Las Vegas Metro breaks ground on new hangar

By Cydney Cappello

Thursday, Dec. 4, 2008 | 7:34 p.m.

Several Las Vegas Metro department pilots, Clark County Sheriff Douglas Gillespie, Clark County Commissioner Lawrence Weekly and U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., all donned golden shovels to break ground at the site for the new Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department hangar today.

The new hangar will be constructed near the old hangar on the corner of Citizen Avenue and Simmons Street and is expected to be finished in a little more than a year. It will house seven helicopters, an airplane, several search and rescue vehicles, ATVS, one boat and rescue equipment, with room for expansion for 15-20 years.

"Go from an approximately 8,000-square-foot hangar to now a 38,000-square-foot hangar, including office space, this is phenomenal," said Metro Section commander of the air support search and rescue section, Lt. Joe Ojeda. "To say this is phenomenal in these hard economic times is the understatement of the year."

According to Ojeda, last year the search and rescue division completed 180 rescues, resulting in more than 220 lives saved. They also flew more than 6,000 hours, handled 14,400 calls and even made 930 arrests attributed to pilots’ observations.

"No matter what else is happening in our economy, we know that public safety ranks very high," Clark County manager Virginia Valentine said. "This new facility will allow the air support team to improve their operations, better care for their equipment and increase their service to the community."

For the first time in Metro history, the department has 24-hour, seven-days-a-week helicopter coverage, so they had to buy more helicopters and hire more pilots, Sheriff Douglas Gillespie said.

"This service is essential to keeping this community safe," Gillespie said. "It’ll be another one of those milestones in Metro history that will show many people from the outside looking in that we are that quality police organization."

Gillespie did not say exactly how much it would cost, but that money has already been put aside for the project. He said that they thought a long time about how the new hangar would actually be funded.

"This is what its about at the end of the day when the tax payers are saying, 'are you being fiscally responsible?' and this is where the tax dollars ought to go and that’s to provide more public safety," Lawrence Weekly said.