School district races builders for land

By Emily Richmond

Friday, Nov. 29, 2002 | 4:07 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION: Dec. 1, 2002

Matt LaCroix studies the large map of the Las Vegas Valley pinned to the wall behind his desk at the Clark County School District's real estate office, the geography marked with a dizzying array of colored squares, flags and boundary lines.

It's a battlefield map, and LaCroix -- assistant director of real property management -- is one of the generals.

LaCroix was brought in two years ago to make sure the district has space to build schools -- a difficult task in a valley of massive growth coupled with a shrinking market of available land.

"Making sure there's space for schools isn't about having inventory," LaCroix said. "It's about having the right land at the right time."

The school district is engaged in a high-stakes game of Monopoly with developers as they both scramble to determine where the next building boom will be and snatch up valuable land.

It's the same struggle that's going on nationwide, although none on the scale seen in Clark County.

The extensive -- and expensive -- school construction process is complicated by the fact that developers have few legal obligations that compel them to work with the district to ensure land exists for campuses.

"It would be wonderful if developers had a clear responsibility to work with us, instead of what we have, which is a few who cooperate and a whole bunch who don't," School Board President Sheila Moulton said.

While a third of the states allow communities to charge developers fees to cover the impact new homes have on schools, parks and other public facilities, Nevada does not. Since 1998, district officials have spent about $75 million buying up parcels throughout the Las Vegas Valley in anticipation of continued growth. That's half of the money approved for land acquisition under a $3.5 billion capital-improvement plan.

It costs the district the most to buy land in areas that are already highly developed. That's why planning ahead of the growth is so essential, LaCroix said.

When determining the potential effect a new subdivision may have on area schools, the district calculates how many children are likely to move into the neighborhood. A luxury golf course community of high-end houses would likely bring fewer students than a dense development of single family homes.

However, it's not unusual for developers to change their minds late in the game, which can have a disastrous effect on the district's plans, said Dusty Dickens, director of zoning and demographics.

"We might be expecting a luxury development aimed at people 55 and older, with no kids," Dickens said. "Then we turn around, and suddenly there are 500 new single-family homes on the market instead, which means 300 new kids we need to find classroom seats for."

Such flip-flops are frustrating, Dickens said, and one of the reasons the district has as many portable classrooms as it does.

"Is it the ideal situation? Of course not," Dickens said. "But we do what we have to."

Leslie Bausher, vice president of home builder American West, said her company has cultivated a working relationship with the school district.

"It's important that the school district know where we're going, because it's important that our home buyers have access to all the facilities and services they need," Bausher said.

Bausher said she understood the difficulty of establishing such a relationship given their different priorities.

"It's a conundrum," Bausher said. "You have private industry operating within the entrepreneurial spirit to fill a need, and then there's the school district, a public entity with all of the politics and bureaucracy that entails."

Irene Porter, Southern Nevada Home Builders Association executive director, said conversations between the district and developers are becoming more common, but are still not happening often enough.

"I'd like to see a regular, ongoing dialogue," Porter said. "These are relationships that really need to be nurtured, for all of our benefit."

Numerous telephone calls to many leading builders were not returned. Several companies refused to comment. When asked why he was reluctant to be interviewed, one builder said he didn't want to be blamed for causing school overcrowding.

It's true that many of the schools are housing hundreds -- and in some cases, nearly 1,000 -- more students than they were designed to serve. And many of those extra students are coming from new home developments, apartment complexes and condominiums. But district officials say they aren't interested in playing the blame game -- they just want to ensure there are enough classroom seats to go around.

The school district's enrollment has soared nearly 40 percent since 1996, to more than 255,000 students. It breaks ground on a new school site nearly every month, but construction still isn't fast enough to keep up. It's not unusual for some schools to get new students on a daily basis, officials said.

The district faces an "overwhelming task" to meet the demands of the community for traditional neighborhood schools, said Martha Young, associate dean of the School of Education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

"People who move here have expectations that schools will be a certain way," Young said. "What they find is class sizes that are too large and neighborhoods that are constantly being rezoned. In the old days, your child switched schools because the family moved, not the boundary lines."

Keeping up with those expectations can be a source of tension between the district and the public, Young said.

