When it comes to economic development, Henderson is all in to win
Henderson has long been known for its pro-business climate and our business community surveys confirm we are an excellent place to do business. We’ve enjoyed great success in recent years in helping to diversify southern Nevada’s economy, welcoming Haas Automation and other advanced manufacturers, Google and other high-tech companies, healthcare leaders and the headquarters and practice facilities for the Las Vegas Raiders and Aces. We’re even Nevada’s first NBA city!
We love winning. Perhaps being an all-star sports city, a community sports leader and the preferred business headquarters for professional teams has sparked our competitive side. When it comes to economic development, we’ve got our best players suited up and we’re ready to take the field.
Henderson has a solid strategic plan in place and a clear vision for the sustainable future we are working towards, and because of that, we have the confidence to be first to the net when opportunities arise. When it was time to retire the Henderson Convention Center, we initiated a unique public-private partnership with the Vegas Golden Knights organization to create Lifeguard Arena and reinvigorate downtown Henderson. When the Henderson Pavilion was damaged in a severe windstorm, we partnered again on a world-class, state-of-the-art sports and entertainment center and then built it in the middle of a global pandemic. When the Fiesta Casino was put up for sale, we had a unique vision for the site so we bought it ourselves. These are all bold moves with big, long-term payoffs.
We’re also making big plays to develop a quality, skilled workforce that is ready to meet the rapidly changing needs of industry. We’ve partnered with Henderson’s higher education institutions and industry to build facilities and create training and career pathways that will prepare the workers of today and tomorrow for the high-skill jobs of the future. Our Center of Excellence training center will open this year and will be a game-changer for attracting more advanced manufacturing opportunities to our city.
Yet we don’t just want to win at any cost. We sometimes turn down attractive opportunities that are not the right fit for our community. As we strive toward the prosperous future we envision, we are investing in our people, our infrastructure and the premier quality of life for which our city is nationally recognized. So, cheer us on or jump in the game and be a part of our all-star city… in Henderson we’re all in to win.
Sincerely,
Mayor Michelle Romero
Audacity Henderson
In the decade between 2011 and 2021, the City of Henderson’s population grew from 267,100 to 331,900. Between 2013 and 2022, Henderson’s workforce increased 24 percent, from 136,900 to 169,300.
“The explosive population growth is a testament Henderson’s quality of life, desirable amenities and availability of great jobs,” said Jared Smith, director of economic development and tourism, City of Henderson.
“Before moving to a city, companies want to know they’ll have access to workforce,” said Smith. “New residents want to move to a place they enjoy and where they can be gainfully employed.”
With substantial population growth, it’s indicative that both companies and residents can find what they’re looking for in Henderson. The growth the City is experiencing is the successful outcome of bold moves and big investments City leaders are making in the community.
Bold Moves, Bright Outcomes
In the last two years, the City has made investments in the future, annexing land and creating partnerships to improve quality of life for residents, enhance an already healthy economy and make an already business friendly environment even friendlier. City leaders are making moves, not plans, bringing youth sports, sports tourism, pumping up industries and making room for them.
Henderson has built new fire and police stations, and new schools. The City also annexed 8,000 acres of land and master planned the first 850 acres for new industry, created a Center of Excellence for workforce training opening in 2023, and invested in youth sports and tourism.
Play
When the Fiesta Henderson Hotel and Casino located on West Lake Mead Parkway was demolished, the City lost hotel rooms, restaurants and other amenities. In December 2022, Henderson City Council approved bringing it back – even better.
The City used $32 million in redevelopment funds to purchase the site from Station Casinos. Plans are underway to develop the site into a multiuse youth sports facility that will provide year-round recreational opportunities.
It will also open the door to sports tourism in the form of national, regional and local tournaments. Henderson is already home to the Henderson Silver Knights ice hockey team, the training facility for Las Vegas Aces professional basketball team and Las Vegas Raiders Headquarters and Intermountain Healthcare Performance Center.
“We’re hoping the sports facility is really going to drive tourism,” said Smith. “We already know southern Nevada is the perfect spot because people are very interested in coming here for these sporting events.”
City leaders believe the Fiesta site can have an estimated $200 million regional economic impact based on an economic impact study performed when The Dollar Loan Center’s multipurpose indoor arena was in the planning stages. That study showed the project would generate:
- $142 million from construction
- 1,000 full time jobs during construction
- wages of $54.7 million during construction
- ongoing annual economic impact between $17 and $26 million
- between 89 and 122 direct full time jobs annually.
