LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – We could one day see a lot more scenes of movie crews on the streets of Las Vegas and movies produced at a multi-million dollar studio.
On Wednesday, the Clark County Commission approved ‘Summerlin Studios’ to begin the process of building a 700-million-dollar facility.
The project is a collaboration of the Howard Hughes Corporation and Sony Pictures. The 500-thousand-square-foot project will be located near South Town Center Drive and West Flamingo Road.
The county says the new facility will bring more than 1.6 billion dollars and thousands of jobs to our community.
Neighbors living near the future studio site showed up at Wednesday’s commission meeting raising concerns.
“This is not where it should be, I think it’s a terrific idea but not there,” said one resident who lives in the Siena community.
“My concern is that we have so much building going on in this area, it’s all basically single-family homes and I don’t think a high structure in the middle of this fits into what kind of neighborhood we have,” another community member explained. “When your presenter was presenting this, one of the things he said was – well we have all of these high buildings along 215 – but this is not the 215… This is a very small neighborhood with a lot of low buildings,” she added.
Some residents are even worried about the traffic that would be brought to the area.
“Flamingo is not an arterial street. West of Hualapai, Flamingo becomes a 35 mph local road. Local roads provide limited mobility and it’s the primary access to residential area shops and local businesses. A movie production studio is not a local business, it’s an industry that will draw from the greater community and its main entrance is better suited to be located on a thoroughfare that can carry larger volumes of traffic than this area,” said a separate local.
While presenting the application, Bob Gronauer, a zoning attorney for the Howard Hughes Corporation, said the company is working with them on that issue.
“Flamingo, and when you get down to Town Center, and further down on Hualapai, those road networks are the largest networks in your system to carry the most intense traffic around,” Gronauer explained to the commissioners.
Howard Hughes and Sony Pictures Entertainment provided a statement to FOX5 earlier this month saying Nevada could support a “thriving film industry.” Both say the project will generate billions in private investment and create thousands of jobs for Nevadans.
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