Controversial Badlands development proposal back for consideration

In the months since a controversial proposal to develop the Badlands golf course was introduced, Las Vegas city officials and employees have met for hours, fielded hundreds of angry emails and traveled to California to tour a comparable development.

Plans to develop the golf course, which closed late last year, return to Planning Commission and City Council agendas this week.

Ward 2 Councilman Bob Beers, who represents southwest Las Vegas, said the issue has required an extraordinary amount of time.

And Planning Commissioner Trinity Schlottman, in an October email to Beers, wrote that the Badlands proposal was probably the most difficult item he’s voted on in six years.

“I never imagined that I would have been threatened, pushed around, and beat up as much as I have been on this project,” Schlottman wrote to Beers.

Opponents have bombarded Beers with emails accusing him of not representing their interests and promoting the project. Beers’ political challengers have made hay of the project, raising the fight in the Ward 2 election.

To property owners, Beers wrote that “unfortunately, the land has been zoned residential from before you moved next to it.”

To project opponents, he wrote that the only “legal way” the city could prevent the golf course from being developed would be to buy the land through inverse condemnation, “and that would not be fair to all the other taxpayers in the city.”

“Granting of the right to develop a piece of land creates something of value,” Beers said, adding that if the city were to take away that right to develop the land the developer could sue the city to recoup lost value.

IRVINE TRIP

A dozen Las Vegas city employees and elected officials took a day trip June 28 to tour residential developments in Irvine, California, which included a stop to research the proposed development for the Badlands golf course.

The trip was dubbed a “high-intensity residential tour,” and combined airfare costs totaled more than $2,300, city travel expense reports show. Beers, Deputy City Manager Scott Adams, Planning Director Tom Perrigo, Economic and Urban Development Director Bill Arent, Public Works Director David Bowers, Fire and Rescue Chief William McDonald and Government Affairs Manager Brian McAnallen were among city officials who made the day trip, city travel expense reports show.

City communications director David Riggleman said the group planned to visit Playa Vista, an Irvine development seen as fitting in with Las Vegas’ Symphony Park. But the group also toured Spectrum, another Irvine development, which was deemed helpful in envisioning the proposed Badlands development’s scope.

PLANS RETURN TO CITY HALL

An eight-hour council meeting on the proposal in November resolved nothing. However, developers withdrew a substantial amount of the development proposal, leaving 720 multifamily residential buildings on 17 acres at the corner of Rampart Boulevard and Alta Drive. That proposal is slated to return to the City Council on Wednesday.

Beers said Monday he has some concern about the density on the 17 acres as a stand-alone project.

A proposal for developing another portion of the course, at Alta Drive and Hualapai Way, is on Tuesday night’s Planning Commission agenda.

Contact Jamie Munks at jmunks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0340. Find @JamieMunksRJ on Twitter.