“Being bold means not being afraid to think outside the box,” said Henderson Mayor Michelle Romero. “It was a risk to issue bonds during the pandemic, when there were so many unknowns. Yet we made that bold move and, as a result, we were able to build our state-of-the-art, world-class sports and entertainment facility. We just marked the one-year anniversary of The Dollar Loan Center’s grand opening and that also means celebrating a year of job creation and other economic impacts. Proceeding at a time when others had slowed or stopped projects allowed us to build on an accelerated schedule and saved us approximately $40 million had we waited.”
Work
“Eldorado Valley is the future of industrial growth,” said Smith. “We know that all of southern Nevada needs more developable land with infrastructure, not just Henderson.”
So when the opportunity rose to annex 8,000 acres of Eldorado Valley, Henderson made its move. The first 850 acres are currently being master planned by a team of developers for industrial use. “This represents a new strategic option for manufacturing and logistics growth for all of southern Nevada, because it’s on I-11 and closer to California than a lot of other land options,” said Smith. “With this much land availability, companies aggressively looking at this location, and the speed at which we are able to bring infrastructure to the area, we believe that Eldorado Valley could spark thousands of new, great paying jobs in diverse industry sectors,” continued Smith.
The first 850 acres are slated for master planned overlay for industrial only. “We’ve got development standards in the overlay and we’ve negotiated with the City of Henderson staff. They’re great to work with and we expect those standards to be heard by the City Council in May,” said Dave Brown, president, Land Development Associates.
An overlay provides an extra layer of planning control to properties in a clearly defined area. For the 850 acres in Eldorado Valley, the new, master planned industrial park will have no residential component. It will be purely industrial, mostly big box distribution centers.
“We’re excited to partner with the city of Henderson,” said Brown. “We will be investing hundreds of millions of dollars in improvements into the Eldorado Valley project.” Brown expects to break ground after development and utilities standards are approved, within the next year, and is shooting for its first occupants in the spring of 2025.
“Manufacturing is an emerging industry,” said Smith. There’s a lot of media attention on manufacturing in southern Nevada, but there’s definitely room to grow. “The fact that we’re seeing so much activity is exciting. It helps to diversify our economy and that’s one of the reasons we made the investment into the Center of Excellence in partnership with College of Southern Nevada (CSN).”
Cities and regions that do workforce development well do it as public/private partnerships. Instead of trying to guess what companies need for workforce, they bring those companies into the decision making. With the Center of Excellence, the City is working in partnership with CSN to deliver what businesses need.
Center of Excellence
One of the first questions companies ask when locating to a new city is about workforce. Is there a skilled workforce available? Are there systems in place to train potential employees the way the company needs them trained?
Haas Automation asked those questions of Henderson. The City responded with the bold decision to invest, through an earmarked grant, in a training facility to provide a pathway for future talent. This facility is the Center of Excellence, a $12 million workforce development ecosystem tied to College of Southern Nevada (CSN).
“We’ve been building up our inventory and programs to align to the type of manufacturing jobs that Haas will be bringing in,” said Dr. Federico Zaragoza, president, CSN. Programs geared specifically for Haas center around very advanced manufacturing, a controlled manufacturing program [with] highly sophisticated systems that require a lot of interaction with robots within the operations, and interface between technology and people. “These are advanced manufacturing technicians we’re going to be producing.”
The Center is slated for a soft opening in the summer of 2023, and a launch in the fall. Because of the nature of the systems students will be training to work with, CSN now offers an Associate of Science degree in advanced manufacturing that includes machining. Under the machining umbrella is control systems, robotics and components of advanced manufacturing positions. Because training will be delivered with the same state-of-the-art equipment used by advanced manufacturing companies, new employees will have the experience to be productive from day one.
There are partnerships with Vegas and Henderson Chambers of Commerce, Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance (LVGEA), public education and the City of Henderson itself. Workforce Connections, southern Nevada’s local workforce development board, will be embedded in the Center.
“We have an employer outreach component as part of the Center of Excellence,” said Zaragoza. Partnering with Henderson, Zaragoza said, “we will be connected with existing employers and those coming in and expanding. When we know a company is coming in, we can work with the ecosystem of partners in that industry to allow us to train individuals.”
“Haas is going to need thousands of employees when their facility is completed, and we know there are plenty of other manufacturing companies that are already here or coming that are also going to need this workforce pipeline and that’s exactly what the Center of Excellence is designed to do,” said Smith. “This is a bold move by the City and CSN to put strategy into action. We’re going beyond the discussion and making the investments and making ideas reality.”
