KVIG Informative

Whether land next to Red Rock Canyon can be developed has come down to one constitutional question for more than two decades: can Nevada’s Legislature single out one piece of Clark County and freeze its zoning by statute? The Nevada Supreme Court answered no in 2013, and that ruling — not any new law — is still what decides the fight over Blue Diamond Hill today.

Congress designated Red Rock Canyon as Nevada’s first National Conservation Area in 1990, backed by the state’s congressional delegation, according to the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the land. It was the seventh National Conservation Area created nationwide, the same source states.

Congress revisited the boundary in 2002, passing the Clark County Conservation of Public Land and Natural Resources Act, according to the law’s own published text. Under that act, the Howard Hughes Corporation conveyed about 1,082 acres of private land at the conservation area’s eastern edge to the federal government, in exchange for roughly 998 acres of federal land conveyed to the corporation and 1,221 acres transferred to Clark County for park use, the same text states. The acquired land became part of Red Rock Canyon, governed under the original 1990 law, according to the act.

Just outside that federal boundary sits Blue Diamond Hill, a former gypsum mine developer Jim Rhodes bought through his company, Gypsum Resources, in 2003 to build housing, according to the Nevada Legislature’s own record of the dispute. Clark County had already acted to limit development there, adopting the Red Rock Design Overlay District in 2002 to lock in rural zoning of one house per two acres across roughly 70 square miles adjacent to the conservation area, the same record states.

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The Nevada Legislature went further in 2003, passing Senate Bill 358 at state Sen. Dina Titus’s request to permanently bar Clark County from ever rezoning that land for denser development, according to the Legislature’s own bill record. Gov. Kenny Guinn signed it into law that May.

Gypsum Resources sued, arguing the law was unconstitutional because it targeted one specific piece of Clark County rather than applying statewide. The Nevada Supreme Court agreed on Jan. 31, 2013, ruling in Nevada Attorney General v. Gypsum Resources, LLC that Senate Bill 358 violated three separate sections of the Nevada Constitution’s bans on local and non-uniform legislation, according to the court’s own published opinion. The justices rejected the state’s argument that natural-resource preservation justified an exception, the same opinion states.

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That ruling did not touch Clark County’s own Red Rock Design Overlay District, the zoning ordinance the county adopted under its own authority in 2002. It settled a narrower question permanently: the Nevada Legislature cannot step in and lock down zoning on one named piece of land by statute. Every fight over Blue Diamond Hill since 2013 has had to run through Clark County’s own zoning process, not through Carson City, because the state’s one attempt to take the question out of the county’s hands did not survive the Nevada Constitution.

Red Rock Canyon’s boundary is now a matter of federal law, fixed by a 2002 act of Congress. What happens on the private land just outside that boundary remains, by the Nevada Supreme Court’s own order, Clark County’s decision to make alone — and no future Legislature can take it back without running into the same constitutional wall that brought down Senate Bill 358.