FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED DEC. 17, 1997
I told you so.
Yes, New York-based Home Office Computing magazine got some of the details wrong when it ranked Henderson, Nevada as a good place to start a home-based business -- but promptly gave the back of its hand to neighboring Las Vegas.
In the edition which went on sale Dec. 1, the national magazine reports: "It's hard to say where the town line separates Henderson from Las Vegas, and the whole metropolis is a good place for home-based businesses in large part because the population and the economy are booming."
So far, so good.
But then the magazine continues: "The difference between Henderson and Las Vegas is attitude: Henderson's approach is laissez-faire, whereas Las Vegas is willing to redevelop using such tools as eminent domain where they simply take land for development instead of purchasing it."
Whether that statement is precisely true is a matter of definitions. It's true enough that the Las Vegas City Council has been downright giddy in its overenthusiasm for seizing lands under powers of eminent domain, not just for such traditional "public uses" as roads and parks, but often with the stated intention of promptly turning the subject real estate over to wealthier private developers, better favored at city hall, who are simply reluctant to negotiate for the land on the open market.
Now, it's (start ital)not(end ital) true that such victimized original property owners are never offered any compensation. The city generally offers something close to the assessed taxable value of the seized properties. If lawsuits develop, it's because the property owners object that the moneys offered are not in keeping with the highest and best potential uses of the property -- as in the specific case of the Pappas family, whose downtown retail property (on the Las Vegas Strip half a black from Fremont Street, for goodness' sake) was zoned for unlimited gaming, making it a potential site for a full-fledged competing casino ... but for which the city refuses to pony up more than $480,000.
Would the owners of existing major casinos who comprise the "Fremont Street Experience" have had to pay more if they simply approached landowners like former U.S. Sen. Chic Hecht and the Pappas family and started negotiating to buy their lots, privately and in good faith?
Of course. Why else use their political muscle to get the land condemned, bulldozed on short notice, and then "compensated" at a bargain-basement, take-it-or-leave-it rate?
Thus, the magazine is technically correct when it says the seized lands are never "purchased," in the traditional sense of a willing buyer negotiating in good faith with a willing seller.
The city can argue that it offers the real owners "fair compensation" till it's blue in the face. The current city mothers have been warned again and again that such indiscriminate use of this extreme power would eventually come back to haunt them, giving Las Vegas a national reputation as an unwise place to invest in a business property, since anyone with more "juice" downtown can walk in any day -- assuming you find your enterprise within the ever-expanding boundaries of some "redevelopment zone" -- and demand your keys.
Well, it's come to pass, hasn't it?
Why does the city council suppose the outsides of apartment buildings in communist capitals always look so ratty? Ask the residents why they don't keep up their building facades in more attractive fashion, with fresh paint and plantings and the like, and they'll cackle at your foolishness: "What, so some well-connected party member might notice the place, and go down to city hall and get us thrown out because he wants it 'reassigned' to himself? Are you crazy?"
If The Las Vegas City Council wants to eventually transform this once-booming metropolis into an American simulacrum of Moscow or Bucharest, both in appearance and in ability to attract new investment, it need only continue bankrupting old widows like Carol Pappas -- depriving them of their rents and offering them a fraction of what their properties might bring on the open market -- for the "crime" of having owned, kept up, and paid taxes for 60 years on a piece of property for which the mayor's newcomer friends now have a better use, advising the old-timers as they're put out on the street (as Mayor Jan Jones did), "You've had it long enough; time to give someone else a turn."
District Court Judge Don Chairez has already ruled the Pappas property was seized illegally. If the city fails in its current maneuver to transfer the case to federal court, by spring the District Court could assess the city back rent for the illegally-occupied premises, as well.
The reek of this pretty kettle of fish is beginning to spread.
Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The column is syndicated in the United States and Canada via Mountain Media Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas Nev. 89127.
-- Samuel Adams