Decision may come Monday on building for police

By Joe Schoenmann

Sunday, Oct. 26, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Metro’s plan to have a developer build a new police headquarters, which the governments of Clark County and Las Vegas would lease for a few years before purchasing, remained unresolved at last week’s County Commission meeting.

The 370,000-square-foot building would consolidate 60 Metro offices throughout the Las Vegas Valley. It’s planned for 14.56 acres on the northwest corner of Alta Drive and Martin Luther King Boulevard.

Wasn’t it set to go except for some minor differences the city and county were going to work out?

A month ago, Metro’s Fiscal Affairs Committee asked Las Vegas and Clark County to resolve a question over 70,000 square feet. That’s how much space Metro now occupies within City Hall. By law, commissioners say, the city must pay for that much square footage at the new building. The county would pay 60 percent of the remainder of the new headquarters’ cost and the city would cover the rest. But as of Friday, the two sides were still trying to reach an agreement.

So what’s the holdup?

That’s not clear. There’s grumbling about money being tight and about how the total cost to taxpayers has yet to be revealed. The plan was for the developer to pay the building’s initial cost, then the county and city would lease it for three years before buying it. Metro has said the first lease payments wouldn’t be until 2011. The department’s argument for the lease-buy option is that over time the building will cost about the same as Metro’s current cost of leasing offices throughout the valley.

Is there a deadline for all of this to be sorted out?

Well, Metro’s next Fiscal Affairs Committee meeting is Monday morning. The agenda for that meeting includes awarding of a design, tenant improvement and project coordination contract to Ward & Howe Associates for the new headquarters, contingent upon approval of the lease between Project Alta LLC and Metro.

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After two small planes from North Las Vegas Airport crashed into valley homes in separate fatal incidents in August, didn’t County Commissioners ask the county Aviation Department to review safety issues at the airport? Whatever happened with that?

Aviation Director Randy Walker gave a PowerPoint presentation to commissioners last week. He ran through the tally of accidents: 47 at or near the airport in 21 years. The vast majority of them, 37, were attributable to pilot error.

Were any of the surviving pilots who were to blame punished by the FAA?

Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani asked Walker that question, noting that drivers who cause traffic crashes are cited. Walker told her the county is “not privy to that information.”

How does North Las Vegas’ safety record stack up against McCarran International Airport’s and Henderson Executive Airport’s?

(Editor's note: See correction below) Walker had that answer. Over the five years and nine months, North Las Vegas Airport had one incident for every 62,000 operations; at Henderson Executive, it was one for every 340,000 operations; and at McCarran it was one for every 1.3 million operations. (An operation is any instance of a plane being operated. So it includes a plane being piloted down a taxiway.)

Why is McCarran so different?

Most flights to McCarran are commercial and corporate, both of which employ highly trained pilots. “They have to (have the training) by FAA regulations and their corporate policies,” he said. They are forced to abide by guidelines that, for example, might prevent them from even attempting a landing during bad weather or from taking off if a warning indicator light is on. Meanwhile, “general aviators” at North Las Vegas have no such restrictions. “It is up to them,” Walker said. “They own their aircraft.” That prompted Commission Chairman Rory Reid to note: “So they have less training and more discretion.”

So what was the upshot? Did this result in some kind of plan to take steps that should reduce the number of crashes at and around North Las Vegas Airport?

The only plan is the one Walker talked about in August. He is asking the Federal Aviation Administration to give him the authority to restrict the use of the airport by student pilots and anyone flying experimental aircraft. He wants to be able to move some, if not all, of those fliers out to the more remote airport in Jean.

Correction: The Sun’s Oct. 26 “Answers About Clark County Government” contained errors in the segment regarding a report about the North Las Vegas Airport. During the Oct. 21 County Commission meeting, Commissioner Lawrence Weekly, not Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani, said that errant pilots should be punished for accidents just as errant motorists are. The airport accident statistics in the story were also incorrect, in part because of errors in the transcript on the county’s Web site. Randall Walker, county aviation director, told the commission that since 2003 there had been only one accident out of 3.3 million “operations,” meaning takeoffs and landings, at McCarran International Airport. In the same period, Henderson Executive Airport had three accidents and 426,000 takeoffs and landings, or one accident for every 142,000 operations. At North Las Vegas Airport, the ratio was one accident for every 62,000 operations.