City presented good government award

Three times in six years. That is Boulder City’s current record as a winner of the Cashman Good Government Award, which it won for the most recent time last week.

Presented by the Nevada Taxpayers Association, the awards, according to the group’s website, “honor government entities and individuals who put workplace experience together with ingenuity to make citizen services work better, faster and cheaper.”

The pitch for this year’s award by the city was the use of revenue from solar leases to keep property taxes low. The property tax rate in Boulder City is the lowest in Nevada. The solar lease money goes in a couple of directions, budget-wise. Part of it — several million dollars per year — goes to the Capital Improvement Fund. But the largest chunk goes directly into the General Fund, which pays for most of what the city does. According to a city statement about the award, in fiscal year 2025, $13.7 million —or one-third of the entire budget —comes from the solar leases.

Boulder City is the biggest city in Nevada in terms of land mass, about 212 square miles. It is a city of fewer than 15,000 residents (less than 12,000 of which are full-time, year-round residents, where an ordinance caps annual residential growth and gambling is prohibited.)

Decades ago, an effort was spearheaded by then-Mayor Eric Lundgaard to purchase a huge tract of land that surrounds the city on two sides known as the Eldorado Valley. The vast majority of the city’s huge land area is comprised of that largely undeveloped expanse of desert. The idea was to use the purchase of the land as a kind of extension of the city’s strict growth ordinance, which limits residential development to no more than 120 units per year.

As development in the Las Vegas Valley really took off in the 1990s, the city’s purchase of most of the Eldorado Valley acted as a kind of a buffer to ensure that financial interests beyond the city boundaries could not build houses in the surrounding land.

However, in the past couple of decades, the area has morphed from an empty buffer to a revenue generator as multiple firms have leased land for large solar generation fields as well as one natural gas-fired electricity generating facility. Moving forward, the city looks forward to increasing revenue as energy storage is added to that mix.

Boulder City joined five other finalists in Carson City on Feb. 25 at the Nevada Taxpayers Association Dinner, where it was named the overall award winner.

“Solar leases have provided a solid revenue stream, proving to be strong even during the COVID years when other communities struggled,” the city said in a written statement. “Over the past six years (fiscal years 2020 through 2025), the average annual land lease contribution to the general fund’s overall revenue stream was $83,056,738 total in land lease revenues. That’s 34-percent of the city’s general fund total revenues ($246,585,000).”

“Going forward, it is anticipated that land lease revenues will approach approximately 40% of the overall operating revenues of the city,” said Finance Director Cynthia Sneed, finance director for Boulder City. “The city is projecting a very stable revenue stream of close to $14.7M annually for the next five years based on current leases.”

“This initiative has demonstrated that through the active involvement of the community, city council and city staff, viable and meaningful impacts can be made to benefit the taxpayer base of the community,” said Michael Mays, acting city manager. “This effort has allowed the city to achieve its goals while being fiscally responsible. I am proud of the hard work and dedication of all who work to keep Boulder City a great place to live, work, play and retire.”