Some experts say land is crucial to the resilience of Southern Nevada's economy, the latest controversy surrounding a bill that would make more land available to develop.

That's this week on Nevada Week.

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Welcome to Nevada Week.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

Land appears plentiful in Southern Nevada, but there are federal restrictions on how much of it can be developed.

In March of last year, Nevada Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto introduced the Southern Nevada Economic Development and Conservation Act.

The bill would make thousands of acres of land available for development, setting aside more than 2 million acres for conservation and outdoor recreation and returning more than 41,000 acres of ancestral lands to the Moapa Band of Paiutes.

If you take a look at this list, you will see the vast support this legislation received from politicians to conservation groups, homebuilders, and Chambers of Commerce.

However, according to Cortez Masto's office, Clark County pulled its support of the bill; and as a result, that bill is now at a standstill.

Joining us to talk more about the situation is Tina Quigley, President and CEO of the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance; John Restrepo, Principal of Las Vegas based RCG Economics; and Kevin Higgins, Executive Vice President with CBRE, a commercial real estate services firm.

Thank you all for joining us.

Clark County is not commenting on why it has reportedly pulled its support of the bill.

Cortez Masto's office told Nevada Week that it is because of a negotiation that she had to make in order to gain bipartisan support.

She called it a compromise which resulted in 24,000 acres of land being made available for development instead of the original 30,000.

And, John, I know you want to talk about that 30,000 number.

There are some differences in that number.

But is that also what you believe to be behind the County's withdrawal of support?

-(John Restrepo) I think part of it was the reduction in the land amount, but even then it's not as critical.

It's not as important as some people made it sound.

The 41,000 acres in the original bill, about 9,000 of that was on hillsides, mountaintops where you couldn't really develop much anyway.

So if you take that out, there was around 30,000, let's say.

The new Act, or the compromise, was 25,000.

So that's still a pretty significant amount of land for development.

So I don't think that was the main thing.

What I'm hearing on the street is that there were other issues, like the stripping out of affordable housing language, issues with how rural preservation-- rural preservation lands are going to be dealt with, and there is other language in the bill that the County said, you know, this may not give us what we need, so we need to stop and kind of renegotiate.

And so now that, as we were talking about earlier, now it goes into next year because now we're in an election season.

So this bill won't be talked about again.

So in a way, maybe it's better to wait if we can fix some of these changes that were made at the last minute.

The County didn't get a chance to really look at it very closely during this compromise in the Natural Resource Committee that Senator Cortez Masto is the chair of.

So I think, you know, all things being equal, I think maybe it's better to see if we can improve on it, go around the next time.

-Tina, is that what you're hearing from the County?

-(Tina Quigley) So I think that these things are extremely complicated and political.

And they're way above my paygrade in terms of how intricate that they become.

I think the County was frustrated because they didn't have enough time to thoroughly review the compromise.

One of the things that was important to us for economic development purposes was the concept of the Southern Nevada Water Authority's Horizon Lateral, which would bring water and infrastructure to the Sloan-Jean area.

And in particular, there was an industrial park that the County had planned.

The language sounds so simple, but the language had changed from, The Feds "shall" allow this lateral, to, The Feds "may" allow this lateral.

One word, but for legal purposes, a very big change.

And we'd already known that there was pushback from the federal government originally even to have that lateral line in the language.

So there was a chance we wouldn't have got it.

So it was very hard to read when I opened the paper that morning and learned that the language had been pulled, or the bill had been pulled.

Because for economic development purposes, we need that.

It's very important.

-Explain that more.

Why do we need land in order to improve the economy?

-A local economy, I always say, is a lot like a bucket of money, where all the money is just kind of transacting between your dry cleaner, your daycare, your grocery store, your employer, et cetera.

But there's always a leak in the bucket.

Every time you buy something that wasn't manufactured here or serviced here, that money goes to somebody else's economy.

And since we don't grow anything here, we don't manufacture that much here-- Mostly we're a service, an experiential economy.

That's where our big spigot of new money comes in.

