Sunday, Jan. 16, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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The Jan. 9 guest column “Nevadans deserve a fair return on public land leases” took a good shot but missed the target. It correctly states “our lands should not be up for wild speculation.” But Bureau of Land Management oil and gas leases are not the threat to Nevada, or at least Clark County.
Rather, it is the sale of BLM land for speculation such as is part of the pending SNEDCA, mistitled as the Southern Nevada Economic Development and Conservation Act. It should be called the Southern Nevada Environmental Destruction of Conservation Act.
The act provides for the sale of 31,000 acres of BLM land in Clark County to developers for construction of 292,000 residences, adding nearly a million people to Clark County.
The travesty of this pending legislation is that it was drafted in concert with Assembly Bill 356, the “nonfunctional turf removal bill,” which is nothing more than a tool to take water from developments landscaped under existing water-use guidelines and sell it to developers who purchase the BLM land. This would create traffic congestion, air-quality deterioration, increased metro-heat and stress on all infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, etc. And there is no water for a million more residents, even taking it from legacy communities.
And why? To what end? Simply to promote unsustainable growth? It’s time our county commissioners paid attention to the realities of our environmental carrying capacity and protected the quality of life for all of us, rather than pad the pockets of developers.
