Construction plans considered

Friday, Sept. 23, 2005 | 10:15 a.m.

Executives of four development companies on Thursday afternoon pitched university regents on what their companies can do to help the Nevada System of Higher Education meet some of its building needs.

The Las Vegas- based Molasky Group, Thomas and Mack Companies and American Nevada Company, along with Ft. Lauderdale-based Chevron Energy Solutions Co., presented their plans for lease-purchase arrangements that would allow the university system to construct needed facilities without waiting to raise the entire cost or stressing the state's bonding capacity.

In a typical lease-purchase arrangement, the private developer takes on the cost and risk of constructing a project and then leases the building back to the university system for 20 to 30 years, Chancellor Jim Rogers explained to regents at a meeting Thursday at the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas. At the end of the lease period, the university system would own the building.

All of the companies who presented Thursday also utilize a design-build, team approach, involving the contractor, the architect and the developer from day one to significantly speed up the process, executives said.

Tom Thomas, partner of Thomas and Mack Companies, estimated that a 55,000-square-foot classroom facility at the Community College of Southern Nevada could be completed in 14 months with his company as opposed to 30 months under the current state process.

The lease-purchase arrangements also could significantly reduce the need for Public Works Board oversight, Rogers said, saving the university system money. The projects would still have to work with Public Works to some degree, he said.

Thursday's presentations leaned decidedly in favor of the local companies, all three of which have given significant money to the university system, Rogers said.

"I think someone from out of state is going to have difficulty competing with those local people," Rogers said. "I think there's an added value to the system in feeling comfortable with them."

Rogers also said the local companies wouldn't be wrangling with the system over dollars and cents when the owners have already donated millions to help UNLV expand.

Irwin Molasky, the patriarch behind the Molasky developments, donated 45 acres near Flamingo Road and Maryland Parkway to expand UNLV's campus and was the founding chairman for the UNLV Foundation to raise private money for the university.

The Thomas and Mack families jointly helped UNLV develop its campus and are major donors to the Boyd School of Law, having established the school's legal clinic. The families more recently have agreed to pay for a moot courtroom facility for the law school.

The Greenspun family, owners of American Nevada and the Las Vegas Sun, have pledged $25 million to the building of the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs in addition to their previous donations in establishing the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies. The Greenspun Family Foundation has also pledged $2 million to Nevada State College.

Officials from Chevron Energy Solutions, already the outsiders, managed to offend Regent Mark Alden by offering to help promote curriculum and recruit teachers and nurses to Nevada State College if the company was selected as a developer for the campus.

Alden called Chevron's presentation unprofessional and called the company's promises a "bait and switch."

Representatives for all of the companies said they saw Thursday's presentations as just their chance to show what they could do for the system. All of the companies will have to formally bid on the building projects as they come up, Rogers said.

The Nevada Legislature gave the university system approval to do three lease-purchase projects during the biennium, Rogers said. Possible projects include a nursing facility at Nevada State College in Henderson, library and classroom space at the Community College of Southern Nevada, and a juvenile justice center at UNR, officials said.

UNLV is also looking at a lease-purchase arrangement for a planned orthodontics building on the Shadow Lane Biomedical Campus.

In Thursday's presentation, Rogers specifically asked American Nevada, which developed Green Valley in Henderson, to present plans for developing a complete college town on the 500 open acres at Nevada State. Company officials hired nationally known college planners JJR to help them establish a vision for the campus.

Brian Greenspun, president and editor for the Las Vegas Sun, said his family's American Nevada Company was especially interested in the Nevada State site because it allowed the company to do what it does best, building a master-planned community, for something incredibly important to the owners -- promoting higher education in Nevada.

"This presents an opportunity to build an educational community in all its forms. It makes sense for us to be a part of that," Greenspun said.

The college town would ideally mix classroom and office facilities with everything needed in any community: retail, residential, restaurants, libraries, even medical facilities and possibly a Clark County school, Stephen Troost, vice president for JJR, said.

There is profit to be made by partnering with the university system in the lease-partnership arrangements, executives in all three local companies said, but not to the extent a developer would have with a mixed-use, private development. "We are doing this because it is the right thing to do," Molasky said.

The Molasky Group has or is working on other lease-purchase arrangements for governmental buildings, included an Internal Revenue Service building in downtown Las Vegas, a Social Security building in western Las Vegas and Casa Grande, a transitional institution for the Department of Corrections.

The developer in a lease-purchase scenario takes away a lot of the risk away from the higher education system because the developer is responsible for any cost or time overruns, Worthington said.

Thomas of Thomas and Mack said his company has been looking at a private-public partnership to build classrooms at CCSN for the last three years.

"They (college officials) cannot facilitate the demand for classroom space, and it's unfortunate," Thomas said. "We thought that private development should look at how we could address the need."

Greenspun said his company would similarly liked to have done the work on UNLV's Greenspun College of Urban Affairs building, but at the time the family made the donation, the Legislature didn't allow the system to enter into lease-purchase arrangements.

Rogers said the system's eight presidents will work together to decide which three projects on their wish lists should go out to bid for lease-purchase arrangements sometime during the next three months.