VEGAS NAME-DROPPING: Why Harry Reid Airport Still Welcomes You to McCarran

Posted on: July 30, 2024, 12:07h. 

Last updated on: July 30, 2024, 09:42h.

Corey Levitan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Restaurants, Las Vegas Myths.

It’s been nearly three years since Clark County officially renamed Las Vegas’ international airport from McCarran to Harry Reid. So why is its former moniker still visible throughout the airport?

In January, Harry Reid International Airport released this photo of a Super Bowl sign. But the real news was the sign above it, which still welcomed visitors to McCarran International Airport and has yet to be updated. (Image: Harry Reid International Airport)

The reason is that the Clark County Commission stipulated that no public money be used for the renaming, and the money raised privately has long been depleted.

Using zero taxpayer dollars helped drum up support for the renaming, proposed by Commissioner Tick Segerblom, since Clark County wouldn’t have to find the $2 million Segerblom initially estimated it would cost from its budget.

Late Nevada US Sen. Harry Reid, shown in an official photo taken in 2009. (Image: US Senate)

Green from the Blue

Private funding also helped thwart more vigorous opposition from Nevada’s many Republicans. Though considered a hero by many, Reid was an ardent Democrat who served as Senate Majority Leader during Barack Obama’s presidency.

Before the rededication, Reid supporters gushed forth to contribute $4.2 million to the effort, which as of October 2021, was estimated to cost $7-$7.2 million. Diamond Resorts International founder Stephen J. Cloobeck and retired gambler Billy Walters donated $1 million each.

Unfortunately, all of that money was absorbed by the most expensive part of the project — switching out the marquee road signs along Tropicana Avenue, a job initially budgeted at only $1.95 million.

In November 2022, the first of three phases of the renaming had to be halted due to rising construction costs and the lack of funding to cover them.

As of this past February, construction was estimated to cost around $7.7 million, half a million more than the 2021 estimate.

Currently, the McCarran name still graces the welcome signs, exterior building signs, all signage and markers inside the terminals, the rental car shuttle buses, and all staff uniforms.

No timeline for completion of the remaining phases has been announced.

Late US Senator Patrick McCarran funded the purchase of the land on which the airport no longer named after him sits. (Image: Wikimedia)

Who Was McCarran?

Patrick McCarran served Nevada in the US Senate from 1933 until his death in 1954. During his tenure, McCarran, also a Democrat, sponsored several key commercial aviation bills. These included the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938 and the Federal Airport Act of 1945. He also funded the purchase of the land on which the first civilian Las Vegas airfield was built.

For all these reasons, that airfield was named after him in 1941.

However, McCarran was also instrumental in limiting the number of refugees allowed to enter the US after the Holocaust, to only 100K of the 400K Europeans then seeking asylum.

According to Michael Ybarra in his 2021 book, “Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt,” the reason he spearheaded the bill — signed into law by President Truman in 1948 — was because those refugees “might be communists and were almost certainly Jews.”

According to Ybarra, McCarran wrote to an assistant that “87 percent are of one blood, one race, one religion.”

In 2012, Reid told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that McCarran was “one of the most anti-Semitic … one of the most anti-Black, one of the most prejudiced people ever to serve in the Senate.”

Reid retired in 2017 as Nevada’s longest-serving US Senator at 30 years. He died at age 82 in December 2021, two weeks after the airport was rededicated in his name.