Clark County hadn’t yet surpassed 20,000 residents when it opened the airfield now known as Harry Reid International Airport back in 1943, but the decision is widely considered one of the key reasons why Las Vegas was eventually able to establish itself as a premier tourism destination that is today home to 2.3 million residents.
The airport hosted a record 58.4 million passengers last year, and the Clark County Department of Aviation is anticipating a point in the not-so-distant future when the 82-year-old facility will no longer be able to shoulder a growing demand.
Recent department projections suggest annual passenger counts could surpass 63 million by 2030. Once that happens, county spokesperson Luke Nimmo says that land and airspace limitations at the “landlocked” 2,800-acre airport campus will prohibit its expansion. Instead, the county is taking another look at a long-dormant plan to construct a second major commercial airport off Interstate 15 in the Ivanpah Valley area between Jean and Primm.
Former county and airport officials foresaw this possibility as early as 2000, when they successfully lobbied the United States Congress to pass the Ivanpah Valley Airport Public Lands Transfer Act. The legislation granted the county roughly 6,000 acres in the area for the eventual development of a supplemental commercial airport, but the plot sat vacant while the idea was revisited and shelved multiple times over the years.
Now, the county has officially revived talks with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to prepare a federally mandated Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the proposed airport.
The three-year process will lay the foundation for a project that wouldn’t be complete until well into the 2030s, but Nimmo says it’s needed “to support the long-term growth of our community and economy” and “meet future air travel demands.”
The first step came in a three-part series of public scoping meetings between July 29 and 31. The proceedings were led by David Kessler of the FAA, who has been tasked with overseeing his agency’s portion of the EIS drafting process. In the July 29 session, Kessler relayed the county’s position that “insufficient facilities” at the four-runway Harry Reid airport warranted a secondary option.
“The key thing here, this is not a replacement for Harry Reid International. This is an addition to it,” Kessler said.
According to Kessler, the proposed Southern Nevada Supplemental Airport would include a central terminal with a series of connecting roadways and two runways. In addition to the existing 6,000 acres of county-owned land, an adjacent 17,000-acre “compatibility buffer” would elevate the airport’s total footprint to nearly 23,000 acres.
Kessler urged the public to submit comments, concerns or questions to project leadership through September 5 by emailing [email protected]. From there, he said the FAA, BLM and other stakeholders will work on completing a draft and final version of the EIS through early 2028. More information on the process can also be found at snsaproject.info.
The first meeting featured a handful of local trade union members who spoke in support of the project—with one noting that it could provide relief for “members who are currently out of work and more than ready to get this project built.”
However, a much larger portion of the feedback came from environmentalists like Vinny Spotleson, an organizer for the Las Vegas-based Toiyabe Chapter of the conservation nonprofit Sierra Club. Spotleson and his group joined forces with representatives from the Center for Biological Diversity to highlight their concerns at the July 30 session.
Some of them came dressed as threatened native species like the desert tortoise and white-margined penstemon wildflower, which Spotleson says will suffer critical habitat loss if the airport is built.
“This issue, generally, of sprawling down to Jean and Primm is one we’ve been fighting for a long time,” Spotleson tells the Weekly. “For the same reason that I-15 connects us across different valleys, it’s also important for the animals who use it as a migratory corridor. The sprawl creates islands that are cut off from one another, which promotes inbreeding and makes it harder for these species to recover.”
Spotleson fears that the new airport could also further accentuate the Valley’s existing water scarcity issue.
“There simply isn’t enough groundwater in Primm to have a whole commercial airport, and the fact that it’s being built on a dry lakebed also presents a myriad of engineering challenges,” Spotleson says.
In the July 29 meeting, Kessler acknowledged these environmental concerns and said the FAA and other partner agencies would look into them.
He expects his team to submit the initial EIS draft in June 2027, followed closely by another public hearing. They’ll have roughly eight months to make revisions before making a final determination around May of 2028. From there, Clark County would be able to move forward with construction.
Have comments, concerns or questions about the Southern Nevada Supplemental Airport? Submit them via email to [email protected] by September 5.
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