Northwest Town Center: Citizens love it or hate it

There was thunder, lightning and rain outside, but a different kind of storm raged Thursday night inside the Santa Fe hotel-casino as homeowners vented their anger about a proposed commercial center in far northwest Las Vegas.

More than 500 people squeezed into a stifling conference room to attend a sometimes fractious town hall meeting that focused on Town Center, a 2,170-acre development along U.S. 95 between Tenaya Way and Grand Teton Drive.

The project, approved by the city in 1996, would concentrate commercial and high-density housing along a corridor that would include parts of the future beltway and Centennial Parkway.

The reasoning behind the project is to keep commercial development out of residential areas, where people bought expensive homes thinking they were buying a piece of rural life only to discover urban living was already knocking at their back doors.

Many in attendance saw the need for the project, but others were less understanding.

There were cat-calls and snide remarks during most of the 90-minute meeting, with many of the questions posed expressing frustration and anger rather than looking for an answer.

County commissioners Lance Malone and Mary Kincaid hosted the meeting. City Councilman Larry Brown, whose district includes some of the Town Center, was unavailable for Thursday night's meeting, but Malone said Brown would be at future sessions.

"How long has this been in the planning stage?" one irate homeowner asked as Malone, the moderator, walked around the room with a microphone.

Many homeowners near the development site say they had not been informed about the project and that, if they had been, they probably would not have bought property there.

Regardless of when the project was planned and approved, the fact of the matter is that it is coming.

"You came here to get away from commercial development," said Malone, who took every opportunity to express his sympathy for the irate homeowners, "but you knew commercial development was coming. ... It's coming, whether you moved here in 1952 or yesterday."

The job now, Malone said, is to mitigate the damage and harness the commercial development so that it does not bleed into the neighborhoods.

He noted that on Thursday, he and Brown managed to kill a proposal to tack on an additional 700 acres to Town Center. Deleting those acres also stopped the construction of a high-density apartment complex at that location.

He also said he was able to include an additional 20 feet of right-of-way in future land purchases for the possibility that the area someday could be served by a light-rail mass-transit system.

Many were skeptical about the ability of the city and county to keep promises when it came to development -- several residents said politicians had their hands in developer's pockets.

"I vote for what I think is best for the community," Kincaid said in her own defense. "I vote out of sincerity.

"There will be 300,000 to 400,000 more people here (in the northwest) in the next 20 years. We have to plan for the future."

Several residents said they didn't think officials should be developing projects today based upon what future residents may want.

"You should have asked us what we wanted," one resident said.

Louise Ruskamp, with the Tule Springs Community Association, said she is "100 percent in favor of the concept. ... Most people in our association are aware of what's going on."

The problem, she says, is an apparent lack of a consensus between the city and county about what concerns residents in the area.

"This could be a top-notch, state-of-the-art center," she said.

Though a lot of heat and not much light was generated at Thursday night's meeting, Ruskamp said it was important to have such gatherings.

"It's an avenue for the people o find out where the commissioners stand," she said.

Tony Bruges, with the Mountain Shadows Homeowners Association, also finds the Town Center concept appealing.

What concerns him is an apparent lack of finality in zoning and the seeming ease with which developers get around zoning regulations.

He and others, such as Marty Giles Harvey, would like to form a coalition of homeowners associations and other concerned groups to fight zoning issues that affect them.

They noted that developers go into neighborhoods and get zoning changes with apparent ease because there isn't a large enough organization with sufficient power to combat them.

"We're so fed up," Harvey said.

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