KVIG Informative

Congress drew a line around Las Vegas in 1998 and let the federal government sell everything inside it. Twenty-eight years and $3.5 billion in land sales later, that same line is why Clark County is back in Washington asking for more room to grow.

President Bill Clinton signed the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, H.R. 449, into law on Oct. 19, 1998, according to the U.S. Government Publishing Office’s official compilation of the statute. The law, now codified as Public Law 105-263, authorized the Bureau of Land Management to auction and directly sell federal land inside a disposal boundary drawn around the Las Vegas Valley, according to the Bureau of Land Management’s program page for the act.

The law set a fixed formula for what happens to the money. Five percent of every sale goes to Nevada’s general education fund, 10 percent goes to the Southern Nevada Water Authority, and the remaining 85 percent goes into a special Interior Department account, according to the Bureau of Land Management. Congress has amended the act several times since 1998, including through the Clark County Conservation Act of 2002 and the Lincoln County Conservation, Recreation, and Development Act of 2004, the bureau’s program page states.

The program has sold 17,520 acres through auctions and direct sales since it began, generating $3,582,272,072 in total sales revenue as of July 1, 2024, according to the Bureau of Land Management’s own program statistics. That 85 percent account has funded 180 active projects across nine categories, the same statistics show, with $257.3 million available for parks, trails and natural areas projects, $246.4 million for capital improvements, $88.4 million for hazardous fuels reduction and wildfire prevention, and $41.9 million for conservation initiatives.

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The same fixed boundary that made those sales possible has become the valley’s constraint. The Clark County Board of Commissioners passed a resolution in June 2018 directing staff to pursue a new federal lands bill, according to Clark County’s own public lands bill webpage, stating that the community needs a coordinated, well-planned approach to its increasing population without sacrificing its most sensitive natural resources.

Clark County has continued developing its proposal for that new bill since the 2018 resolution, according to the same county webpage, seeking a rewritten boundary and land-conveyance framework to replace the one Congress drew in 1998. The county has not set a final acreage figure for how much additional land it is requesting, according to its own public materials on the process.

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A law written to sell off empty desert around a smaller city has instead financed three decades of parks, water infrastructure and wildfire prevention while quietly running out of the one thing it was built to sell. Clark County is now negotiating with Congress for a second boundary, because the first one, drawn in 1998, was never built to hold a valley this size.