Thursday, March 10, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

City in the rough

Environmental worries, land battles and explosive growth. Is Mesquite the new Vegas?

By Emmily Bristol

MESQUITE--Every day, Chalet Cafe owner Susan Edwards bakes pies from scratch. Blueberry, apple, cherry, banana and chocolate cream--each gets the signature flaky crust that only a woman who has been making pies for decades can produce. These aren't the factory-produced, homogenous baked goods of a restaurant conglomerate. These are pies made by one woman, one batch at a time.

Edwards has owned the cafe in the heart of downtown Mesquite since the 1970s. She's maintained the tradition of a dying breed--the family-owned and operated American diner. Edwards herself bought the circa-1900 cafe from a family that owned and operated it for decades. She lives upstairs. But even on her days off, Edwards descends to bake the irresistible pies.

To borrow a line from "Twin Peaks" FBI Agent Dale Cooper, this is damn good pie.

But the Chalet Cafe's pies are not what bring people to Mesquite. And you won't find a roadside sign guiding you to them from Interstate 15 should you find yourself in the mood for a pit stop. But the kind of patience and old-fashioned ideals that keep Edwards baking is the charm that so many people who visit Mesquite fall in love with.

"The magic of Mesquite--you can't identify it. It's something that grabs you," says Mayor Bill Nicholes.

This sort of charm isn't labeled with flashing lights. Many who travel through Mesquite--on their way to Las Vegas or back to Utah--probably only take notice of the largest buildings in town: the casinos. Perhaps they marvel at the horses grazing in pastures right off the highway. And golf enthusiasts most likely note the great expanses of fairways and greens. The city of roughly 18,000 has six golf courses, with another on the way.

However, the casinos and fast food chains lining the highway are just a sort of crunchy outer shell, buffering the town from thousands of weekend visitors like the unchanging snow-capped mountains that surround it. Inside the shell there is a softer, quieter, slower place filled with people unimpressed by big-city dwellers' frantic pace and self-importance.

During two days in this small town, the locals were by turns overwhelmingly friendly and cautiously protective. The residents love their town. They worry that journalists only come to expose its problems without seeing its gem-like gleam. Perhaps there is good reason to fret, since most of the time the town only makes headlines when there is trouble--sticky interstate glue spills, stabbings, floods.

Unfortunately for Mesquite residents, it's becoming harder to avoid the limelight. In April the town more than doubled in geogrpaphic size, annexing about 7,700 acres from the federal Bureau of Land Management. Last month, the city again grabbed headlines following a BLM land auction of more than 13,000 acres in Lincoln County that abut Mesquite. While Mesquite officials have no jurisdiction over the Lincoln County parcels, the imminent development of acreage nearly the size of the town itself will no doubt change it forever.

Perhaps like the fictitious Twin Peaks of David Lynch's 1990s television series, Mesquite is a town that is being shaken from slumber. In essence, Mesquite is on the verge of a new era. But does new mean better?

'You can't buy underwear in Mesquite'

Mesquite has a slogan: "Come for a day...stay for a lifetime." And this is true for many of its leading residents. Bill McClure, president of both the Mesquite Chamber of Commerce and the Mesquite Rotary Club, moved here from Utah after falling in love with it on a weekend vacation with his wife.

"When we came down here for our anniversary, we decided the first chance we got we were going to move to Mesquite," says McClure. Nine years later, the newspaperman saw an ad for an editor position with the town's twice-weekly paper, the Desert Valley Times, and got his chance to relocate to Mesquite. And McClure has seen the town change in his short time there.

"When I moved here 4 1/2 years ago there was only one east-west street in town," he says.

Last week the Mesquite City Council approved a 176,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter, the town's first big box store.

"Next to the [40-bed] hospital [which opened last July], that's the biggest thing to happen to Mesquite," McClure says with palpable excitement.

The approval has been heralded as positive by most residents. But there is a vocal minority who see the supercenter as an entity that will change the character of the small town and spell the beginning of the end for the mom-and-pop stores in downtown Mesquite. Both McClure and Nicholes are vocal proponents of the planned Wal-Mart.

"We're kind of the reverse of most communities," McClure says. "We've grown so fast that the retail, the mom-and-pop businesses, haven't been able to keep pace with growth. For instance, you can't buy underwear in Mesquite. You got to go to Vegas or St. George to buy underwear, if you want a choice of two different brands. ... If you want any selection at all you have to go out of town. So what's going to happen is, when Wal-Mart opens up here around Christmastime, the floodgates are going to open. We're going to have a ton of new retail in town because the dollars that are now going to St. George and Las Vegas are going to, most of them, are going to stay here. ... And a lot of our folks are just too old to go driving that distance to go shopping."

Indeed, there's been a whirlwind of activity in Mesquite the past few years. The town went from one to three traffic lights, with four more proposed before the year is done. New streets have been built, with more on the way. And the city is in the midst of developing a comprehensive master plan to control the quantity and quality of growth.

