Golden Eagle Land Exchange in Downtown Reno

3/5/09 - ADVISORY BOARD MEETING: GOLDEN EAGLE LAND EXCHANGE - Also on the agenda was discussion about the Golden Eagle Land Exchange. If you aren't familiar with this topic, Golden Eagle Industries has been buying up parcels, one at a time, for the LAST 20 YEARS, in a concentrated area bound by Evans, Virginia, 5th and 7th Streets in downtown Reno. I have a makeshift map of this area but it's extremely outdated by a year or so, and both Golden Eagle and NNUD have acquired additional properties since this map was created. Golden Eagle has reached a point where they would like to trade this land for some ReTRAC parcels the Redevelopment Agency has in its property portfolio. It would be a dollar-for-dollar equal value land trade. The Redevelopment Agency would then own Golden Eagle's parcels and vice versa. So why have they decided to swap all this land after spending over $10,000,000 over 20 years to acquire the land? Well, I don't know really, but it might have to do with the Tessera project, a large multi-block mixed-used development that would sit on some the land Golden Eagle owns. NNUD, the developers of Tessera, also own a significant amount of land in the area. However when asked by a board member if the land trade was specifically for the Tessera project, Mark Lewis replied that it 'could' be, but doesn't necessarily have to be, for Tessera, and mentioned there are many uses for that land given its strategic location, if the Tessera project falls through. Overall, everyone seemed pretty cool with the land exchange, there were no real objections to it.