When that-- Sometimes that new money dies out.

We go through boom or bust cycles.

It's not healthy to be solely reliant on one.

So we need to be continually bringing in new spigots of money, and that comes in the form of economic growth: physical growth, industrial growth, manufacturing growth, technology, technology companies' growth, creative industry growth, healthcare growth.

Those are all going to-- That growth is reliant on our landscape.

-Kevin, you come from the commercial real estate aspect of this.

How crucial was this land bill in your opinion to Southern Nevada's economy?

-(Kevin Higgins) Well, I agree with John in that rather than make a quick decision just to get the bill passed in the County's perspective, why not wait and make it the right decision?

I don't think it's an immediate, if we don't get it done for 6 months or 12 months that there's doomsday coming around the corner.

I do think on a long-term perspective, it's very obvious we are an island of private land surrounded by public land with not much area to grow privately.

So in the long term, yes.

And I think we've been talking about what that long-term perspective is to each of us.

Is that in 2035, 2040, et cetera?

And I think there's a few differing opinions on residential versus business parks, industrial parks, et cetera.

-Industrial parks, commercial real estate, how much longer do you think Southern Nevada has of available land?

-I think that we certainly have, in my opinion, 12 to 15 years easily.

I think that the municipalities and SNWA have chosen that to be, put their money where their mouth is, into Apex with $250 million that they approved a year and a half ago November, to bring it to Apex to make that land developable for new developments and new businesses, new manufacturers as alluded to.

But you look out there, and if that gets there, and supposedly if the SNWA puts it there, it's January, February of '28, which is still over five years off for that.

But you're seeing private and quasi-public partnerships right now bringing in the infrastructure up to different portions of Apex just beyond the Speedway right now, in hundreds of acres right now.

At the end of the day, you've got at least over 4,000 acres minimal conservatively that you can build on in my opinion there, given the technology we have right now and given the land that's there.

And if you do a conservative building percentage of 35%, that's 55- to 60-plus million square feet alone, just in that area of town.

-So you're saying 12 to 15 years.

The County says there are about 27,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management land that it can currently sell for residential or nonresidential uses.

And the County estimates that only would last five to seven years.

Do you disagree with his numbers, those numbers?

-A little bit I agree, and I disagree a little bit.

And that is that it all depends how you measure demand for land, right?

-According to your study-- -Right.

-it's a huge demand.

-From our study that we did in 2020, focused on a segment of that land.

And that was any parcels over 20 acres that didn't have more than a 7% slope.

Because that's the easiest to develop for industrial.

And that was near rail and roads and things like that within a certain distance.

And so in that context, the-- And then we measured that against the job growth being produced by UNLV and from Goethe.

So there was this whole job growth aspect of this, and that eats up that demand.

That eats up the bucket, as Tina would say.

And so how much do we have there?

And what is the pricing, as well?

Because, as Kevin knows, as you get closer to a certain point, the land becomes too expensive.

And it may be there, but people opt to go to another market because pricing may be out of context, let's say with Phoenix.

And so there's a variety of factors in place here that create a shortage or not.

And so a lot of it is pricing, locational decisions the company is going to make, proximity to the job market.

The job shed, for example, that comes into play.

So it gets complicated.

So it's an issue you have to look at so many different components to determine what the true supply of developable land is.

-What do you want to add, Tina?

-Well, I do want to-- I want to build on something that John said.

So Phoenix is our primary competitor when it relates to attracting companies that need land.

Their land costs are cheaper than ours.

From what I understand, their construction costs are cheaper than ours.

So those are two things that are very concerning.

The other thing is, we may have this acreage available, but the size of the acreage is concerning.

So I think I read that there are about 198 20-acre plus parcels.

Generally, when a large employer comes in, they're looking for larger than the 20 acres.

And we had an employer who was considering Southern Nevada about six months ago, who needed over 100 acres of contiguous land.

And we only had four parcels in the entire valley that we were able to show them.

So they did not choose to come here.

-To talk about the population that is expected to be here in Clark County: by 2035, 2.94 million; population right now, 2.33 million; by 2060, 3.39 million.

