Valley residents should look north for the answer, to North Las Vegas, which began as a tent city and has grown to a population of more than 200,000 people.

In the last decade, when much of that growth has occurred, the city has been led by Mayor Michael Montandon, who is completing his last term of office due to term limits.

Montandon enjoys public service and makes no secret of the fact that he has no intention of retiring from political life when his term ends in 2009 - he just doesn't know what he'll end up running for.

Montandon talked with In Business Las Vegas about how North Las Vegas is overcoming image problems, managing growth and new residential and retail projects on the horizon for the city that he thinks could someday be home to UNLV and a professional sports franchise.

Question: North Las Vegas doesn't seem to get the same respect as Las Vegas and even Henderson. Why is that and what is being done to change that?

Answer: I'll try to digress from the Rodney Dangerfield jokes. I have to keep a good perspective of it because normally when people come in to see me, they want something. So the first thing they do is tell me how wonderful North Las Vegas is and what a great job we've done and how everything has changed since they've been here. But they're blowing smoke. They want something. We work pretty hard to actually see what the people think about it. And you know ¦ it's real. How much do you know about the history of North Las Vegas? Why it even exists? Back in the day, it was a tent city. North Las Vegas was set up, we had our separate cities. Las Vegas was the booming little gaming town. Boulder City was created by the federal government for the people building the dam. And everybody who didn't have a place in one of those came up here and founded a tent city. And so it was always the low-income district. It was chartered in 1946 and still remained the affordable housing - that's the "in" term, I'm sure they probably didn't use that term - they probably called it cheap back then. Fifty or 60 years have gone by and we're overcoming that image. We've got great asset though. I have more than 1,000 new cheerleaders every month coming in. Nobody wants to move in and say anything bad about their city. So, I've got a lot of help. So it's changing, but it was literally designed to be something less than Las Vegas when it first started. We're getting past that.

North Las Vegas hasn't had the gaming industry influence that other Southern Nevada cities have had, but that seems to be changing with Texas Station, the Fiesta, the Cannery and, soon, Aliante Station. Does North Las Vegas want more high-profile casinos within its city limits?

That's a big policy question. I'll answer it and, initially, I'll say no. But let me tell you about the policy behind that. We have to look at the city and say, "What do we want the city to look like?" If you picked up North Las Vegas as a whole, and moved it anywhere else, it probably would be a pretty diverse community. We've got some gaming, we've got a lot of industrial, we've got manufacturing, we've got retail. But as a suburb of Las Vegas, we act like a bedroom community, really, because we don't have the big destination gaming, we really are a suburb or a bedroom community and we're happy with that. The tax structure supports that, everything works fine as long as we keep up strong job creation, everything works great. Every once in awhile, there's a little undercurrent of competition, I guess you'd call it. I don't know if you remember it recently on the (Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority), some of the county members said, "We don't think that taxes ought to be distributed to the cities, we think it all ought to stay where it's generated." Well, if the county's going to start getting competitive and they want it to stay where it's generated, we're going to be left no choice but to say, "Well, then we need a Strip and we need destination gaming." As long as the formulas are consistent, the development will stay consistent.

What is the biggest secret about North Las Vegas that you wish all Southern Nevadans knew about?

The opportunities. America in general is famous for its entrepreneurial opportunities and there's just a lot of opportunities up here. If you want to start a bank or if you want to start a business selling cat sweaters, you name it, if you want to start a business, this is a great place to be. With over 1,000 new people moving in here every month, you've got a set of people who don't have relationships. They don't say, "Oh no, I've always eaten at Joe's Sub Shop." They'll eat at Fred's Sub Shop. They'll try something new. Just great business opportunities.

So why is it better than, say, Henderson?

Well, mainly because of our growth. Mainly because we have new growth, new people and not that much competition. I can tell you, when I leave the house looking for a sub shop, I don't have a lot of choices. There's just a lot of room for people to come in and try something new.

What do you think is the biggest problem facing North Las Vegas and how would you propose solving it?

The biggest problem is the one you referred to. It's the image. I'm way past the proposal stage. We've got dozens of different programs in place working on that image and I believe they're working. They're coming around dramatically. But the second-biggest problem, and we share it with a lot of the others, is keeping the infrastructure ahead of the growth. It's a built-in problem in that generally growth infrastructure is funded by people and until the people get there, there's no funding source. And the people say, "Why didn't you think to build these roads before we all moved out here?" "Well, because you weren't here to pay for them." So that problem's inherent. But we're tackling it a little bit at a time. There are people asking us to come up with a global solution but the reality through improvement districts and refunding agreements and lots of little pieces, we're doing a better job of getting the infrastructure ahead of the people.