Reinvent
There are five redevelopment areas in Henderson, each a neighborhood to itself. Of the five, two are already successes, built out and transformed. Cornerstone is located where the I-215, Stephanie Street and Cornerstone Park come together. It’s a residential neighborhood developed with higher density residential and commercial office spaces. Tuscany is a self-contained redevelopment area between the Water Street District and Lake Las Vegas, a completely built out residential neighborhood.
Both Cornerstone and Tuscany started as undeveloped land with challenges like gravel pits and having been used for mining. Today they’re success stories transformed through incentives programs offered through the Redevelopment Agency.
The fifth area, Lakemoor Canyon, is directly across from the entrance to Lake Las Vegas. It’s been in process for 10 or 15 years to turn 1,200 acres of land, formerly owned by the federal government, from a reclaimed mine site to a master planned community of 3,000 new homes.
The Water Street District is another story. “A lot of what we’re seeing in downtown is due to the Redevelopment Agency’s effort,” said Anthony Molloy, manager of redevelopment, City of Henderson. “People say it’s the 25 year overnight success story. We’ve been working on redevelopment in downtown for 20 years to see fruits of labor come about now with construction and the addition of a new restaurant and a mixed-use project. [Those are a result of] the attraction of Lifeguard Arena.”
Molloy credits the Redevelopment Agency’s transformational projects with creating opportunities for developers to further create new, exciting projects. “We have made investments in the infrastructure, community outreach and the development of a flexible master plan that allows for the streamlining of the entitlement process, to bring new businesses into our downtown.”
Redevelopment also provided business recruitment grant programs to help with tenant improvements. “We’ve seen a lot of reinvestment taking place already,” Molloy said. The new investments activated what may have been former vacant spaces transitioning to amenities for residents (not just in downtown but citywide), created job growth and resulted in private investment taking place.
Boulder Highway
The reinvention of Boulder Highway is a multi-jurisdictional effort to look at bus rapid transit.
“Reimagine Boulder Highway is going to provide a transformational opportunity for the areas in the City of Henderson,” said Molloy. “ We know from previous studies the width of the right-of-way and the fact that there are undeveloped portions. In some areas, from the back of existing curbs to where the private property land exists now, there’s spaces of as much as 200 feet wide of undeveloped right-of-way. We’re taking a very comprehensive view of that entire corridor to identify where those places are and who owns that land, because we want to make some bold moves and remove the obstacles that have prevented investment from happening throughout that corridor.”
The entire corridor is mixed-use, and the Redevelopment Agency envisions any combination of retail, office spaces and multifamily residential projects going in.
“We want to identify key locations to encourage higher density residential in that node and additional homes are going to support additional retail and office in the area as well,” said Molloy.
A Place to Call Home
Henderson’s parks are part of the quality of life afforded to residents and businesses. Citywide, there are 70 parks (and growing), everything from family parks with playground equipment to trail heads to sports complexes. Many parks highlight the beauty of the City’s desert environment. It’s that environment that’s provided the opportunity for Parks and Recreation leadership to step up and make a difference. In order to comply with water conservation legislation enacted in 2021, 59 parks in Henderson need to remove nonfunctional turf.
“A lot of the nonfunctional areas that we identified were areas that were close to parking lots and streetscapes,” said Kirk Niemand, superintendent of Parks and Recreation. “Part of the definition for nonfunctional is we want to be 10 feet away from streetscapes or parking lot areas, so that’s where we started. A lot of our older parks, 20 to 30 years old, have a lot more turf grass installed when they were built. That turf went all the way out to the street.” A lot of the nonfunctional areas are only accessed by maintenance workers—they’re not parts of the park residents use for recreation.
The City identified all the nonfunctional turf areas in all of its parks early on and came up with a plan to map out the areas and work with Southern Nevada Water Authority to get the turf removed and replaced with xeriscaping (a landscaping style which requires little or no irrigation).
Henderson is the first municipality to start the process. When the project is complete, the City will save approximately 288 million gallons of water annually while still providing quality recreational green spaces for residents to enjoy sports, picnics and more.
Henderson Now
Henderson continues to grow back office finance jobs–Barclay’s continues to hire residents regularly, said Smith–and manufacturing is still gaining ground as a top industry in the area.
Henderson supports growing businesses. For companies wanting the benefits of a West Coast location without the drawbacks of being in California, Henderson offers access to Port of Los Angeles coupled with the tax benefits of being in Nevada, and the workforce possibilities in southern Nevada. That’s a win all the way around.
“I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunities before us,” said Mayor Romero. “This is a unique time in our City’s history, with my background as the previous manager of the Redevelopment Agency for more than 10 years and with the two Council members with significant development experience. As we strive to diversify our economy and build a sustainable future, we are well-poised for continued momentum and we’re going all in.”
