Las Vegas church building new location after court battles with state over Project Neon

A Las Vegas church plans to move to a newly built location in the suburbs this year, after highway overhaul Project Neon drastically changed the area around its longtime site.

Grace Presbyterian Church is building a new place of worship at the corner of Durango Drive and Oquendo Road in the southwest valley. The two-story building will span more than 38,000 square feet, Clark County records show.

Work crews broke ground last fall, and the church expects to move in around November, associate pastor Craig Sanders said.

Grace Presbyterian, 1515 W. Charleston Blvd., at Interstate 15, traces its roots to the 1950s and has about 450 members. It bought the 4-acre site for its future home back in 2017 for $3.3 million, property records show.

Sanders said that many of its members live in the western Las Vegas Valley and that it was looking for a site in a growing section of town.

“We’re in a really good place,” he said.

He said it took years before construction got underway because it took time to finish the necessary planning, designs and engineering, and because the church was negotiating with the Nevada Department of Transportation over its decades-old site near downtown.

Highway to court

In 2014, the church sued NDOT and the city of Las Vegas in Clark County District Court over the then-upcoming Project Neon highway widening project.

To clear space for the massive project, the state planned to acquire dozens of properties totaling more than 90 acres by 2014, with many deals involving eminent domain, or a forced sale to the government for public use of the site, the Review-Journal reported.

According to the church’s complaint, public officials in 2013 started demolishing areas around Grace Presbyterian that they had acquired for Project Neon. As a result, the church was left to operate in a “blighted” neighborhood and its congregation had “suffered an increased threat to their security,” the lawsuit claimed.

The project also wiped out a source of income for the church, as Grace Presbyterian had rented parking spaces to a since-demolished neighbor, the complaint alleged.

The parties agreed to dismiss the case in early 2016, court records show. Project Neon broke ground that spring.

In 2017, when the church was planning its new location in the southwest, its architecture firm wrote a letter to the county saying the facility would include worship space, a multipurpose hall, offices, meeting rooms and classrooms.

The firm also wrote that amid increased problems with access, property “disfiguration and damage” and decreased visibility stemming from Project Neon, church leaders determined they needed to move, following decades of continuous existence on Charleston, county records show.

$18.5M settlement

The church sued NDOT again in 2018 over Project Neon. According to the complaint, NDOT forced underground utilities to be moved onto church property “with no compensation”; contractors parked on church property, blocked driveways and even charged their cellphones in its electrical outlets without permission; and Project Neon’s construction and demolition caused cracks in the property’s foundation.

The case was settled in 2021. Under the terms, NDOT agreed to pay the church $18.5 million to acquire its real estate along Charleston, court records show.

The settlement also called for a lease agreement that allowed the church to stay at the campus for up to four years.

Project Neon, which cost $1 billion and was finished in 2019, was the state of Nevada’s biggest and most expensive public works project ever, covering nearly four miles of I-15 between Sahara Avenue and the Spaghetti Bowl interchange.

NDOT spokeswoman Kelsey McFarland confirmed the department acquired the church property as part of a court settlement and leased it back “at fair market value to allow time for relocation.”

Tough access

Grace Presbyterian was formed in 2013 through a merger of First Presbyterian Church of Las Vegas and Summerlin Presbyterian Church. The former First Presbyterian opened its doors on the current downtown-area campus in 1955.

The church previously sat along an open stretch of Charleston Boulevard, but after Project Neon, it’s now practically boxed in.

One side of its campus is tucked behind a now-elevated stretch of Martin Luther King Boulevard, and out front, a rising ramp built in the middle of Charleston funnels drivers to the MLK overpass.

All told, vehicular access in and out of the church is now difficult and confusing, and passersby don’t see the place, according to Sanders.

“We’ll have weddings there and people are always late because they can’t get there,” he said.

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.