The city is expanding to the north with the development of former BLM land. How important are the new residential developments planned and under way to the future of the city?

The new development you're talking about is Park Highlands.

There's also Aliante, right?

Aliante is almost sold out. Aliante is in its sunset as far as a new project is concerned. It's just remarkable, isn't it? When you're talking about new, you're talking about Park Highlands. I think it's hugely important because Park Highlands is more than just a new community. It's a change in the way people live. While it may be subtle, it's very real. We've got this historic dichotomy in the way we do things. When we ask people what they want, they want less traffic problems. And they want less pollution. They want better schools. They want all kinds of things. But then we have this kind of built-in Southwest zoning code which says, "Make me get in my car and drive everywhere. Don't let me walk to school. Don't let me walk to the store. Buffer." We love that term - buffer. Setbacks, large lots. They're just not consistent. We can't give the people what they want with what we have and so Park Highlands along with several other communities in the valley helped change that picture. There's going to be mixed used here. There are trail systems. You can't imagine how many hours went into the negotiations of how many feet between any residence and a park. One-thousand feet, 1,500 feet. We want everybody to be able to walk to a park. So we had to really strategically place homes and parks and put it all together so it works. It's going to be a change in the way people live.

Should there be limits to the growth of North Las Vegas or would you like to see it go all the way to the Sheep Mountains to the north?

The limits to the growth. Who wants to live here? I'm not a fan of putting government limitations on what the people want. There are a lot of people who use the drawbridge argument: "I'm in, pull up the drawbridge. Now that my kids have a seat in the schools, don't let anybody else come in." And I get this all the time: "I moved here to Southern Nevada to get away from all this growth. Why don't you stop it?" Well, we thought about stopping it right before you got here. But we didn't. I say that facetiously. But the reality is that if people really want to live here, they should to be able to live here. Now at some point, supply and demand will say that the people who really want to live here may not be able to afford to live here. That might change things. Right now, the limit is Moccasin, that's the street, so it's right at the base of the Sheep Mountains.

How large a population base do you expect for North Las Vegas in the next decade?

We expect 525,000 people by 2025. And I'm not making those numbers up, we worked very, very hard on our visioning process and trying to figure out where we're going to be. So that's a little more than a decade. But give us a decade and we'll probably be somewhere in the mid-300s.

And where are you now?

205,000 to 210,000 people.

What are the prospects for some of the economically challenged neighborhoods of the city, such as the old downtown area?

The prospects are incredible and the definition of "economically challenged" changes dramatically. The city has a redevelopment agency which regularly buys up certain properties. It doesn't seem like it was very long ago that we were buying up properties in the teens, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, the same homes that we're paying $200,000 for today. Even those economically challenged places have seen an incredible increase in equity. That alone is changing the community. People have more to work with. The city has pretty dramatic plans for downtown.

Such as?

I'll just take one particular one. If you take the area of land between Interstate 15 and Las Vegas Boulevard along Lake Mead (Boulevard) which is the major entrance to the city, I think we own half of that now and we're working on putting together a major redevelopment plan there. We're also working with private developers to develop virtually every vacant site. We have a new $21 million shopping center that's just completing construction at Cheyenne (Avenue) and Civic Center (Drive). We got together with them to help them do it. Very exciting for us.

Because of all the expansion to the north, the need for services is expanding in that direction as well. How do you placate residents of some of the older parts of town that the expansion may mean less for them?

You know, I don't know that that's true, that the expansion means less for them. We often get the criticism of "Why aren't you doing this in the older areas?" when the reality is, when it comes to city money, we're spending it all in the older areas. The developers are spending it in the new areas and they're building all kinds of things. We've hired the architects and we're in the design process right now for a new city hall. This is a major economic boom. We're going to build over 200,000 square feet of city hall and that tends to have a pretty significant impact on the economy around it. We have a choice where we could build that, we could build it anywhere in the city, and we're staying right here, downtown, at our current location. So, that will be $130 million that'll be spent down here revitalizing this area. We continue to renovate parks, we're adding new facilities. I don't think we sacrifice at all because the things we're building - we're not building those, developers are.

