Heller: Public lands development can help fix Reno’s growth, affordability woes

Jason Hidalgo | Reno Gazette-Journal

Show Caption Hide Caption Video: Heller talks public lands bill, growth issues and Google in Reno Full video of Sen. Dean Heller talking about Grow With Google in Reno, the Nevada economy, his close race with Jacky Rosen and latest Trump tweet.

Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., doubled down on a proposal to open federal land to development as a way to combat Reno’s growing pains.

Heller, who was the keynote speaker at the Grow with Google event in downtown Reno on Monday, touted the growth seen in Northern Nevada due to its diversifying economy. At the same time, Heller says it is putting greater pressure on area infrastructure and fueling a housing affordability crisis.

“We have a lot of people moving into this particular county and with that comes problems we need to solve and infrastructure, of course, is one of them,” Heller told the Reno Gazette Journal at the Grow with Google event. “It’s not just roads and bridges. Obviously, it’s housing and the ability to build more homes.”

Development vs. conservation

An analysis by the Reno Gazette Journal in May found that households need to make $80,000 per year to afford the median house in Reno. Reno-Sparks is also seeing record-high rent as well as one of the highest increases in rent in the nation due to strong rental demand and low vacancies.

Heller pointed to the federal government’s ownership of the bulk of Nevada’s land as a barrier to development. This includes Washoe County, where 83 percent of the land is federally owned.

County officials are pushing for a Las Vegas-style public lands bill to open up more areas for development. It’s an approach that Heller believes would help lower rent and housing prices in Reno.

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“It’s tough to expand the footprint of a city like Reno (due to federal land ownership) and the only way you can do that is through federal legislation,” Heller said. “We’re working with the leadership here in this community in order to expand the footprint of this town so we can ... get more housing available to people here so that we drive down some of the prices, especially when it comes to rental issues.”

Although the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act has been credited for funding conservation efforts, the Washoe County Economic Development and Conservation Act has been slammed by groups such as the Sierra Club and Friends of Nevada Wilderness for not focusing enough on protecting the environment. Critics also say that there is still more than enough space to expand without having to touch federal land.

“I think that the county is focused much more on development than conservation for Washoe County,” Friends of Nevada Wilderness Executive Director Shaaron Netherton said back in April.

Virtual dead heat

Increased access to public lands for development is one of the key campaign platforms for Heller, who is in a neck-and-neck race for his U.S. Senate seat with Democratic challenger Jacky Rosen, according to a recent Suffolk University/Reno Gazette Journal poll.

Heller says close races are just par for the course in the Silver State.

“Welcome to the state of Nevada, these races are always close,” Heller said. “Basically it breaks near the end and hopefully it breaks my way — usually it does.”

While the growth and affordability issues seen in Reno and other parts of the state are serious, Heller says Nevada is in much better position now to tackle them than it was just a few years ago when the state was in the midst of a crippling recession. At the time, Nevada was the No. 1 state per capita for bankruptcies, Heller said. By early this year, the state was leading the nation in job creation.

“We can solve a lot of problems in this country … if we have a dynamic economy and that’s what we have right now here in Northern and Southern Nevada,” Heller said.