A view of the Southwest Airlines check-in counter at McCarran International Airport Wednesday, May 20, 2020.
Saturday, March 27, 2021 | 2 a.m.
Renaming the Las Vegas airport for former U.S. Sen. Harry Reid hit a minor snag over a flaw in the motion a Clark County commissioner made proposing the change.
Commissioner Tick Segerblom’s verbal motion at a Feb. 16 meeting “did not include mention of a resolution supporting the name change,” county spokesman Eric Papa said. Chairwoman Marilyn Kirkpatrick referenced a resolution, but Segerblom’s actual motion did not, Papa said.
The discrepancy must be fixed before the county can formally notify the Federal Aviation Administration of the change. The commission plans to take a vote April 6 to fix the problem.
The FAA doesn’t approve name changes, but the agency must complete certain administrative tasks, such as revising air traffic control maps, before recognizing any changes.
The rebranding will not change the airport’s three-letter code, LAS, which is a key FAA identifier.
The commission voted unanimously last month to change the name of the airport from McCarran International to Harry Reid International. The airport has been named for Nevada’s late U.S. Sen. Pat McCarran since 1968.
The minutes of the meeting indicate Segerblom moved that a recommendation regarding the airport renaming be approved. But the only mention in the minutes of a resolution is included parenthetically.
Segerblom has sought to rename the airport since 2017, when he was a state senator. He unsuccessfully introduced a bill in the Legislature to rename the airport for Reid and remove McCarran’s statue from the U.S. Capitol.
An aviation proponent, McCarran was also a racist, anti-Semite and xenophobe. McCarran, a Democrat, represented Nevada in the Senate from 1933 until his death in 1954.
Reid, 81, was born in Searchlight and hitchhiked 40 miles to attend school in Henderson. He eventually graduated from law school and ascended in state politics before heading to Washington in 1983, first as a member of the House of Representatives.
Reid, a Democrat, then served in the Senate from 1987 to 2017 and was Senate majority leader from 2007 to 2015.
The renaming has received broad Democratic support in Nevada, plus endorsements from some prominent local Republicans.
