The Bureau of Land Management and other groups will consider the planning of Oliver Ranch and take community input at the following meetings:
The BLM also will make a presentation on the project to the Red Rock Citizens Advisory Council at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the Blue Diamond Library.
The plan for the 320-acre Oliver Ranch in the conservation area has the backing of local educators, the BLM and the Outside Las Vegas Foundation, a nonprofit group that works with the cadre of federal agencies that manage the vast areas of federal land outside the urban area. Some observers, however, caution that the project could harm the environment it is supposed to study.
The BLM and other supporters of the project believe the project would educate 10- to- 13-year-olds on the importance of protecting the fragile desert environment and cultural resources, including rare American Indian petroglyphs near the site.
Supporters have a feasibility study in hand that said the future school could host more than 14,000 students annually. The BLM already has $22 million in federal funds to build the school garnered through sales of federal land in Clark County.
Environmentalists and residents of the unincorporated village of Blue Diamond are concerned that the Oliver Ranch plan would be bad for the environment that the educational program would be designed to support.
BLM Las Vegas field manager Mark Morse said the concerns will be addressed in a just-launched environmental assessment. He said the environmental assessment, required for work of this kind on federal land, could be completed later this summer.
"There are some environmental concerns," he said. "Any time there is a major development inside a conservation area, we need to be able to answer those questions.
"Their concerns are the same concerns we have," Morse said.
Morse and Alan O'Neill, Outside Las Vegas executive director, said the payoff for the project could be huge.
O'Neill's group, with federal funding, paid for the initial 2002 study by the Yosemite National Institutes, a conservation and park think-tank, which said a project could attract more than 14,000 young people annually to Oliver Ranch. Unlike other study or recreational venues in the natural areas surrounding Las Vegas, the value of Oliver Ranch would largely be that the young people, 250 at a time, would stay for three of four days at a stretch, the feasibility study concluded.
"The Oliver Ranch project is exciting because it would be a residential situation, and we don't have that in the mix presently," O'Neill said. "It gives kids an immersion experience in the desert."
The problem that the Oliver Ranch school would address is that thousands of Las Vegas' young people have little or no connection and knowledge of the desert surrounding the urban island, O'Neill said.
"We hope to instill in the kids a sense of pride, respect, ownership," he said.
Local environmentalists say the goal is noble, but they have concerns about the impact the project -- and thousands of young people -- would have on the desert ecology.
"There is a huge need to do education and research," said Jane Feldman, an activist with the local arm of the Sierra Club, "but I have been concerned about a couple of things."
One issue she sees is that the proposed tuition for the program is $160. At that rate, "What about the kids who can't afford it?" Feldman said. "Are we really going to hit the kids we need to hit?"
She said that until now, there have been few public meetings to discuss the scope or the impact of the project. Feldman noted that 30 percent of the kids targeted in the Yosemite National Institutes feasibility study would come from Southern California's San Bernardino or Riverside counties.
"I'm really interested in reaching the people who live here in Las Vegas, but becoming an international education resort destination is a different thing," she said.
Jeff van Ee, a Las Vegas environmentalist and a board member of Outside Las Vegas, shares some of the same concerns.
"I think it will have an impact in the area," he said. "I think some careful thought needs to be done to see how it pencils out."
Like others, van Ee said he supports "the general concept of educating kids on the outdoors."
"But a lot of people in Blue Diamond and elsewhere have been surprised by the size of this project," he said. "It has been pushed with a lot of enthusiasm. I think further assessments are required, more public input is required than has been done to date.
"I'm not against the facility, but I just think they haven't done their homework," van Ee said.
Morse and O'Neill said that while the general concept is more-or-less set, the size and scope of the project could be changed as the environmental assessment process continues. They said if the project endangers the environment it seeks to teach about, Oliver Ranch will be a failure.
"No size is locked in, despite what people might think," O'Neill said. "We want to build something that works here. We want this, the design itself, to be an important teaching tool."
Some residents of the village of Blue Diamond, which has a population of about 300, perceive a threat posed by the project on two fronts. One is to the environment that many there have adopted as stewards.
Evan Blythin, a village resident and a member of the Red Rock Citizens Advisory Council, said the biggest threat, however, is to the village's water supply, already dwindling after years of scorching drought.
"There is no water," he said. "We hold pretty firm to the notion that there should be no residential component because there is no water."
Blythin said other concerns that he and others in Blue Diamond have is that the proposed environmental school was not included in the Red Rock Canyon management plan, that public input heretofore has been limited, and that the area cannot support a project of this size without significant environmental impact.
"The bottom line is: If you take this small, riparian area, and it is beautiful, and lay $22 million of infrastructure on it, you no longer have a beautiful area," he said.
Morse said the BLM has a contract with the U.S. Geological Survey to find out how much water can be taken from wells at Oliver Ranch. He said the area should support the needs of the environmental school, which will be designed for minimal water and energy use.
Blythin said he and his neighbors don't dispute that the BLM, Outside Las Vegas, the Clark County School District and others want to do the right thing.
"There's nothing wrong with the dream," he said. "It's just in the wrong place."
Morse said the old ranch, in use for generations, already has put its stamp on the conservation area -- and the "environmental footprint" of the Oliver Ranch project would stay within those confines. Trails would be established into the desert, but the young people would be closely supervised and would not be able to stray from those designated areas.
"We're going to be able to use that footprint and not get into the undisturbed areas," he said.
Morse said the support from the community has allowed the project to go forward this far, and it will be needed if the project will continue to go forward.
"I think it's an extremely valuable community project, but it is the community's project, not the BLM's," he said. "We don't need a mausoleum out there. We need to touch the kids. We really do."
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