How supportive has the broader business community been to City Hall efforts?

How supportive have they been? Let me answer that in kind of a sideways direction. Bless their hearts, the North Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce continues growing, but it doesn't hold a candle to the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce. One of the problems we've had, and it goes back to those opportunities I was talking about earlier, is when it comes time to search for business leaders to run for political office, the pool is shallow. The businesses have not come up here to the extent that the opportunities are available for them.

What has to happen to change that? You've said yourself that the image problem is gradually being overcome. Is image still a part of the problem?

Yeah, image and old-timers. In a way, I enjoy having it be a well-kept secret or the best-kept secret around in that newcomers are having some great opportunities. We have new businesses starting up and there are old-time businesses that say, "Well, we wouldn't go up to North Las Vegas." You know, let them stay where they're at. While we'd love to have them, it's kind of enjoyable to have people get excited about what's available up here.

What is the timetable for the development of the as yet unnamed regional mall at Craig Road and Fifth?

Right now, "as yet unnamed" is probably the most exciting part about it in that they're going through the naming contest. I enjoy this. I enjoy going to the schools and saying, "Who all's applied to try and name our center and get a four-year college scholarship out of it?" The kids get all excited about that. But the naming contest will end at the end of June. They'll continue going through the design phases, they'll probably start construction by the end of the first quarter of '08. How long does it take to build a mall? I don't know, 18 months or so, so the end of '09, early 2010. But we're talking big - 1.4 million square feet. So it's on track

What is the timetable for the development of a campus for UNLV north of the beltway?

That one's probably even longer. It's kind of a three-step process. First step is, make sure the land is clean. Parts of it used to be a small-arms training range and there are some possible environmental issues. Second step is legislation to get the land to UNLV. Third step is to get the state to fund it for UNLV. So it's quite a ways off.

How will a UNLV campus change the dynamic of North Las Vegas?

I could put an exact dollar figure to it, but over a short period of time, billions (of dollars) in economic incentive. And this campus will be large enough that they'll have research and development opportunities with it. Take north San Antonio when the University of Texas moved in or take any of these places where they have a new university and you can quantify the actual effect, but it's difficult to measure. It's that big.

Will it be the main campus for UNLV?

That decision hasn't been made, but we're making an assumption. UNLV is landlocked at 347 acres down there and they're going to have 2,050 acres up here. What do you think?

Tell me a little about the Apex Industrial Park and what that means to North Las Vegas.

The Apex industrial area is 10,000 acres. It's not all developable. There's thousands of acres that could be big-box distribution, good job-creating industrial. What they need is infrastructure so we're in the process of negotiating with them on what it would take - and it's very complex - they need water and sewer and electricity. They need phone service, they need all of the standard infrastructure. Nellis needs to know that they're not a danger to the mission of Nellis. So we're having to limit land uses and you know they don't want to see hotels and residential out there. So we're trying to make it all work. But, again, that's 10,000 acres.

What kinds of things do you envision out there?

Warehousing, distribution and manufacturing and some support services. But jobs is what we really see out there.

As North Las Vegas continues to grow, the need for mass transit may also continue to grow. What plans are in the works for mass transportation?

Right now, huge plans. It's what we call the Fifth Street Corridor. In technical-speak, it's divided into several pieces, there's the roadway portion and the transit portion. But the reality is, we have to make it work with a land-use portion. Transit won't work - and you can ask (Regional Transportation District Director) Jacob Snow - unless you have the need to move a large amount of people from one place to a large desired other place. So really, the Fifth Street Corridor has to translate a lot of density, which Park Highlands and the Fifth Street Corridor are creating through our land-use plan, to the Strip. And that's really what it's going to be. As that develops, we believe we are developing a land-use plan that supports transit.

How important to North Las Vegas is the proximity of Nellis Air Force Base?

It's funny you ask that. I just left lunch with the colonels and everybody out at Nellis. We try to quantify it. Economically to the valley, about $5 billion. We believe we get the lion's share of that. Every time I'm out at Nellis, airmen, colonels, lieutenants stop me and say, "I live in North Las Vegas. That's my town." It's the proximity. It's huge. Just huge. I'd be afraid to think of what the loss of it would do to us economically.

North Las Vegas should have far more noise complaints about Nellis aircraft than people who live under the McCarran Airport flight path in Summerlin, yet we never hear about that. Is it a problem?

