada governments still lag behind the national average of providing five acres of parkland for every 1,000 residents.

The average here hovers closer to 2.25 acres per 1,000 residents, about half of the parkland available in other parts of the country, according to the Urban Land Institute, a privately funded international group that studies land use issues.

That slight improvement from the 2.16 acres per thousand available in 1997 came despite a 34 percent increase in park space, thanks to $180 million earmarked for new parks over the past five years. As municipalities opened 827 acres of new parks, the population increased by 322,000.

One example of Southern Nevada's innovative approach is the River Mountain Loop Trail, a 35-mile paved trail being built around the valley and southeast to Lake Mead National Recreation Area and the Hoover Dam. It is being funded primarily by federal and matching funds for the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act.

That federal legislation, passed in October 1998, helped cement relationships between the various government agencies. It allows the sale of 27,000 acres of federally owned land surrounding the Las Vegas Valley and requires the Bureau of Land Management to use money from land auctions to buy environmentally sensitive land for preservation and to improve other land for public use.

Sales to date of 4,126 acres at $122.6 million have pumped $78.5 million back to the state. Of that money, $22.4 million has been appropriated directly to Southern Nevada for development of parks and trails, such as the River Mountain Loop Trail. Another $40 million in proposed funding -- including $13 million for more than 100 miles of trails through the Las Vegas Valley -- is expected to be approved by the Department of Interior in June.

"There were times when politicians in Clark County looked at the federal lands as irrelevant, evil or as a roadblock to the future, but today I think the leaders realize that the different agencies are in it together," Jarvis said.

Local governments are also negotiating similar agreements with private developers, waiving new construction taxes in exchange for privately financed public parks. The parks increase neighboring land values and save cities millions of dollars in construction costs, municipal park planners say.

In North Las Vegas such agreements allowed the city to more than double the park acres opened for public use between 1997 and this year, Al Brown, North Las Vegas manager of park maintenance services, said. Private developers built 37 acres of parks. The city built another 20 acres of parks and a recreation center at a cost of $12.7 million.

A North Las Vegas development planned for 1,900 acres will include another 45 acres of park space. If a maximum of 7,500 homes are built, as allowed by plans, and households average 3.67 people -- which is the case in the remainder of North Las Vegas -- that would supply 1.6 acres per 1,000 residents, the citywide average today.

Most municipalities hope to increase their average to at least 2.5 acres per 1,000, based on a study by the Southern Nevada Regional Planning Authority, a group formed after a 1997 legislative mandate.

The rationale behind the goal was based on the realities of living in a desert and the changing needs of Southern Nevada households, Jeff Harris, Clark County director of park planning, said.

"More young, professional families and their kids are moving to the valley, and their kids want to play soccer and the girls want to play Bobby Sox (softball)," Harris said. "We're starting to see a more sophisticated community."

Clark County built 259 acres of parkland in the past five years, in large part through a $52 million tax-neutral revenue bond approved internally in 2000. Similar to North Las Vegas, the county since 1999 has required developers of parcels 300 acres or larger to put aside 2.5 acres per 1,000 projected residents.

If new residents have more sophisticated needs, they're not always willing to pay for them.

When the city of Las Vegas in 1996 floated a $25 million bond for parks and recreation, voters rejected it.

Since then Las Vegas has avoided asking voters for park money, Stacy Alzbruck, spokeswoman for Las Vegas Leisure Services, said. Instead, the city issued four midterm bonds that didn't require public approval, generating from $10 million to $12 million annually for new parks, finance director Mark Vincent said.

That money, combined with roughly $4.5 million annually in room taxes from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and another $2 million in new residential construction taxes, has supplied the most dramatic increase in developed park space for any municipality in Southern Nevada.

From 1997 to this year, Las Vegas nearly doubled its park space, jumping from 399 acres to 794 acres.

"The City Council made the decision that any general fund revenues available after operating expenditures -- half or more of those would go toward parks projects," Vincent said.

In Henderson city officials during much of the past five years built on the strength of a $55 million voter-approved park bond, adding 111 new acres of parks with another 140 acres in design or under construction.

In 1999 Henderson won a national gold medal for its parks and earned national accreditation in February 2001.

Despite adding substantial parkland, however, Henderson's acreage per 1,000 residents dropped slightly, from 3.1 to 2.8. Between 1997 and July 2001, 54,700 people moved to Henderson, increasing the population by 38 percent.

Boulder City, a town that sidestepped the rapid growth experienced by the Las Vegas Valley with an ordinance that limits permits for new homes to about 120 annually, managed to maintain 5 acres per 1,000 residents without adding a single acre of park space.

Alan O'Neill, executive director of the nonprofit organization Outside Las Vegas, is less concerned with the "technicalities" of actual park acres. Like Jarvis, he is more focused on coordinating efforts of local, state and federal government agencies with available resources to build more trails to connect residents with adjacent federal land. "We're dealing with 7 million acres of federal land in Southern Nevada," O'Neill said. "So how we create ownership and long-term stewardship of the land is important, not only for tourism or for environmental concerns, but for the people who live here."

The efforts of his organization, just more than a year old, are a large part of the reason Jarvis says Southern Nevada is breaking new ground nationally. Only officials in the Puget Sound area of Washington are coordinating efforts in a similar way, Jarvis said. Atlanta is starting to coordinate, but is not as far along, Jarvis said.

"From a certain perspective, Las Vegas gets a bad rap," Jarvis said, "But in this respect, Las Vegas is on the cutting edge. There's no model."