A local home builder has set out to refurbish a Las Vegas golf course that once belonged to the player Bill Walters and was engrossed in controversy years ago.
Touchstone Living has drawn up plans to build approximately 1,300 homes on 130 acres of the Royal Links Golf Club, according to county documents. The project, along Vegas Valley Drive about a mile east of Nellis Boulevard, would include two story townhouses, pools, playgrounds, tennis and pickleball courts, and a trail area.
The Clark County Planning Commission is due to review the project on Tuesday.
Touchstone’s sprawling residential section would pave an East Valley golf course with a story whose story was marked by a multi-million dollar bid during the mid-2000s for housing development, an overturned city council vote, a police investigation, and more Allow accusations of preferential treatment for the city.
It would also bring cheaper houses to a market that is increasingly dominated by more expensive apartments.
‘Once in a lifetime’
Touchstone founder Tom McCormick said Monday that the new Independence community would total 160 acres and include 1,600 homes, but he has not yet submitted plans for the 32-acre section of Royal Links across Vegas Valley Drive.
McCormick said he is under contract to buy the course and expects to complete the purchase before year end. He wants to start building model homes at the end of the first or the beginning of the second quarter of 2022.
Independence would be his greatest development of all time, he affirmed.
“It’s a one-off project,” said McCormick.
Scottsdale Golf Group founder Shelby Futch, whose company operates Royal Links, was unavailable Monday for comment.
House prices on Independence are expected to start at or below $ 250,000, according to McCormick, who found the project is aimed at first-time buyers.
Royal Links is surrounded by many apartments. The neighbors also have an adjacent municipal sewage treatment plant.
McCormick believed there would be “some resistance” from potential buyers to live near the facility, but he said the city of Las Vegas had “done a great job fixing that,” and there was ” a great demand for this ending ”. City.”
According to a June 2020 letter from current city manager Jorge Cervantes, the city spent nearly $ 150 million “to reduce or eliminate odors” from the sewage treatment plant.
McCormick also said that he tried to buy the golf course prior to the Great Recession and that the property “has a history”.
“Political and financial preference”
Walters, a legendary sports bettor and businessman, bought the then vacant land from the city of Las Vegas for $ 894,000 in 1999. The sale came with a deed that prevented anything but a golf course on the property as it was next to a sewage treatment plant that caused 1,400 odor complaints in 1993 alone, city records show.
Amid the frenzy of the Las Vegas real estate bubble, Walters offered the city $ 7.2 million in 2005 to lift the deed restriction to allow residential development.
The city council, headed by then-Mayor Oscar Goodman, a friend and former lawyer of Walters, agreed to lift the restriction in the fall of 2005. But the council overturned the vote two weeks later.
The repeal came after Nevada’s then-attorney general George Chanos wrote a letter saying his office planned to investigate matters relating to the Royal Links site, including its sale and lifting of its deed restriction.
According to a memo from the city at the time, the former site manager Richard Goecke violated bidding or spending protocols several times in connection with Walters’ acquisition of the property between 1996 and 1998, the Review Journal reported.
A Las Vegas police investigation found that Goecke “committed acts that were likely to be criminal in nature,” but then District Attorney David Roger found that news reports reported that criminal charges could not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had expired.
Chanos also released a report claiming “a consistent pattern of political and financial privilege granted to the business units of Mr. Walters by the City of Las Vegas”.
Walters was not accused of any wrongdoing, a news report said at the time.
Ultimately, Royal Links remained a golf course, and Futch acquired the property in 2016, records show.
Walters was arrested in 2016 on charges of insider trading. Sentenced in 2017 and sentenced to five years in prison, he was released from a federal prison camp in Florida last year to serve the remainder of his sentence under a coronavirus release program.
In October 2020, the Clark County Commission approved plans by the owners of Royal Links to repurpose the space for residential use. At the hearing, a land use advisor told commissioners that the plans showed “what a prospective builder could do” and were submitted “for the purpose of selling the property”.
On January 20, his last day in office, then-President Donald Trump pardoned Walters, one of 143 pardons and sentence conversions, White House officials said at the time.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.