"Most people who move here probably don't know that developers aren't required to provide the district with land," Young said. "They just know they want their children's schools to be like the ones that existed 10 or 20 years ago."

State statutes allow the school district to demand land from developers under certain conditions. That gives school officials some power over developers, although they rarely wield it.

When a builder submits plans to the county for a subdivision -- defined as five or more parcels of land -- a copy of the preliminary map is sent to the school district. Officials then have 15 days after receiving the map to determine whether a school site is needed, and to notify the builder. The builder is then required to sell a parcel of the land to the district at market value.

The notification process might be enough in a smaller community with less growth, LaCroix said. But in the Las Vegas Valley, where hundreds of subdivisions are in the works on any given day, it's impossible to track them all, he said.

Instead, district officials watch for the more sizable projects and then take their concerns directly to the developer, LaCroix said.

"Sometimes we're successful at convincing (developers) that a well-designed school within the development would be an asset for them," LaCroix said. "Sometimes we're not, and that's when it gets expensive for us."

LaCroix declined to specify projects where the district was forced to buy costly land because developers wouldn't cooperate.

"Let's just say some situations have been more challenging than others," he said.

One way the district saves money on land purchases is by acquiring Bureau of Land Management parcels. The district is allowed to designate BLM land as potential school sites even if there are no immediate plans for development in the area. The district can later acquire the land for thousands -- instead of hundreds of thousands -- of dollars.

In some instances when the proposed school site interferes with design plans, developers will ask the school district to rescind its claim on the BLM parcel in exchange for land elsewhere. Such trades are common, particularly within larger master-planned communities.

"Having the BLM land ensures that an educational facility can be constructed to address the educational needs of the kids moving into the development," LaCroix said.

Occasionally a developer will donate land to the district, but often it is a less-than-desirable parcel that requires extensive excavation and expensive infrastructure, LaCroix said. However, that's still better than having to buy land at market value, LaCroix said.

More aggressiveness

John Schlegel, Clark County's Comprehensive Planning director, said that in the past few years he has seen the school district become more aggressive in its long-term planning.

Before, the district seemed to wait for developers to declare their intentions and then struggled to catch up, Schlegel said. Now, the district earmarks BLM land in high-growth areas, which gives school officials leverage when dealing with developers later on, Schlegel said.

"Instead of trying to negotiate individual school sites with individual developers, the district has already declared they are first in line for that land," Schlegel said. "It seems like it's been an effective strategy."

It's also a strategy that seems to have worked in North Las Vegas, where the district had already flagged two BLM parcels when developers announced plans for a 1,905-acre master-planned community.

For the upcoming Aliante project, developers agreed to put 12 acres of land within the community on reserve, said Carol Bailey, a school district site-development planner. That means if school enrollment booms, or developers choose to lift age restrictions on one of the seniors-only neighborhood, the district will already have land for a school, she said.

"In this case, we're ahead of the game," Bailey said.

The project's lead developers are Del Webb Communities Inc. and American Nevada Corp., which is owned by the Greenspun family, which also owns the Las Vegas Sun.

"It would be wonderful if the school district and the developers could always come to an understanding ahead of time," said Jacquie Risner, North Las Vegas community development director. "In this case, it seems like both sides realized how much smoother it can be to have a commitment up front to work with each other instead of against each other."

Schlegel also endorsed such a scenario of cooperative spirit, but said it was unlikely given the "independent nature" of many of the area's smaller builders.

When builders come in with design plans, Schlegel said he routinely asks them to consider the potential effect on everything from transportation to parks to schools.

"I say, 'You should be thinking about that,' " Schlegel said. "They say to me over and over again, 'It's you're problem, you fix it. That's what you guys in the public sector get paid to do.' "

With larger projects developers tend to be more cooperative because they are an integral part of the "big picture," Schlegel said. Developers putting up dozens of houses on 40-acre parcels are tougher to convince, Schlegel said.

Move on

"Their attitude is finish it, sell it and move on," Schegel said. "But when they move on, the houses they built stay, and so does the impact."

In Clark County, school construction is paid for with funds from real estate transfer fees, hotel room taxes and bond sales. In some communities, the cost of school construction is offset by impact fees, a set amount charged to developers before home construction begins.

