Plans made for State College area

Dan Kulin

Friday, Sept. 5, 2003 | 9:38 a.m.

Proposals for the Nevada State College at Henderson put the campus next to a mini-downtown anchored by a train station surrounded by shops and offices, with apartments above them, a city planner said Thursday.

Two proposals will be displayed publicly for the first time from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Henderson Convention Center. City officials and consultants will be on hand to take residents' comments on the proposed plans.

Some residents already are not happy with the proposals.

Linda Freeman is a neighbor of the planned campus and a member of the Henderson College Area Plan Steering Committee that will ultimately recommend a development plan to the City Council. She said the neighbors will be unhappy with the plans.

The parts of the plans Freeman said will be most controversial include a proposal to extend Paradise Hills Drive from the U.S. 95 to College Drive, and a plan to build apartments in the area around the campus.

"A lot of neighbors will be very upset," Freeman said.

Extending Paradise Hills to College Drive would put the road through the Mission Hills neighborhood, increasing traffic and creating an unsafe condition for children who walk to the J. Marlan Walker International Elementary School, she said.

The plans call for three main traffic access routes to the campus, two straight from U.S. 95, and the third via Paradise Hills. Freeman said she opposes only the Paradise Hills extension and thinks other neighbors will too.

She also said she believes apartments will bring crime to the area and hurt the neighbors' property values.

"No one really wants a stack of apartments next to a rural area," Freeman said. Freeman's Mission Hills neighborhood, which will be next to the future campus and surrounding development, is made up of homes on 1-acre lots, and residents who ride horses around their south Henderson community.

Frank Fiori, a senior city planner and project manager overseeing the development plans, said the proposals could change before going to the city Planning Commission and then City Council.

"This is a community-driven enterprise here so it's important to have their opinions," Fiori said. "The college is going to happen out here, so the question is how do we work with it and how do we make it work."

For now, the two proposals that will be on display Tuesday feature a light-rail station surrounded by two- to five-story buildings with retail and office space on the first floors and apartments above, Fiori said.

"People will be able to live here and shop here," he said.

"They're fairly similar mixed-use transit oriented developments," Fiori said about the two plans.

The differences between the two proposals include different locations for the proposed train stations and some varied street placements, he said.

Both plans are for roughly 460 acres southwest of U.S. 95 and north of the future campus site. Some of that land is owned by the city, but most is privately owned, Fiori said.

A developer would need council approval to develop the land differently than what is dictated by the plan ultimately approved by the council, he said.

Steering committee member Jeff Anderson, land manager for developer D.R. Horton, which owns about 35 acres within the plan area, said he's very optimistic his company will be able to work within the plan adopted.

"With what I've seen so far being a landowner ... and a Henderson resident, I see good things," Anderson said. "It was good to get the stakeholders involved."

Depending on what development plan the council approves, Anderson said the company may have to alter the specifics of a planned development.

"But we have diversity in what we build. We can make it work," he said.

Land south of the campus site is proposed to be left as rural open space as most of it is federal land that is part of hillsides, Fiori said.

He would not share the specific layouts or maps of the two proposals. Fiori said the specific proposals to be displayed Tuesday would not be finalized before Tuesday.

On Thursday, Fiori said he wasn't sure exactly how many apartments could be proposed in the plan.

"I don't have an estimate because I don't know whether they will be three stories or five stories," he said.

"We're still going over the alternatives internally," Fiori said. The proposals are being developed by EDAW, a Denver-based consultant the city is paying $114,244 to develop the plan.

Railroad tracks pass through part of the property, and the Regional Transportation Commission is looking into the feasibility of rail service in the area, Fiori said. The exact cost of putting in a train station, and who would pay for it both still have to be determined, he said.

Fiori said the extension of Paradise Hills Drive, which bothers Freeman, is already part of the city's long-range roads plan that is separate from the development plan for the land around the future campus.

Plans for the land around the campus are being developed separately from plans for the new college campus. But Fiori said planners are discussing their plans with each other, and he expects the campus and surrounding developments to fit together nicely.

After Tuesday there will probably be two more public meetings about the plans for the land around the future campus. A final proposal, possibly modified in response to public comments, will then be approved by the steering committee and sent to the Planning Commission.