Regents reluctantly OK Rainbow Gardens sale

Friday, April 15, 2005 | 9:16 a.m.

It's the gift that keeps on giving.

Headaches, that is.

A 517-acre parcel of land given to UNLV in 1982 has left university officials in a no-win situation, university President Carol Harter told the Board of Regents during a daylong meeting Thursday in Carson City.

The only buyer for the Sunrise Mountain/Rainbow Gardens parcel, landlocked within a federal conservatory, is the federal Bureau of Land Management, Harter said. But to sell the property to the BLM, the university must first complete an expensive environmental cleanup mandated by environmental regulators.

The former gypsum mine behind Sunrise Mountain beyond the eastern edge of the Las Vegas, has been a dumping ground for trespassers who have left behind lead from target shooting and dangerous chemicals from burning copper wiring, university officials said. Removing those contaminants could very well cost more than the BLM says the land is worth, Harter and other university officials said.

Current estimates for the remediation effort are figured at $1 million, and the BLM has offered $1.55 million for the property.

All other potential buyers have decided that the land, with its rare bear poppy plants and limited access, is undevelopable, Harter said. Del Webb Corp. and Lake Las Vegas developers have both passed on the property.

"It's not a pretty situation," Harter said. "We wish we had a residential development on it and could make lots of money. But right now we just need to cut our losses, clean it up, sell it and reduce our liability."

If the university didn't sell the property to the BLM, it would still be responsible for cleaning up the land and then would continue to be liable for its management, said Thomas Hagge, associate vice president for facilities management and planning.

And because BLM is the only buyer, UNLV can't really haggle over the details.

"It's essentially useless to anyone else except the federal government," Hagge said. "We have one buyer, that buyer is an 800-pound gorilla, and they define the conditions for buying."

After more than an hour of questioning, regents grudgingly agreed that selling the land to the BLM was the only option, voting 9-2 to approve the sale. Regents Steve Sisolak and Mark Alden voting against the sale. Regents Howard Rosenberg and Bret Whipple were absent.

Jim Rogers interim chancellor of the University and Community System of Nevada and several other regents said they feared the cost to clean up the land could be far greater than the currently estimated $1 million.

Rogers, speaking from past experience with environmental regulators, even suggested that the cost could rise as high as $20 million before the university was through. A cleanup he oversaw of a gasoline leak went up in price from $50,000 to $400,000 several years ago, Rogers said.

"I'm very goosy about this." Rogers said, scoffing at representations from university officials that the Nevada Department of Environmental Protection would somehow be more lenient with UNLV in the cleanup because the toxins aren't an immediate health risk and because there will no development of the land.

Hagge said that much of the contaminated soil will just be able to be covered over. Regardless of the cost, however, the university is stuck paying it.

"No matter what the number is, we're stuck," Hagge said. "We can't let a willing buyer get away and be stuck with it forever."

Sisolak said the Rainbow Gardens land showed that regents should be careful about what gifts they accept. Regents likely spent 15 seconds considering the item when they approved taking the land in 1982.

University officials estimated that the land was worth $2 million to $2.5 million when the Pacific Coast Building Products Co., known as PABCO, deeded it to UNLV in 1982. Conditions on the gift and then the federal conservancy rules repeatedly thwarted attempts to sale the land until now, Harter said.