By Dana Gentry
Nevada Current
Residents of a North Las Vegas neighborhood that’s been sinking for decades thought their nightmare was nearing an end when lawmakers threw a $37 million life raft and a promise of relocation their way in 2023.
Now, Gov. Joe Lombardo wants to swap $25 million in federal funds allocated for the relocation for a promise of replacing it with state money down the road.
Lombardo and the state’s housing division say they’re concerned the federal funds may not be expended by a December 31, 2026 deadline, in which case the money would revert to the federal government.
The money, if not spent in time, “will not just be lost to the project. It will be lost also to the state,” Christine Hess, chief financial officer of the Nevada Housing Division, said during testimony before the Legislature’s Interim Finance Committee on Thursday, adding federal constraints are the issue. “At no time has the division ever suggested, nor the governor’s office suggested that the funding be removed and not replaced.”
Housing Division Administrator Steve Aicroth said the state learned recently that “potentially we’re going to miss the mark,” estimating the effort is eight to 10 months behind the timeline set by the developer, former Las Vegas City Councilman Frank Hawkins. “We’re still looking like it should be there. But we basically have burned up some of our cushion being a little bit behind schedule already.”
State Sen. Dina Neal, who sponsored Senate Bill 450, said during the meeting the state took four months to negotiate the contract with developer Frank Hawkins.
“There you go,” Hawkins said during a phone interview Friday. ”Why am I eight months behind?”
Hawkins says the project presents unique challenges, including the risk of unsuitable soil.
“We’ll know about the soil in the next few weeks. If all goes well, we’re ready to go,” Hawkins said. “Can we do 93 houses in a year? Yes. We got two years and two months.”
Assemblywoman Danielle Monroe-Moreno, chairwoman of the committee, noted the residents have “been made a lot of promises over a lot of years, for a lot of things that they haven’t seen come to fruition,” adding if the money is spent elsewhere, the residents “have no guarantee that that money would come back, because it would have to be the vote of the next legislative session, and we don’t know if any of us are going to be sitting in these seats after Election Day in November.”
Built on an aquifer, neglected by city
Windsor Park, a remnant of Southern Nevada’s segregated past, was built during the 1960s and was home to close to 250 predominantly Black families. In the 1980s the land beneath the homes near Martin Luther King Boulevard and Carey Avenue, which were built on geologic fault lines and a depleting aquifer, began to subside as the city extracted groundwater.
North Las Vegas received $14.5 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1994 to relocate homeowners for about $50,000 each, but some who had paid off their mortgages and didn’t want new debt, stayed put.
North Las Vegas has given up on Windsor Park, despite the fact that taxpaying citizens remain. Vacant lots, some owned by the city, are often littered with illegally dumped debris.
Had the city forced residents from their homes, it would have been on the hook for eminent domain awards. Instead, residents allege the city has engaged in a sort of reverse condemnation via neglect. An ordinance passed 30 years ago prohibits homeowners from improving their properties.
The state’s request is “above and beyond, and we need to figure out a way to make this work for these residents. We can’t just be another place for their pleas to fall on deaf ears,” Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro said, following heart wrenching testimony from longtime residents as well as new families desperate for affordable housing, who unwittingly purchased sinking homes without warning from real estate agents, appraisers, and lenders.
Laquanna Sonnier, a single mother, received down payment assistance from North Las Vegas to buy her home for $230,000 during the housing rush of 2021.
“I didn’t understand why I had so many issues, like many of the others, with plumbing, and the foundation,” she told lawmakers. “My home insurance, they canceled on me within the first two months of me having the home, and I didn’t know why.”
The appraisal of Sonnier’s home noted no deficiencies. “The property appears to be in average condition for the neighborhood,” it said.
Sonnier says it’s “disheartening to know that as long I’ve been living, they’ve been having these issues, and they finally get a glimmer of hope, and it’s trying to be taken away. I do not want my children to grow up having to fight this fight.”
“I would like to see this done before I’m no longer here,” Barbara Carter, who bought her Windsor Park home in 1966, told lawmakers. “I would like to see another home that my family, my daughter and my granddaughter, can live in when I am not here any longer, because that’s what I worked for all my life.”
‘Political and disingenuous’
Aicroth, asked by Monroe-Moreno why IFC wasn’t informed earlier of the concerns about meeting the deadline, said the state “had concerns about this project since before it was actually signed into law.”
Shortly after its passage in 2023, SB 450, which mandates the relocation of the Windsor Park homeowners, almost suffered a quiet demise on Gov. Joe Lombardo’s desk, according to Neal, the state senator who sponsored the measure and fought during two sessions for its passage.
“He vetoed 75 bills and he was going to veto this one,” Neal said of Lombardo at the time.
“Despite the governor’s continued concerns about the feasibility and implications of the legislation itself, he believes it’s important to support the residents of Windsor Park and give the program a chance to succeed,” Lombardo’s spokeswoman, Elizabeth Ray, said in 2023.
On Thursday, Ray said via email that without the governor’s “support and signature on Senate Bill 450, the plans for the Windsor Park Community would not be possible today. This proposal guarantees the future of the Windsor Park community, and any attempts to portray it otherwise are political and disingenuous.”
Neal told the Current it’s unconstitutional for the governor to swap out the money. Ray said there was never a proposal for him to do so unilaterally.
Hawkins, the developer, says he believes the governor supports the project.
“I’m going to give him some grace. The governor signed the bill, and he didn’t have to,” he noted. “The governor is a local guy. He went to Rancho High School. The governor understands what’s happening in Windsor Park and I can’t think of any reason or rationale why the governor would want to do harm or continue to extend this horrible environment that the people are living through.”
Assemblywoman Angie Taylor, a Democrat from Washoe County, said she felt lawmakers were getting “a lot of excuses. We made a commitment to them. These families have been suffering, some of them, for 60 years, and we’ve done the Lucy and Charlie Brown football thing to them. ‘Okay, here you go,’ and then pull the football back.”
Lawmakers noted the division is deploying more than $550 million in federal funds for other housing projects that are subject to the same deadlines.
“I still don’t understand why we can’t say we’re going to spend this $25 million in two years,” said Taylor. “We just talked about spending all kinds of other money in a much shorter period of time.”
But the effort mandated by the bill to purchase lots on land adjacent to Windsor Park comes with its own unique challenges, state officials say, such as securing those parcels.
Unlike other projects, the relocation does not involve “one lot that we can then subdivide or one lot that we can put a 200-unit apartment building on,” Aicroth said. “93 lots for potentially 93 homes. So that’s really the biggest issue that is going to take some time.”
Hawkins says he’s secured conditional agreements to sell from 30 parcel owners.
The informational agenda item did not require the committee to take action, however, a number of lawmakers voiced a clear preference for staying on track.
“If direction is provided that we’re going to use these funds then that’s what we’re going to do,” Aicroth, whose statements throughout the hearing were prefaced with heavy sighs, told the committee.
“All of us have been around long enough to know if there’s something we really want to get done, we can get it done,” Taylor said. “And so I am asking you to find a way to get it done. Hard stop. Period. We owe them.”
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Dana Gentry is a native Las Vegan and award-winning investigative journalist. She is a graduate of Bishop Gorman High School and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Communications from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
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