KVIG Informative

Congress cleared the way to transfer more than 5,700 acres of Ivanpah Valley desert to Clark County in 2000 so the county could someday build a second Las Vegas-area airport. Twenty-five years later, no runway exists — but the federal government has just restarted the environmental review required before one can be built, on a new timeline that does not produce a final decision until 2028.

Congress passed the Ivanpah Valley Airport Public Lands Transfer Act, Public Law 106-362, on Oct. 27, 2000, directing the Bureau of Land Management to convey federal public land in the Ivanpah Valley — about 30 miles south of Harry Reid International Airport, near the California state line — to Clark County for the development of an airport facility and related infrastructure, according to the law’s text on file with the bureau.

The Bureau of Land Management’s transfer maps, titled “Ivanpah Valley, Nevada — Airport Selections” and dated April 1999, identified the specific parcels and remain on file at the bureau’s Las Vegas district office, according to the same document. The bureau ultimately conveyed 5,752 acres to Clark County, according to the Clark County Department of Aviation’s own account of the project’s history.

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The 2000 law required Clark County to pay fair market value for the land, with that revenue directed into a special federal account earmarked to acquire private inholdings inside the Mojave National Preserve and to protect petroglyph resources, according to the law’s text. It also required the county to commit to keep operating Jean Airport, a small general-aviation field near the site, and to obtain Federal Aviation Administration certification that an airspace study had adequately examined the new airport’s effect on access to the Las Vegas Basin before the transfer could be finalized.

The law included a reversion clause: if an environmental review later determined an airport should not be built at the site, the land would revert to the federal government and Clark County’s payments would be refunded, according to the law’s text.

The Federal Aviation Administration published its initial notice of intent to prepare an environmental impact statement for the airport in 2006 and released working papers on the project’s purpose and alternatives in 2008, according to the Clark County Department of Aviation’s project history. Clark County asked the FAA to suspend that review in 2010, citing the effect of the recession on regional aviation demand, according to the same account.

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The FAA and the Bureau of Land Management formally canceled that suspended review and opened a new one in a joint notice published in the Federal Register on May 19, 2025, citing revised federal environmental-review procedures adopted under the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 and renewed demand for air travel in Southern Nevada. Clark County Director of Aviation Rosemary Vassiliadis called the restarted process a major milestone for the region’s aviation future, according to the Clark County Department of Aviation’s own announcement.

The agencies held public scoping meetings in Las Vegas and Primm in July 2025 and closed the public comment period that September. A federal interagency permitting tracker now lists a three-year schedule for the new review, with a draft environmental impact statement targeted for November 2027, a final version targeted for August 2028, and a decision on whether to proceed targeted for October 2028, according to the tracker’s current project timeline. Twenty-eight years after Congress cleared the way to build a second Las Vegas-area airport on this land, the government’s own schedule says the decision on whether to actually build it is still two years away.