So a million more people are expected to come.

That's according to UNLV's Center for Business and Economic Research.

And that drives the demand for land.

Did you want to add something?

-Yeah.

I think from the standpoint of maybe when the study was done a couple years ago, one, we didn't have the infrastructure or the bill passed to bring in the infrastructure into Apex, the 250 million.

And so the thought of that being usable in any near term wasn't there.

So when people are making decisions to move to Southern Nevada or wherever, three years out is a really long time.

Most of our clients that we see, it's maybe 18 months or 24 months.

And that's a build-to-suit, I got to be very specific at what I do, et cetera.

They don't think much further out.

So those lands might have been usable lands that they could power up within that two-year period.

I can't tell you that today that turning off of 93, off of Love's Truck Stop, that in two years you can have a fully capable brand new substation, city or county water, and/or a sewage system.

I can't.

2028 was the date that they're putting onto it.

So that might have been a factor in looking at land here.

To put it to work, again-- -You're talking about the Apex specifically?

-Apex.

-And I want to talk about the infrastructure to the Apex.

The water line, it's not fully through; it's up to the lower Apex, working on the central Apex.

And if Southern Nevada is granted that Build Back Better Regional grant, that would help facilitate getting water all the way up there.

What is the status of that, Tina?

-So we've been told that we would hear back by the end of September.

We are hoping that it will actually be in the next couple of weeks or so.

There's a lot in that grant, if we receive the full grant, that would relate to workforce development for advanced manufacturing, as well as infrastructure development for advanced manufacturing which we are geographically well primed for, recognizing our relationship, our I-15 connectivity with Southern California.

-Talking about the bill that is at a standstill, if that land did become available, what would the infrastructure needs be for all of that?

Similar to the Apex?

-Well, yeah, inevitably.

And you guys can speak more to it.

One of the things that bringing water out to-- So there would be, I think, 350 acres allocated down in southern, the southern I-15 area, the Sloan area for an industrial park.

And if we had that Horizon Lateral as well, well positioned to start, balancing out Apex with a southern alternative, as well.

-You want to add something?

-I was gonna say kind of the known/unknown in all of this, right, is the question of-- For example, you mentioned the population numbers from CBER, Center for Business and Economic Research.

Remember, when they do those forecasts, they are not constrained by any kind of natural resource constraints or land constraints or workforce constraints or anything else.

They're just looking at historical rate, growth rates, rates of growth in projecting into the future with some adjustments.

So the issue of constraints to growth, that forget about what the environmentalists want to do or not are there, as well.

And so a lot of this-- So there's a circle that we're in, right?

What is demand?

What creates demand?

What creates supply of land?

What creates the demand?

And from that standpoint is, with all the new world we're in postpandemic, whether it's the water issue, which we haven't done, the land issue, the workforce issue, all these things come into play.

Cost of doing business here, issues relative to other markets, that all comes into this whole, as I would say, coming from New Orleans, a gumbo of things that are going on, right?

We're trying to project.

And Kevin nailed it earlier, and that is there are issues of timeframe and time horizons.

The development community is focused on two years, three years maybe at the very most.

The long-term planners like Tina and I are looking at 10, 15, 20 years.

Where do we go from here?

And that's where it gets kind of hazy.

But we need to start doing that thinking now because it comes real quick.

2035 sounds far away, but it's 2022 already.

-There's no question that all of us at this table are looking out towards the future.

And don't get me wrong, I think it's a great idea.

The message I want to send is we're okay.

Don't panic right now.

Let this bill get taken care of.

Let it be put in the right perspective.

Let certain areas of growth be not just opened up of thousands of acres and you've got no infrastructure, et cetera.

Sloan being a good place to start because it's the closest to the infrastructure and closest to the housing, et cetera.

But just opening things up will, I think, cause a bunch of other issues right now.

And as far as the Apex and water and sewer, you've got two different entities really working at sort of the same time.