Some argue that the people building the neighborhoods, developments and apartment complexes should pick up the tab for the new schools needed for the future residents. But many builders say they are already doing enough, chipping in for infrastructure, parks and police and fire stations.

Currently 17 states use impact fees on new commercial and residential construction to pay for public facilities, according to the American Planning Association.

Opponents of impact fees for school construction say the cost punishes home buyers because builders simply tack on the extra cost to the price of the house. There's also no way of knowing in advance whether the home buyer will have children, opponents note.

But supporters of the fee system say it's a realistic way to pay for growth, and developers have thus far been given a free ride.

"The school district has to hunt, peck, beg, plead and borrow to have adequate land to build schools," said Sharon Linsenbardt, who lives in northwest Las Vegas and is a frequent speaker at county zoning meetings. "It should be a given that developers have to either set aside land or pay the school district directly to accommodate the families who will be moving into those new homes."

Linsenbardt said that to see evidence of the school district's plight she has to look no farther than across the street from her house. It's there that the district bought a 36-acre parcel at the corner of Buffalo Drive and Grand Teton Way. The site will likely be used to build a high school and draw enrollment from neighborhoods currently served by Centennial and Western high schools, district officials said.

'Ridiculous'

"We hear all the time how broke the district is, yet they had to shell out tax dollars and buy land," Linsenbardt said. "It's ridiculous. Insulting and ridiculous."

Before the school district could benefit from impact fees, state statutes would have to be changed.

Nevada allows the use of impact fees for sewage, drainage, water and street projects in the area immediate to where the fees are levied. During the 2001 Legislature, lawmakers approved letting local governments also use impact fees to pay for parks and fire and police stations.

But when it comes to paying for school construction, impact fees are forbidden -- except in Nevada's smallest counties.

State law allows only counties with populations under 35,000 to approve a tax of $1,000 for each new house, apartment or mobile home space. Under the law, local school boards must ask the county to impose the tax. So far, only Douglas and Storey counties have done so.

For years, a small number of lawmakers and educators have lobbied unsuccessfully to have the population cap eliminated so that the state's largest counties -- Clark and Washoe -- could benefit from the extra funds.

With 15,871 residential building permits issued in Clark County last year, impact fees could have yielded millions of dollars.

"We've tried and tried, but we're never able to get the votes," Assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani, D-Las Vegas, said. "You don't want to impact the cost of houses so that people can't afford to buy them, but I think we need to expect a better partnership from the home builders."

Giunchigliani was pleased that lawmakers had been successful at winning a slight increase in the percentage of the hotel room tax and real estate transfer tax to go toward school construction. Those measures passed wtih the backing of home builders and the gaming industry, she said.

Still more needs to be done, she said.

More growth

Growth won't stop when Clark County's existing $3.5 billion capital- improvement bond authorization expires in 2008, Giunchigliani said.

"We're going to be forced to re-examine how we pay for educating our children," Giunchigliani said. "It may be we need a direct partnership between the state and local districts. We do it for colleges and universities, and perhaps we should do it for K-12 as well."

As in Clark County, school districts nationwide are often left scrambling for land once a new development is approved. Communities in Wisconsin, Florida and North Carolina, among others, are all considering impact fees to pay for school construction and improvements.

In another fast-growing school districts -- Elk Grove, Calif. -- developer impact fees make up 40 percent of the funds for new school construction and modernization. Another 19 percent comes from local bonds and the remaining 41 percent from the state.

While Elk Grove is significantly smaller than Clark County -- 52,400 students -- the district opened four new schools this year and plans 31 more within the next eight years, according to Jim Elliot, Elk Grove Unified School District spokesman.

In some instances, the developers have been eager to work with officials to plan school sites, Elliot said. But Elk Grove has also been left stranded without land for schools.

"That's when the impact fees really help, when we have to start buying chunks of property at market value," Elliot said. "If we don't get the money from the developers, we don't build."

LaCroix said knows the change he'd like to see made by the Legislature. "No residential units would be approved until everyone knew where those kids were going to go to school. If we did that, I think the quality of life would improve for us all."