Council to OK auction of 1,600 acres

Jeffrey Libby

Friday, Oct. 18, 2002 | 11:02 a.m.

After an 18-month delay, the Henderson City Council on Tuesday is expected to approve for auction roughly 1,600 federally owned acres in southwest Henderson. The expected vote would set into motion the largest land sale in the Las Vegas Valley since North Las Vegas auctioned 1,900 acres in May 2001.

The auction to a single buyer in November 2003 should mark a return to the days before 1997, when fast-growing Southern Nevada cities such as Henderson, North Las Vegas and Mesquite could grow as quickly as builders could frame up houses, confident that the state would dole out enough tax money for cities to provide services to their new neighborhoods.

"The language that penalized fast-growing cities is due to be completely eradicated from the state tax formula by the time the first home is sold," City Manager Phil Speight said Thursday.

Last fall the city asked the federal government to delay the auction, originally scheduled for May 2001, because city officials said a 1997 change in state tax laws prevented them from recouping the cost of growth.

It took about a year before Henderson officials calculated that changes to state tax law were costing the city close to $7 million annually. Under the 1997 law, the state wasn't doling out enough tax money for fast-growing cities to provide the same level of services to the new development.

Henderson officials argued against the new tax codes in 1999, but it wasn't until the 2001 Legislature that they successfully lobbied for shifts that immediately cut the city's losses to about $2.7 million annually.

By the summer of 2004, the remnants of the tax formula that "penalizes" fast-growing communities will be completely phased out, about the same time Speight said he expects the first homes to be completed on the 1,600 acres.

"It will allow us to provide the level of services people have come to expect without one area in the city having to be subsidized by other areas," Speight said.

The desert up for auction is part of 6,200 acres annexed by Henderson in January 1999 from unincorporated Clark County. It is owned by the Bureau of Land Management and stretches for 13 square miles mostly southeast of St. Rose Parkway and Interstate 15. As of Thursday, Henderson planners were still fine-tuning much of the parcel's borders, but on its eastern end, the parcel will run along the 5,000-acre Anthem master-planned community.

The mix of residential, commercial and industrial uses also remained undetermined as of Thursday, and probably will not be determined until January, said Bob Wilson, a planner in the property management department.

"But we already have major roads drawn in," Wilson said. "And before the sale we'll have the land-use plan. So we're a couple years ahead of North Las Vegas in that respect."

When Del Webb and American Nevada Corp. purchased the 1,953 acres for $47.2 million in May 2001, the land uses had not been planned, Wilson said. Developers took another eight months before sealing a deal with the city to build a $1 billion development with as many as 7,500 homes. American Nevada is owned by the Greenspun family, publisher of the Sun.

The public auction of the BLM land through the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act of 1998 is a first for Henderson, said John Rinaldi, city manager of property management.

Eighty-five percent of the sales price will be spent in Nevada, rather than going to federal coffers as in federal land auctions and exchanges before 1998, said Judy Fry, a land sales manager for the BLM.

Fry declined to speculate on the expected sales price of the 1,600 acres. A BLM auction next month of 1,150 acres, including three large parcels south of Blue Diamond, is expected to bring $100 million, she said.

"We're in the same business as anyone else selling land right now," Fry said. "We want to achieve the highest price we can."

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