KVIG Informative

Congress protected 83,000 acres around Red Rock Canyon as a National Conservation Area in 1990, and expanded it three separate times since to its current 198,000 acres. The gypsum mine on Blue Diamond Hill next door was never part of that boundary — private land that predates the conservation area by decades and has outlasted a state law written specifically to freeze its zoning, a state Supreme Court ruling that struck that law down, and a Clark County settlement that cleared the way for development on it. Now a federal agency has a new filing on the same hill to sort through: a preliminary permit application for a 450-megawatt pumped hydropower project.

Congress designated Red Rock Canyon a National Conservation Area under the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area Establishment Act, Public Law 101-621, signed Nov. 16, 1990, setting aside roughly 83,000 acres in Clark County, according to the U.S. Code citation for the act at 16 U.S.C. § 460ccc.

Protection built in layers over three decades

The Bureau of Land Management’s stewardship of the canyon predates the 1990 act. BLM withdrew about 10,000 acres under the Classification and Multiple Use Act in 1964, and dedicated the site as the “Red Rock Canyon Recreation Lands” on Oct. 29, 1967, according to UNLV Special Collections’ finding aid for the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area Records. BLM opened a visitor center in 1982 and that same year acquired a 5,000-acre buffer from Summa Corporation, the Howard Hughes company that had held the land, per the same finding aid.

Congress expanded the NCA again in 1994, growing it to about 196,000 acres, according to UNLV Special Collections’ finding aid. The Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act of 1998 added roughly 1,002 more acres and helped fund improvements including the visitor center, according to the Bureau of Land Management’s own program page for the act. The NCA’s current total, 198,000 acres, is stated in BLM’s Record of Decision for the Red Rock Canyon NCA Resource Management Plan, signed by then-BLM Nevada State Director Robert V. Abbey.

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The private hill next door

Blue Diamond Hill sits outside those boundaries. UNLV Special Collections’ finding aid for the Blue Diamond Mine Corporate Records documents that a gypsum deposit there was discovered in 1905, that the Blue Diamond Materials Company acquired the claim in 1923, and that a processing mill built by 1941 gave rise to the company town of Blue Diamondville, later renamed Blue Diamond. Ownership passed through the Flintkote Company, which purchased the operation in 1959, and James Hardie Gypsum Inc., which acquired the mine and mill in 1987 and ran them until a 2004 closure, according to the same finding aid. Jim Rhodes purchased the site in 2005 and has operated it as Blue Diamond Hill Gypsum since. Gypsum Resources LLC is listed as the current permit holder for the facility on a Part 70 operating permit issued by Clark County’s Division of Air Quality on Sept. 24, 2024, and revised July 31, 2025, signed by county Permitting Manager Santosh Mathew — confirming the mine remains active today.

A state law built to freeze it, and a court that struck it down

The Nevada Legislature passed a law in 1993 — the Red Rock Canyon Conservation Area and Adjacent Lands Act, Chapter 639 of the 1993 Statutes of Nevada, approved July 13, 1993 — restricting local governments from increasing residential density or approving new nonresidential zoning on eight specifically identified parcels near the NCA, according to the statute’s text as published by the Nevada Legislature. A decade later, the 2003 Legislature passed Senate Bill 358, freezing Clark County’s zoning on Gypsum Resources’ land at one house per two acres.

The Nevada Supreme Court struck that freeze down. In a Jan. 31, 2013 opinion, Attorney General v. Gypsum Resources, LLC, the court held unanimously that Senate Bill 358 amounted to impermissible local legislation targeting a single parcel, in violation of Article 4, Sections 20, 21 and 25 of the Nevada Constitution — voiding the zoning freeze the Legislature had written specifically for that site.

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A settlement, then a new filing on the same hill

Clark County’s Board of County Commissioners approved a settlement agreement with Gypsum Resources LLC on June 18, 2024, along with related land-use items describing a roughly 2,400-acre “mixed use comprehensive master planned community” on the north side of State Route 159, about 1.5 miles west of its intersection with Blue Diamond Road, according to the county’s own Legistar meeting record for that date.

A separate, current filing now touches the same hill from a different direction. Desert Bloom Energy Storage LLC filed a preliminary permit application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on March 11, 2025, for a pumped-storage hydropower project at Blue Diamond Hill — Project No. P-15398-000 — describing two 4,900-acre-foot reservoirs and two 225-megawatt turbines on land the filing identifies as BLM-managed. FERC published notice that the application had been accepted for filing in the Federal Register on Sept. 26, 2025, setting a public comment and intervention deadline of Nov. 21, 2025.

Red Rock Canyon has been federally protected in some form since 1964 and formally since 1990, expanded three separate times by three separate acts of Congress. Blue Diamond Hill, just outside every one of those boundary lines, has spent the same six decades as somebody’s private property — mined, sued over, settled, and now the subject of a federal hydropower application still working its way through FERC’s docket. The line on the map hasn’t moved. What happens on either side of it keeps changing hands.