They'll even have a shrimp farm

The business community is hot. The city issued 50 new business licenses in recent months and the Chamber of Commerce has bloomed as a result. Last month 19 businesses joined the roughly 250-member chamber, which usually gains just three to five a month.

The Wal-Mart is planned on land adjacent to the new hospital, sandwiched between the north side of I-15 and the city's beloved Flat Top Mesa. Stretching south in this same area between the freeway and mesa, the city is planning a light industrial park in an effort to diversify its economy and provide middle-class jobs to attract younger people to the mostly retirement-aged community. The centerpiece of the new industrial park is expected to be a 500,000-square-foot tool manufacturing company and a proposed shrimp farm.

"This is the hub of the inter-Mountain West," Mayor Nicholes says, pointing out the town's low pollution, low traffic, low crime and low tax rates as selling points. There is something to this. Mesquite sits at a unique juncture for two Nevada counties, Utah and Arizona, and straddles the busy I-15 corridor. It may be a magic formula for success.

But with every silver lining, Mesquite leaders are eyeing the clouds. Nicholes says he and the rest of the Mesquite City Council want to ensure quality development. "I'm leery of someone with LLC behind their name," he says. "There's very little speculative ownership here."

Nicholes says he expects the town to have nearly a 20 percent growth rate over the next three to five years. Mesquite has been one of the nation's fastest-growing small cities for more than a decade, going from about 1,500 residents in 1990 to an estimated 18,000 in 2004. Beginning this summer, three new residential units--whether a house, apartment or condo--will open each day for the next 18 months.

"It's [the growth's] going to come. We've just got to be sure to take care of it," the mayor says.

Nicholes says diversifying Mesquite's economy is a key challenge. The city's largest demographic is retirees, those 55 and older, who tend to relocate to Mesquite for the warm weather and low taxes. The last thing many of his constituents want are higher property taxes.

"To be perfectly honest, most of this community is pretty well-off," McClure says. "Some folks say we don't have a middle class in Mesquite. We have the service workers that work for little over minimum wage and then we have the wealthy retirees who play Wolf Creek and the Oasis [golf courses]. But there are a lot of us that work who are in between that."

Nicholes hopes the city's plans to court light industry and to relocate and expand the airport will create recurring tax revenue and will stave off property tax increases. The city is solidifying an agreement for a 2,560-acre piece of BLM land, known as the Mormon Mesa, that could serve as the new airport.

If all goes as planned, this would move the current airport from the northeastern part of the city to what is now a vacant expanse just outside Mesquite's borders to the southwest along I-15 heading toward Las Vegas. Mesquite already has FAA approval for the site and the expanded 7,500-foot-long runway (up from 5,100 feet), and an environmental impact study is slated to start soon. A larger airport could go a long way to courting those new industrial businesses. Nicholes says the plan also is to use the new airport as an overflow venue for McCarran International Airport. In addition, there are plans to include a light rail system between Mesquite and the airport and maybe one day to Las Vegas. The first part of this ambitious plan, moving the airport, could happen as soon as 2008.

The gaming giant grows

One of the challenges of managing Mesquite's growth will be balancing the city's old and new priorities. The town's hotel-casinos, already the most influential businesses in the city, are positioned to play a major role in its continuing development. The Casablanca hotel-casino is slated to open a 200-room expansion and convention hall in about 18 months. Meanwhile, a remodel at the Oasis hotel-casino has just been finished. This will inch Mesquite's total hotel room count above 3,000 in about a year's time.

But Mesquite is not a traditional Nevada border town, built solely around the casinos. It is only in the last 10 to 15 years that Mesquite's casinos have taken advantage of their position as an entertainment and vacation getaway for the nongaming state of Utah, as well as other Western states.

"We're about the only entertainment southern Utah has," says Marty Rapson, director of marketing for the Black brothers' casinos.

Until 1990, Mesquite's only large casino was the 30-year-old Oasis, which started as the Peppermill. In 1990 the Virgin River Casino, the brainchild of brothers Jim and Randy Black, opened. In short order, the Casablanca (formerly Player's Island) and Eureka casinos opened. Through buyouts the Black brothers now own the Casablanca, Virgin River, Oasis and the closed Mesquite Star (used only occasionally as overflow hotel rooms) properties. The combined properties put more than 2,500 rooms in the Black's hands.

And as with the Wal-Mart, there was a vocal opposition to increased tourism-related gaming in town.

"Everybody who moves into a place, they move in and then say, 'Okay, no more,'" says Rapson, who herself moved to town in 1997. "We're a family-owned business. We're not some big conglomerate. We care about the community. I do feel like the community does embrace us more now."

It's easy to see why. The casinos are the largest employer in town. The Black brothers' properties employ about 2,700 people. And then there's the Eureka casino and the smaller Stateline and Golden West casinos.

Believe it or not, the city needs all the rooms it can get. More than 5,000 tourists visit Mesquite each weekend. Sometimes conventions, the rodeo, baseball games or golf tournaments take the town over capacity. "There's a lot of times we're turning away business," Rapson says.

