By Nick Divito
As the president of the Nevada Environmental Coalition, Robert Hall has battled development in the sprawling Vegas Valley for a little more than a decade. Now the fighting is a little too close to home.
Hall, 74, filed a federal lawsuit last week in an attempt to halt construction of the $12.4 million 215/Lake Mead Interchange going up only 500 yards from his home in Sun City Summerlin.
Hall knows what you’re thinking: Here comes another crotchety old NIMBY-er. “This is not a case of a bunch of old people against progress or highways or anything else,” Hall insists.
Hall’s 30-page complaint includes the standard litany of issues that often accompany a lawsuit trying to hobble development: There are warnings of pollution, threats of cancer from “Mobile Source Air Toxins,” unwanted byproducts such as increased traffic, crime and noise. There’s also the part about how the 14,000 senior citizens living in the 7,979 homes in the development will be bisected by the interchange, which is set for completion this summer.
Then there’s the part about how Hall’s constitutional rights were trampled when transportation officials flat-out ignored input and didn’t hold required public hearings on the project, and how the agencies played it fast-and-loose with their environmental impact reports.
More specifically, Hall says officials hastily drafted an incomplete report in 1996 with promises to address 162 points of environmental concern in a forthcoming second study. That second study never materialized, and the 162 points were never addressed. What’s worse: Writers of the 12-year-old impact statement had no crystal ball to help them predict what Hall calls “the drought of the century.”
Spokespeople for the parties being sued—the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, the Nevada Department of Transportation and the Clark County Department of Public Works—declined to comment on Hall’s lawsuit.
“We’re not trying to stop any highways or roads from being built,” Hall says. “The only thing we’re trying to do is get the environmental impact statement that we are entitled to have by federal law.”