LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – Tuesday was a big day for the city of North Las Vegas and its vision for a major industrial park.
That’s when the city broke ground on the system that will bring the massive facility the water it needs – and then return it all back into Lake Mead when businesses are done with it.
“Congress created this decades ago, and they thought it was a good idea to put an industrial park out here, but the problem was, as sometimes happens with government, they didn’t have a way to do it,” says North Las Vegas City Manager Dr. Ryann Juden. “The biggest problem with Apex is, you have to have water out here, and when you’re 18 miles away from the nearest water source, there has to be a way, from a municipal side, we’re able to connect this into water.”
But now, the Apex Industrial Park is one step closer to complete connection. On Tuesday morning the City of North Las Vegas and the Southern Nevada Water Authority broke ground on the system that will link the northeast site to the Valley’s recycling system. That means every drop of water every business uses will come back to Lake Mead.
“It took a lot of planning, a lot of partnership, a lot of conversations, a lot of drawings on walls and on paper, just to sit down and put your ideas together,” shared North Las Vegas Mayor Pamela Goynes-Brown. “We all had a shared vision on this project and today is just another example of how it’s all coming together.”
The industrial park has been decades in the making. Today it’s a hub of construction activity. Companies like Crocs and grocery chain Smith’s already operating distribution centers at the facility off Interstate 15 at U-S 93. Mayor Pamela Goynes-Brown says more businesses are signing on every day, bringing the promise of more jobs with them.
“This is an industrial park, so there will be a variety of jobs, and I like to call them careers and not jobs because we are building communities out here as well,” says Mayor Goynes-Brown.
“This 18-thousand acres out here at Apex has the potential of having over 116-thousand jobs in it, and can bring over 200 billion dollars in economic impact into the state of Nevada over a 20-year period,” shares Juden.
And within a matter of years, everything will be in place for the park to welcome the businesses, the jobs, and the revenue. Juden says, they just need the businesses and the employees to really get it off the ground.
“We knew this was where we needed to get to, we did everything we could to move it slowly along the way and we were kind of building that airplane in midflight, and today what you see is almost the completion of an airplane that’s ready for passengers, or businesses, to jump on board.”
“When we build to suit, we build for our residents, the community will come, so they can start their careers here and build from there,” adds the mayor.
Mayor Goynes-Brown estimates it will take between five and ten years for the wastewater system to be fully operational.
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