By Dave Berns
Las Vegas City Council Member Nancy Brune was elected to the five-member panel in November 2022. Her district includes Skye Canyon, along with Tule Springs, the Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument and master-planned communities, including Floyd Lamb Park.
Before running for office, Brune served as the founding executive director of the bipartisan Kenny Guinn Center for Policy Priorities. She is currently a research professor at the Desert Research Institute and a principal at the Luz Development Institute. We recently spoke with her about her work and what drives it.
Question: What prompted you to run for the Las Vegas City Council?
Brune: I was motivated by a couple of reasons to run. One was smart growth, and related to that is community engagement. When I was knocking on doors, I heard people say “Growth is coming,” but it feels like the growth is being done to us so we never have a chance to weigh in on community projects or what goes where.
Question: How do you reach out to your constituents?
Brune: I’m trying to be very intentional about holding community meetings or putting information out there about projects so that citizens or residents can weigh in. When there was a proposed Walmart that was going in near Skye Canyon, somebody actually said, “Oh, I don’t think people would mind.” So I said that I’ll do a survey. We’ll knock on doors to figure it out if people do in fact want a Walmart.
“Most people don’t do a survey. Three thousand people responded. Eighty percent were opposed. So, I took that back to (the community) and I said the community does not want or think the Walmart is appropriate. They are ok with commercial. They understand this (land) is zoned commercial, but they don’t want a Walmart. The community said we will work with the developer to try to bring in businesses that we think our community wants. So, I feel like I’ve honored that promise to the residents to listen to them and represent them, and then the other issue was housing.
“At the Guinn Center I did a lot of work with the (Nevada) Legislature and realized over the last couple of years of being up in Carson City, that a lot of the policies around housing, even if the state Legislature passes them, ultimately then the cities and counties… are then in charge of implementation. So, I realized that if I wanted to help with housing maybe the city council or local government was the place to be. That’s what motivated me.
“We have added some new housing units out here in the northwest. I feel like I’ve been less successful on that front because to actually move the needle for the 100,000 affordable workforce units that we need we need many more resources as a region, so I feel like there’s a lot of room for growth in that area. I do think to really move the needle on the housing that we need we do need greater assistance from the federal government.
Brune says she is “not a big government person,” but the problems that we’re facing here are not unique to Las Vegas. “I think it’s especially sad that Las Vegas used to be the place that you could live the American Dream, buy an entry-level house, get a great job on The Strip. Every community in the country is suffering from the lack of affordable housing. I do feel like the nature of the problem is so huge that we do need federal relief.”
Brune notes that Nevadans do not have enough housing vouchers, which are provided by the federal government to help Americans with their monthly rent payments, are based on a population-based formula.”
The vouchers help American pay for residential rental properties. The formula has not been changed in decades. Chicago, which has fewer people than the metropolitan area of Clark County gets more vouchers than we do, Brune says.
“So, our (congressional delegation) is in conversation with the federal government to try to change that formula.