"To the best of my knowledge, the city's southern border at Sahara Avenue, the old San Francisco Street, has been there since 1905," writes Eugene Moehring, the dean of Las Vegas historians. "The eastern border with North Las Vegas has not moved an inch since North Las Vegas became a city in 1946, although prior to that residents of what became North Las Vegas always wanted to join Las Vegas. The problem was their property values were too low, and assessments would not have paid for the road, sewer and lighting improvements -- public works projects that Las Vegas wanted to do there."
Moehring adds that, while static on the south and east, Las Vegas grew northward and westward with literally hundreds of annexations. New communities "once built and occupied, then petitioned to join the city, mostly to get access to LV’s sewer system and wastewater treatment plant."
As for the carve-outs or "islands" of unincorporated Clark County land within Las Vegas, Mob Museum historian-in-residence Geoff Schumacher explains that the city must get the consent of the residents before it annexes land – and many Vegas-area denizens don’t want that, partly because it would mean paying to have sidewalks, water lines and other infrastructure installed, affronting the Old West self-reliance spirit. "It’s a Las Vegas story writ small because nobody wants to pay anything for anything." Indeed, residents of the unincorporated areas have been called freeloaders, "county taxpayers who receive all of the benefits of city services without having to pay all of the costs," as the Las Vegas Review-Journal put it.
Schumacher adds that there are also federal islands of land within Las Vegas, including a parcel at the corner of Decatur Avenue and Vegas Drive that used to be the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management. And there are islands in North Las Vegas and Henderson, such as the huge BMI brownfield that is enwrapped within Henderson without being part of the city.
But the city’s greatest failure of annexation was its inability to break through the Sahara Avenue barrier and lay claim to the Strip. "The first hotel owner on the Strip, Tom Hull of the El Rancho Vegas, built just south of there to avoid higher municipal taxes and fees. Others followed," says University of Nevada-Las Vegas history Professor Michael Green. "The city then tried to annex the Strip and the hotel owners went to the legislature and got a law passed to allow for the creation of unincorporated townships within counties, and that they could be annexed to a city only by a vote of the residents.
"The county then created [the townships of] Paradise and Winchester in the early 1950s. Since then, Spring Valley has been added, and the city occasionally was able to get some land. But it was almost all county [land] south of Sahara." The Mob’s role in lobbying for this this was so central that Chicago Outfit accountant Gus Greenbaum was known as ‘The Mayor of Paradise.’
Howard Hughes, as might be expected, played a central role in the reshaping of the Las Vegas map, although not on the Strip. As Green recounts, "Hughes had done a federal land exchange, swapping acreage he owned in the Elko area, for the area now known as Summerlin. It wasn't city land," but was owned by Hughes’ Summa Corp. "In the early 1960s, Las Vegas annexed it, and Hughes' interests went to court to de-annex it. When his heirs decided to develop it into Summerlin, they went to the city to seek to be annexed so that they wouldn't have to worry about all of the infrastructure and services, so Summerlin is now part of Las Vegas. Ironically, Sam Lionel was the attorney who got it de-annexed, and his old [Lionel Sawyer Collins] firm then got it reannexed!"
In 2001, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman tried and failed to annex 52,000 acres, extending Las Vegas to the northwest, which put him at odds with the Bureau of Land Management. The city eventually got an extra 660 acres as part of a land-transfer bill that was rolled into a must-pass, defense-appropriations bill Then, in 2013, Las Vegas and Clark County began to clash over the former’s desire to incorporate the little – and not so little (one is as big as McCarran International Airport, between Ann Road and Grand Teton Drive) – islands within the city limits. "There’s no county fire departments out here. There’s no county services out here. The city of Las Vegas provides services to these county islands," argued City Councilman Steve Ross.
"If Steve ever tried to annex, I’d break his nose," replied County Commissioner Tom Collins. "The cities here have this ‘everything should be the same’ mentality: Everybody should have a two-car garage and a certain kind of streetlight. They don’t understand that some people don’t want that." Collins could also mention, though he didn’t, that Las Vegas coveted the property taxes that would come with incorporation, including Clark County’s third-most expensive home.
In 2015, the Nevada Legislature passed SB 481, nullifying the annexation of 250 parcels in an island in the northwest part of town. Undeterred, the city went ahead with 32 more annexations and, as of last report, had an additional 200 annexations on its docket. A Las Vegas municipal ordinance requires landowners north of Sahara Avenue to allow their area to be annexed if they’re to tie into Las Vegas’ sewer system – the county’s peters out at the southern border of Las Vegas.
Las Vegas tried to blunt the effect of SB 481, which effectively struck down the ordinance in question, by passing a new ordinance which, according to the Review-Journal, "would expand Las Vegas’ 'service area' to include all property within existing city limits. But it would also deny sewer service to any future applicants who haven’t already filed under the city’s old annexation rules."
As the city continues to process annexation requests, some a decade old, expect this tug of war to continue and for Las Vegas’ shape to continue to evolve in ungainly fashion.