If they call me, I say, "I love that sound" and that's probably why they don't call back. We have over 200,000 people (city residents) and I have two people who regularly complain about the noise at Nellis.

Two people?

Two people. I won't name them by name, but trust me, I know who they are. That's it. Of 200,000 people, there are two people.

Why is that?

It probably has to do with the fact that when you bought the home, you knew that the world's largest air force base is right there. It's hard for somebody to say, "Gosh, I didn't know that Nellis was going to be there."

In the last municipal election, voters approved advisory questions limiting the locations of adult businesses. What is the City Council doing to enact ordinances effecting that voter sentiment?

There were actually about five different advisory questions and we've been able to enact ordinances regarding payday loans and some of the other things. The sexually oriented businesses, it becomes virtually impossible because they've been determined as a freedom-of-speech issue for us to do much limiting on those, but what it does give us, when they come forward for special use permits, it gives us the discretion, they give us the ammunition or the backing we need to make those decisions.

Is the city willing to go to court to defend such ordinances if they are challenged by adult businesses?

The answer is no. We did a lot of research, we actually drafted the ordinance and took them all to the council and our legal research said these are constitutionally protected. It's not a good use of taxpayers' money to challenge the Constitution.

Give your assessment of the prospects for a regional government, whether that's a merger with Clark County or Las Vegas as Mayor Oscar Goodman has discussed in the past.

I believe that there is no other standard in the nation like ours for the success of the portions we have regionalized already. And when I say that, the Regional Flood Control District, the Regional Transportation Commission, the things that we've done regionally have been model best practices nationwide. I believe we will continue to regionalize certain aspects of government. If you look at wastewater, for example, we all put our effluent in the same place. It's ridiculous that four different entities do that. At some point, wastewater quality will be regionalized as water quality is through the Southern Nevada Water Authority. When it gets down to the heart and soul - and that's planning and zoning - I doubt that will be regionalized. The reason is, the farther you get from home, the poorer your decisions get. That's why Clark County with such a large area has town boards. I believe for planning and zoning and probably even parks and recreation, those are issues people just feel a little close to home about and it'll be difficult to regionalize everything because of that.

You once again are a member of the board of directors of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. What do you think is the most critical issue facing the tourism industry in the next decade?

The ability to get people here, both by car and airplane.

I think those were the same words that Mayor Oscar Goodman used when I talked to him last week.

It's huge to us. We've spent so many hundreds of millions of dollars over the years that the most recognizable brands in the world are Coca Cola, McDonald's and Las Vegas. If you go to Thailand, people know Las Vegas before they know McDonald's. It's that serious a brand. People want to come to Las Vegas. To the extent that we can make it easy for them to get here, they'll come.

The LVCVA enjoys the position of having the largest marketing budget of any convention and visitors bureau in the nation. Yet there are many areas in the state that additional funding could solve a lot of problems, transportation and education among them. Do you think the percentage of money generated by room taxes should be ratcheted back so that more could be spent for transportation infrastructure?

Let me just phrase it differently. Do you think we ought to kill the goose laying the golden eggs? Do you think we really ought to cut off the money we spend bringing people here so that we have no more source of funds to build the infrastructure? No, I don't think so at all. It just doesn't make any sense. Relatively speaking, the money the LVCVA spends marketing Las Vegas compared to what it brings in, there's no comparison. It brings in a lot more.

What's in your political future?

Finishing my two years. I've been mayor for a decade. I've got two years left. I get asked the question, "What's next?" almost every day as if I don't have a lot to do for the next two years. Now, let me be less vague and tell you that I can't see myself getting out of politics. I'm term-limited. I'm done in two years being mayor. Nobody's ever hit term limits except the governor, so in 2009, the first crop of politicians will hit term limits. And that includes me.

So do you have any ambitions to go into the Legislature?

You know, there are a lot of political offices out there and I want to stay involved. I just don't know what If I start thinking about that now, it would distract from the things I have to finish here.

What observations do you have about Mayor Goodman's efforts to attract a professional sports team to Southern Nevada? Because land is so plentiful, do you see a scenario where land could be offered for an arena in the same way that the City of Glendale, Ariz., has taken the Cardinals and the Coyotes away from Phoenix?

Yeah. If Oscar does all the work and it lands in a suburb, wonderful.