You've got the SNWA and their plans for the water and sewer to bring a sewer line in up past 93 and Love's Truck Stop and then water around the other backside, main lines to then have everyone connect to and upbringing it to every parcel.

In the meantime what you see with Vantage North, 350 acres; Miner's Mesa; the new Las Vegas Boulevard; 150 acres that was recently sold to ProLogistix; and what you're seeing up in the Sola Mountain area in Apex, that is driven by private-public, nothing to do with SNWA.

That is the owners of the land there working with the City of North Las Vegas.

It's a totally separate waterline.

No sewer.

-Which could potentially happened in the areas that we're talking about in this bill.

I do want to point out some might argue, Kevin, that you have a vested interest in the Apex; for example, the latest VanTrust Industrial Project there.

If more land becomes available, land at the Apex may not be as expensive as it is.

How would you respond to that and your interest in Apex?

-I look out typically more than three years.

I've been doing this 37 years, and I look out 5, 10 years in the future.

And I was working at Speedway 15 years ago trying to make the County and the City work together because one had water, one had sewer.

We understood the need for infrastructure.

We helped get, with RTC's money, the off-ramp at Tropical, to then get sewer in there.

And that was-- The last five years you've seen the growth there.

That took a long time.

So I'm not just looking at short term.

-Okay.

I almost feel like you're making our point for us then; that we actually do need to see land released fairly soon so that we can amp up and be prepared as things are going.

I also want to point out that what we think of, in terms of Southern Nevada right now with the Bruce Woodbury Beltway and all the growth that we've seen, that would not have happened had we not had a lands bill, oh, gosh, in 19-- -1998.

-1998, yeah.

We would have been very constrained.

All of that development that is going on occurred because of a lands bill.

And it's been since 1998 until we've gotten to this point now.

So it's not like there's a free for all, like this land is let and then there's a free for all in terms of development.

There's a lot of zoning and permitting and-- -I have to cut you off there because we have a story to go to.

As we mentioned, several conservation groups support the bill that we're talking about.

In a statement, the Nevada Conservation League said in part, the Act, quote, offered a thoughtful approach for Southern Nevada's future by expanding protections to millions of acres of Nevada's public lands from encroaching development, while offering a pathway forward for affordable and sustainable growth, end quote.

The Center for Biological Diversity disagrees though and spoke with Nevada Week at one of the proposed sites for development.

About a half hour south of Las Vegas sits Hidden Valley, a destination for off-roading, target shooting, and desert tortoise living.

-(Patrick Donnelly) It's also a bighorn sheep migration corridor.

They migrate from those mountains up to those mountains.

-Patrick Donnelly is Great Basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity.

-Looks like these are new leaves since the rain.

-And he says if Congress passes the Southern Nevada economic development and Conservation Act, this area would become available for development which he opposes.

The Center for Biological Diversity believes that human welfare is directly linked to nature.

How would that apply to what is perhaps going to happen here at Hidden Valley?

-Well, biodiversity, all the species out here, all the collection of species around the world, is what gives us clean air to breathe and clean water to drink and what puts food on our plates.

Without biodiversity, we have nothing.

And there's an extinction crisis where all those species are threatened with extinction around the globe.

And destroying this valley, bulldozing it to create McMansions, will incrementally contribute to that extinction crisis and perhaps put our own existence in jeopardy.

-Some lawmakers would argue that the welfare of Southern Nevadans right now depends on access to affordable housing and that this bill would make the land available for that.

How would you respond?

-This bill does not make significant gains for affordable housing.

It doesn't mandate any affordable housing.

It does create a mechanism for affordable housing, but it's not like it's selling off public land to build affordable housing.

-The legislation, touted as the largest conservation bill in Nevada history, includes funding for sustainability and climate protection projects.

The bill would protect about 2 million acres of land; and unlike Donnelly and the Center for Biological Diversity, there are several environmental groups who do support the bill, including Friends of Nevada Wilderness and Nevada Conservation League, just to name a couple.

-But there is a pattern of development that we have been perpetuating in Southern Nevada, sprawl development out into the desert.

And I think everyone recognizes that when they look at Las Vegas.

