North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee says the sprawling Apex Industrial Park is poised to become the heart of Southern Nevada’s economic breadbasket, and a study by Brookings Mountain West suggests that’s not hyperbole.
The nearly 20,000-acre site has the potential to support more than 100,000 direct, indirect and induced jobs, the study
said, because of factors including the park’s proximity to Interstate 15 and rail lines, as well as its suitability for a huge array of businesses.
Today the site remains mostly empty, but the potential is beginning to be tapped. Faraday Future, the Chinese electric-car manufacturer that chose North Las Vegas for its $1 billion, 3 million-square-foot production plant, has begun work on its site at Apex. And in May, Hyperloop One made international news with a successful test of its pneumatic-tube transportation technology at its facility in the park.
Meanwhile, city and regional officials have continued to work on infrastructure upgrades. Those efforts led to a recent breakthrough in which the Southern Nevada Water Authority board unanimously agreed to turn over maintenance and operation of the park’s water system to North Las Vegas, which city officials said would help speed up development by reducing a layer of governmental approvals. Next, officials will work toward getting legislative approval for the deal.
So what’s on the horizon for Apex? Ryann Juden, North Las Vegas assistant city manager, recently spent an hour with VEGAS INC discussing the past, present and future of the powerhouse of industrial development.
What’s the status of the Faraday Future project, and what will be the next steps?
They’re mass grading now. There’s about 60 pieces of heavy equipment out there that are moving dirt around, preparing everything for the foundation. Permitting on Faraday’s slab is moving forward. Very quickly, things are coming together out there. Faraday has submitted plans for the layout of its building, and after that, there are really no next steps; it’s just the natural progression of working through inspectors to construct the building.
Has the publicity surrounding Faraday and the Hyperloop project helped generate more contacts from businesses interested in the park?
There is a large Faraday effect. Tesla put the state on the map (with its massive battery factory under construction near Reno), and Faraday put Southern Nevada on the map. So it absolutely has generated a ton of interest. In fact, the mayor and the city manager just returned from a trip to China, where they had several meetings with five businesses interested in locating here. One of them came to town for several meetings. These businesses are in the manufacturing segment, which is an exciting area for us to be diversifying our economy. We’re the only region of 2 million people in the country that didn’t have a large-scale industrial park that is separated from the population and can support heavy industrial and manufacturing uses. And that key thing is what we have now out at Apex. In fact, there are other cities that have these assets, but they’re full. They’d love to have thousands and thousands of acres of industrial dirt.
How significant was the deal that gave North Las Vegas sole control over water to the park? What do you see as some of the potential benefits?
It ensures that all of the efforts we made in North Las Vegas to make it a one-stop shop for developers stay there. The unintended consequence of that bill was that we were no longer able to do the water permitting. That process took away a lot of the streamlining we did, because we had to say, “Well, you’ll have to go to that other entity to get a lot of your water stuff done, and then come back to us.” You really want to be able to have a strong one-stop shop where you can really control the timeline on development, because that’s what makes us so competitive (in attracting businesses).
How many businesses are operating at the park today?
There are about a dozen businesses operating out of Apex right now, and they range from light logistics to now Faraday bringing a manufacturing component out there. Currently where we’re at in the process is that infrastructure is being designed by the SNWA for water, wastewater treatment is being designed by North Las Vegas, the Regional Transportation Commission is designing rail and the Nevada Department of Transportation is doing a flyover on the roads out there (connecting Interstate 93 to the Faraday site). So with all of that, what’s exciting is it opens up thousands of acres for development.
There was a study by the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance that said at the time — and this was done in 2015 — in the previous 12 months, there have been 122 businesses representing over 18,000 jobs expressing interest in Southern Nevada, but they had to look elsewhere because there was not suitable industrial land for development. That is a problem that’s being solved right now out at Apex, and no longer will these companies have to look elsewhere.
The city has taken steps to streamline permitting processes at Apex and elsewhere. Can you elaborate on those steps?
The mayor likes to talk about it like the Truman White House. When Harry Truman became president, it was determined that the White House was crumbling from the inside. And a lot of people don’t realize this, but the White House was propped up and gutted.
We did a complete overhaul of operations in North Las Vegas.
One of the comments that Tesla made was that Nevada was a place where you could get things done. But the reality was that Nevada wasn’t necessarily the place where you could get things done; Storey County was. So we decided we should create the kind of efficiencies you could have in Storey County (which has a population around 4,000), because (the government) is three county commissioners. It wasn’t nearly the layers of bureaucracy you get down here. It’s very small, very nimble, very quick.
We had some processes that would take four to six months, and in North Las Vegas that would take nine months. Now, you can do them in two or three hours. We had processes that would take six weeks, and now you can do them over the counter. The decisions can be made by staff in those cases; they don’t have to move through the city (structure) anymore.
We’ve advertised that, and that’s basically how we found Hyperloop. Because Hyperloop’s first question to us was, “Can you really get business done that fast?” So that was a major attraction for them. They’re a company that’s founded through a series of private-sector investments, and because of that, their timelines mean something to them. So their timeline for doing their open-air testing and their (development) loop were very time-sensitive. We were able to deliver on their timeframes.
Looking five years out, how do you see the park taking shape?
I think you’re going to have tens of thousands of employees out there, which is going to make us need to have very serious conversations where we put our valuable dollars in transportation. We’re going to need some kind of commuter train that goes out there. The reality is that you have to consider what’s going on at Apex when you’re making long-term decisions about transportation assets in Southern Nevada. You cannot look any longer about just what’s best for the taxicab industry on the Strip.
So what you’ll see out there is enterprise that transforms the way we think in Southern Nevada.
Southern California and Phoenix don’t have a comparable asset, and it puts us at a huge advantage for growth.