KVIG Informative

Henderson paid for Green Valley’s water and sewer lines with a fee on the growth the project itself created — a financing approach Nevada cities still lean on today, years before state lawmakers wrote it into law.

H.M. Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, began assembling undeveloped land southeast of Las Vegas in the early 1950s, accumulating roughly 2,000 acres within a decade, according to a company history of the project held in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections. Greenspun later acquired another 4,000 acres from the City of Henderson, according to an October 1978 account of the project’s opening published in the Henderson Home News and digitized by the Henderson Libraries.

Greenspun’s company, American Nevada Corporation, formed in 1972, according to the UNLV collection. Mark L. Fine joined the company in 1974 and rose to president, a role in which he oversaw Green Valley’s development for the next 17 years, according to a biography published by his own consulting firm. Greenspun served as the company’s chairman.

Donate

Donate

American Nevada Corporation held Green Valley’s grand opening on Oct. 24, 1978, with Nevada Gov. Mike O’Callaghan in attendance, according to the Henderson Home News account. Representatives of four homebuilders — Pardee Construction Co., Collins Brothers, U.S. Homes and Metropolitan Development Corp. — took part, the newspaper reported. The project’s plan covered more than 8,000 acres with room for as many as 100,000 residents, according to both the newspaper account and the UNLV collection.

Henderson’s City Council used the opening to take up how the city would pay for the water and sewer lines Green Valley needed. Council members approved a $5.5 million bond for the work, to be repaid through a privilege fee of $700 an acre charged to commercial and industrial development inside the project, according to the Henderson Home News account.

Donate

Donate

Nevada had no dedicated law requiring new development to pay for its own infrastructure in 1978. State lawmakers have since given Nevada cities and counties specific statutory authority to charge new development impact fees for exactly that kind of infrastructure — the same principle Henderson improvised with Green Valley’s privilege fee, formalized years later.

Green Valley is no longer the edge of the valley. Henderson has built up around it in every direction since, and so has the financing model the city improvised to build it — one privilege fee, one bond and one subdivision at a time.