That pattern of development has led to the climate crisis.

More vehicle emissions from driving, bulldozing this desert, that sequesters carbon.

That has contributed to the climate crisis.

Designating wilderness is all well and good, but that does not mitigate the climate crisis.

Driving around the Las Vegas Valley, I think it's a very common experience for us to see these huge vacant lots in the middle of the city.

There's a vast amount of land to be developed in the Las Vegas Valley right now.

And so we need to completely fill that valley before we even think about sprawling out into the desert.

-We have about four minutes left.

I'd like to start with affordable housing before infill.

You talked about affordable housing is perhaps part of the reason Clark County pulled it's support.

-Well, that's part of it too.

And I was just listening to what Patrick said.

What patrick says reminds me what very famous Stephen Colbert is saying.

What he says is truthy, it feels true.

It's not necessarily true what he's saying.

Infill development is important.

It's not vast amounts of land in the middle of the Las Vegas Valley for development in terms of if you want manufacturing, warehouse distribution, some of these other things.

And it's a complex issue.

Affordable housing is part of that.

Affordable housing can go in infill developments.

It's easier to do it that way.

There's zoning issues that we need to take care of.

Maybe we need to revisit our zoning laws and building permits and things like that.

But what we do know is this: When you look at communities real quickly who are suffering economically -- as Tina said earlier, a stagnant economically -- they have environmental issues much greater than communities that balanced growth.

You have to have balanced growth.

You have to provide decent jobs.

So there is not only the physical environment that we have to worry about, but there's the human environment.

So they have to be blended together.

And so we have to provide benefits to human beings, as well as making sure we keep the biodiversity we need.

So the balanced growth, like most of the other environmental groups said, is what we need.

-Did you want to add something?

-No.

I think that, again, part of this is we all are on the same boat as far as getting this done to look out towards the future.

There's no question about it.

We've got steps to do -- county, city, municipality, people like us -- to help fill the gaps in the meantime and make sure that the planning for the future is here.

Like I said, it took 15 years to plan for the future, and I think it will take 15 years here to plan out for the future.

One thing with the affordable housing as it relates to this is you have to have affordable housing for the labor; otherwise, you can have as many warehouses as you want, but no workers.

So you have to put the two together.

I think that's an issue we're seeing with any development in the South right now is because most of the labor is up North right now.

Right now.

-John?

-Yeah, I think so.

I know Tina and I have talked about this for many times, how affordable housing or workforce housing, whatever you want to call it, is a part of economic development.

You cannot have economic development, economic resiliency, if we don't provide affordable housing to our employees, which leads to the next question we don't like to talk about too much, incomes and wages.

-Wages, yeah.

-So you know, the issue of affordable housing also gets tied into, what do we pay our workforce.

What's the skill levels of our workforce, the quality of workforce, the wealth gap that we talked about a lot.

So there's a lot of components in this.

The good news is at least we're talking about it.

At least we're discussing things in a rational way in this postpandemic world that, I'll be honest with you, we didn't fully explore after the Great Recession.

So now we're, I think, serious about it.

-Tina, this bill, I know you said you were upset to see that it didn't pass.

You understand maybe it's good to take some time and review it?

-Sure.

-Have you been talking with the County, perhaps getting them, trying to get them to change their minds?

-Well, I think the County is as determined as ever to come up with a bill that works for the entire region.

They are fully committed.

And they are in conversations with Senator Masto's office.

And again, Senator Masto is obviously very committed.

I think that we've just run out of time in terms of this congressional year, and it's going to have to go back.

But always remember, with scarcity, there's going to be an increase in prices.

And so that does make us less competitive as it relates to attracting businesses.

But I do want to go back to this affordable housing concept.

I appreciate it very much, something that Deborah March said when I think Amazon wanted to come to Henderson.

And they said, Well, how about we can have some land and turn a parking lot into affordable housing?

And she said, How about you just pay a livable wage?

-There you go.

You mentioned running out of time.

We have run out of time.

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And I'll see you next week on Nevada Week.

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