Vegas art museum could be headed to Symphony Park

Years after backers unveiled plans for a contemporary art museum in the Arts District, momentum is building to move that same museum to Symphony Park.

Board members with Luminous Park, the Las Vegas-based nonprofit behind the $35 million museum blueprint, might be warming to the possibility of moving the project three-quarters of a mile north from its planned site to the city-owned park. They did not return requests for comment.

Las Vegas City Council members Wednesday delayed consideration of a preliminary development deal with the group because Councilman Ricki Barlow had additional questions about the project. That deal would have handed the proposed museum’s board members $2 million in city matching funds meant to encourage private investment in the much-discussed 35,000-square-foot development.

City leaders say the museum, long planned for an empty Arts District parcel near Charleston Boulevard and Main Street, could be built on up to 1½ acres of Symphony Park property wedged between South Grand Central and City parkways.

Museum directors probably could find worse places to move than the park, which — between the Smith Center for the Performing Arts, Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health and park-adjacent World Market Center — attracts its fair share of Las Vegas’ art-conscious, wine-and-cheese crowd.

But would the museum be a good deal for the city?

Las Vegas already has spent some $100 million on bond-funded infrastructure improvements and environmental remediation at the 61-acre former Union Pacific railroad yard that would serve as the museum’s new home.

The city has sought a host of private, property tax-generating development to help pay down that investment. A decade after the park first opened, officials still haven’t managed to persuade a single taxpaying developer to break ground on any of several massive retail, housing and casino projects promised in the area.

The proposed museum would count as the third nonprofit, tax-exempt tenant to land in the park, provided board members and city officials can figure out where to put it.

Officials counted only two park parcels left unencumbered by a development deal. Another two — one set aside for the long-awaited Charlie Palmer Hotel and Casino, the other for a nursing home planned by a California-based developer — also could become available, should their current owners fail to start work on those projects in the next two years.

The museum even couold wind up on top of an oft-derided, $25 million parking garage once meant to support now-abandoned plans for a $200 million, 24,000-seat soccer stadium.

City officials said they haven’t talked with museum board members about that possibility.

But they admit there is a certain logic to stacking the park’s non-taxable projects on top of each other, as opposed to letting them squeeze out potentially tax-generating development.

“It makes sense, but I could argue that if (the project) is additive, we’ll make up the value on one site we lost on the other,” Deputy City Manager Scott Adams said of the idea.

“We need a little more time to figure out where it gets located, but we want to add, not supplant, value.”

Adams said officials have discussed connecting the museum to the parking garage, which will be paid for largely through sales taxes collected at a park-adjacent outlet mall.

Councilman Barlow said as far he knows, blueprints for the two projects were drawn up entirely independently of one another.

He figures the city is not yet close to picking a spot for the museum, part of the reason he moved to delay action on last week’s tentative development deal.

The three-term councilman said he doesn’t mind spending a few million dollars to encourage the development under the terms of that agreement, so long as it helps kick Symphony Park into gear.

“I’m not interested in any more long-term land deals,” Barlow said. “We can’t continue to hold taxpayers’ land at bay for 5, 10, 15 years.

“At the end of the day, what the community will receive is an approximately $35 (million) to $50 million art museum and additional private development that would want to be near such a facility,” he said. “We have a performance-based structure that comes with that.”

Museum directors always could decide to plow ahead with longstanding plans to site the museum in the Arts District. City officials said major museum donors most likely will make that call.

Las Vegas architect Eric Strain — one-half of a Las Vegas team handed $100,000 in federal grant funds for a redevelopment blueprint anchored around the museum’s Arts District plan — said Wednesday the museum’s board is leaning toward Symphony Park.

Strain added such a move wouldn’t kill his project’s overall vision for downtown.

Museum donors would have to come up with as much as $14 million over the next two years to move forward with a city-proposed development deal. Terms outlined under that agreement require the museum to include a “retail store/gift shop, a bistro, event spaces and a hands-on learning center.” They also call on museum backers to complete the project within five years.

In addition, the agreement includes options to help museum directors raise funds, including the use of federal New Market Tax Credits and the “formation of a tourism improvement district” — the same tax tool the city is using to finance its controversial stadium parking garage.

Las Vegas leaders plan to circle back to the deal July 1.

Contact James DeHaven at jdehaven@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3839. Find him on Twitter: @JamesDeHaven.