LOOKING IN ON: CITY HALL

Monday, Dec. 17, 2007 | 7:07 a.m.

It's not a move toward consolidating with Clark County, but the city last week purchased a nine-story building near Rancho Drive and Bonanza Road.

The largest current tenant in the Atrium Building: Clark County.

The county's lease expires in 2009, a year before city staff plans to move into the building.

City Manager Doug Selby said the purchase was necessary because the landlord of the Development Services Center's current building at 731 Gass Ave. will not extend a lease past 2010.

Constructed in 1981, the Atrium Building is 138,000 square feet, more than three times the size of the DSC's current 40,000-square-foot home. The larger space means there likely will be more service windows, Selby said.

As the city attempts to move more of its services online, enabling people to do business via the Internet instead of going to a city building, he expects city services to become more decentralized.

"As we get more into this electronic service era, government will be more distributed throughout the community, and all of us might be like little City Halls, working at home," Selby told city staffers.

Employees of the DSC, a one-stop shop for obtaining permits and processing development proposals, are expected to move into the building in mid-2010.

Fish and chocolates, anyone?

A massive aquarium and a chocolate factory that makes candy in the shape of the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign are two businesses that might find a home in Las Vegas.

Mayor Oscar Goodman said he met with a representative of Oceanis Holdings Ltd., which has built large aquariums in other cities and has expressed interest in building one in Las Vegas. The mayor said the city will continue talking with the builder, and said he could even envision an aquarium being built in the city's Union Park development downtown.

On the chocolate side, Goodman met with people from Dalecarlia Chocolates, who stunned him with news that they had purchased the rights to make chocolates in the shape of the iconic Las Vegas sign.

The mayor said the company is not simply looking to sell the sign-shaped chocolates here, but is considering building a chocolate factory locally.

This might be the truest sign yet that downtown Las Vegas is way past the point of verging on a rebirth.

Verge, a loft project on the north side of U.S. Highway 95, which began sales only in March, has sold 80 percent of its 296 units and is breaking ground.

Though Verge is in a prime location in terms of getting onto and off the highway, as well as being near Fremont Street, it abuts an area of town that - well, let's just say you won't find yourself walking there at night unless you get a flat tire.

That apparently hasn't stopped buyers of the mid-priced lofts.

Goodman said Verge is expected to open in 2009.