Uneasy neighbors

The recent land annexations in and around Mesquite will have a huge impact on where the city and the region go from here. Regional growth plans and their environmental impacts are the hot-button issues of the day.

While Mesquite maps its future, residents in the Moapa Valley--encompassing several small communities between Mesquite and Las Vegas--are being asked to do the same. The BLM has identified about 11,000 acres for possible auction there in the near future. This could bring unincorporated Clark County growth right up to Flat Top Mesa, on the opposite side of Mesquite.

Meanwhile, unincorporated Lincoln County is on the verge of growing right up to Mesquite's borders--including a portion of Flat Top Mesa, a bone of contention between Lincoln County and Mesquite officials.

"The land [on Flat Top Mesa] would be raped if it is built on," Nicholes insists. "It's so much a part of the city, especially at sunset."

Lincoln County Commission Chairman Spencer Hafen says there will definitely be houses on top of the portion of the mesa within Lincoln County. Hafen almost mocks Nicholes' concern, saying the Mesquite City Council once considered moving the city's airport to Flat Top Mesa.

"Mesquite has a short memory," Hafen says. "To me their concerns of saving the mesa and the joshua tree forest--I have a hard time justifying it when they supported an airport on the same piece of ground."

But the two entities will have to work together. While Lincoln County cannot use Mesquite water without an act of legislation, it may come to that. The land in Lincoln County is within the Tule Desert and water is going to have to be piped in from somewhere to feed development.

"The biggest problem [for them] is water. Mesquite has water. It's very limited in Lincoln County," Nicholes says. In fact, he says that during the winter Mesquite sometimes has more water than it knows what to do with.

The next closest Lincoln County city of any significance is Caliente, about 100 miles away. (There is a proposal to build a road between Caliente and Mesquite.)

Since the 13,000 acres of Lincoln County land in question are adjacent to Mesquite, most of the people who will one day live on it will most likely shop and work in Mesquite. This will make planning an issue for both the Lincoln commission and the Mesquite council, despite jurisdictional differences. Both sides, no matter how tersely, acknowledge that.

"The city will be involved [in planning] but they will not be able to have jurisdiction [or approval over plans]," says Hafen, sweetening it by adding, "We've worked together on many things in the past."

Nicholes, too, has a grin-and-bear-it approach to the increasingly significant relationship the two boards will need to have. "It's got to be well thought-out."

Growth in Mother Nature's path

Requiring just as much thought is the environmental impact of growth. In January Mesquite had a record flood, both in terms of damage and the type of flooding. Nicholes says water usually moves in an east-west direction through Mesquite, but during the January flood the Virgin River jumped its banks in a north-south flow. "Those were very unusual circumstances," the mayor says. "It got us good."

At least 83 homes were damaged in the flooding--houses that were built within the river's natural flood plain. Most of the original town's houses were built on high ground, thus avoiding flooding issues, says John Hiatt, conservation chair of the Red Rock Audobon Society.

"Mesquite is essentially built in a flood plain," Hiatt says. "To me, the people kind of didn't look into the future when they built their houses."

The flood raised other environmental concerns. The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that strives to protect endangered species, sent a letter to federal agencies after they discovered sensitive habitat was being bulldozed after the flood without following federal environmental guidelines in order to move the river into a constructed channel. The organization also criticized the Army Corps of Engineers, BLM and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials for their lack of supervision in the situation. The Virgin River is home to at least two kinds of endangered fish, as well as a dwindling number of indigenous birds and animals.

"It was work that they either had previously planned or they took an opportunity to do it," says the center's rivers programming director, Michelle Harrington, adding that she has not ever seen a community treat a riverbed in such a careless way. "I think people used to move riverbeds for development, but since have learned that you can't do that. This sort of thing is outside of the kind of thing I run into."

In late January, wildlife, BLM and Army Corps officials hammered out a long-term plan for Mesquite to deal with flooding and protect the river environment. The city was not fined for Endangered Species Act violations.

Now that the immediate threat of the flood is over, city officials have to evaluate continued development in the flood plain, Hiatt says.

Drastic changes ahead

The next five to 10 years will see drastic change for Mesquite. It will most likely become less identified with its original Mormon-based farm town roots.

The curios in the city's small Virgin Valley Heritage Museum may become more like artifacts of the past and less like a grandma's attic of town collectibles. The residents who drive the freshly resurfaced streets will not know the man who donated his World War II portable typewriter to the museum's back room. The forgotten former Mesquite resident, who was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, will be a faceless, historical stranger to the town's new children who will go on field trips to the museum during Mesquite history week.

The Chalet Cafe may become a sort of demarcation between the old-timers who remember how Mesquite once was and the new residents who don't know its history. It's a story longtime Las Vegans are all too familiar with.

And the residents of Mesquite today seem ready to take that turn, to embark on change.

"It's exciting to live in Mesquite," says McClure, "because if you come here in five years it will be a totally different town."