The Charleston Antique Mall, at Charleston Boulevard and Interstate 15, closed April 30. It was not voluntary. The state Department of Transportation deployed its powers of eminent domain to seize and destroy the building — originally the local 7-Up bottling plant, then for a time the \u201cRed Rooster\u201d antique mall — to make room for the \u201cProject Neon\u201d widening of I-15.<\/p>\n
Business owners Cal and Michelle Tully found a new location, the former Peter Piper Pizza premises next door to Arizona Charlie\u2019s, at 560 S. Decatur.<\/p>\n
The brunette is one of about 40 independent vendors who rent space in the mall. The moving men retained by NDOT stacked her wares — in 140 boxes — at the new location on June 19. They made quite a pile.<\/p>\n
For months now, vendors have worked mornings, evenings and weekends, building and painting as the Tullys and their contractors dealt with city inspection after inspection — lighting, electrical, you name it — leading up to a July 1 \u201csoft opening.\u201d<\/p>\n
On June 26, the City of Las Vegas began running legal ads in the Review-Journal, announcing a July 25 public hearing — 1 p.m. at the new City Hall, 495 S. Main St. — to create in Las Vegas a \u201csecond redevelopment area\u201d for the purpose of eliminating \u201csmall and irregular lots\u201d facilitating the \u201cassembly of land into parcels suitable for modern, integrated development.\u201d<\/p>\n
Guess what? The building next to Arizona Charlie\u2019s, where the Tullys and their vendors have just plowed in hundreds of thousands of dollars for new paint, new lighting, new carpets, new signage — where they\u2019ve just built, in essence, a brand new antique mall? It\u2019s included.<\/p>\n
Virtually all the commercial parcels along Charleston Boulevard from the I-15 west, five full miles to Rainbow Boulevard, are included. Two miles of Decatur Boulevard, from Sahara north to Meadows Lane (just shy of U.S. 95) are included. So are all the commercial parcels along Sahara from the I-15 west to Decatur, as well as the Meadows Mall.<\/p>\n
In the past, the city has used its powers of eminent domain to condemn and tear down buildings and turn over the land to more favored developers primarily downtown, in the area around Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard, where their kleptocrat efforts have led to such triumphs as Neonopolis — re-dubbed variously NeoFlopolis or NeoNecropolis — where the city still services the debt on a rarely used underground parking garage.<\/p>\n
Now, according to the city\u2019s proposed map, the \u201cblighted\u201d and \u201cdeficient\u201d properties in need of redevelopment include the Water District headquarters at Charleston and Valley View, the entire Wal-Mart shopping center with its busy fast-food outliers at Charleston and Decatur, Arizona Charlies\u2019s casino and hotel on Decatur, and the aforementioned Meadows Mall.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe moved on June 19, and they announce they want to seize our new building on the 26th?\u201d the brunette asks. \u201cWhen I first heard this I didn\u2019t know whether to cry or vomit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Both a city council member and City manager Betsy Fretwell insist the city has no current plans to use eminent domain to seize properties in this proposed new \u201cRedevelopment Area 2.\u201d Instead, you\u2019ll hear a lot of happy talk about how they\u2019ll reimburse property owners half their cost if they paint their buildings a pretty new color, or put out some potted plants.<\/p>\n
The Pappas family heard the same line about how they\u2019d be able to \u201cparticipate\u201d in the redevelopment of their property, at Fremont and Las Vegas Boulevard. Downtown property owners submitted plans to fix up their properties, including flowers in pots. The City Council laughed at their naive proposals, instead sending them notices that their properties would be torn down.<\/p>\n
Harry Pappas remembers then-Mayor Jan Jones telling his mother at a hearing \u201cMrs. Pappas, you\u2019ve had your property long enough. It\u2019s time to give it up.\u201d<\/p>\n
The city told Carol Pappas\u2019 tenants to get out, thus reducing her rental income to zero, hoping to squeeze her into accepting their dime-on-the-dollar offer. (The city offered $450,000 for a city block zoned for \u201cunlimited gaming\u201d — a potential casino site at the heart of downtown. After 11 years in court, the Pappas family settled for $4.5 million.)<\/p>\n
Back in 1993, Carol Pappas received a notice telling her she had 30 days to hire a lawyer to fight the seizure. But the city had done a clever thing. They\u2019d hidden at the back of the sheaf of papers a notice that an \u201cemergency\u201d had been declared, eliminating that 30-day delay. It wasn\u2019t 30 days, but less than two weeks later that the wrecking ball showed up and began knocking down the Pappas block. We ran a photo of Carol Pappas, watching the wrecking ball, on the front page.<\/p>\n
On the former Pappas property now stands a big white parking garage, which stood mostly empty for years, till the current owners started leasing out spaces to downtown banks and the courthouse for juror parking. What was the big \u201cemergency\u201d to erect an empty parking garage, Jan Jones — unless it was to stop anyone from putting up a competing casino there, as Bob Snow had tried to do a few years previous, only to be told by some of those same downtown casino barons that he couldn\u2019t because that property \u201cwasn\u2019t blighted\u201d?<\/p>\n
Any private developer who wants to assemble some smaller parcels for \u201ca more appropriate use\u201d along Charleston or Decatur is free to do so, today, with cash. How does the city propose to facilitate that process, short of the threat of eminent domain — which our kleptocrat U.S. Supreme Court, in Kelo vs. City of New London, has now held to be OK as a \u201cpublic use\u201d so long as the new owner promises to pay more taxes?<\/p>\n
When I heard Carol Pappas was dying, I took the brunette to meet her and share her Greek cooking, one last time. Her bible now rests beside my bed. Those at City Hall laugh at the mention of her name. They figure everyone\u2019s forgotten. Have we?<\/p>\n
What favored developer is even now drooling over the prospect of using city muscle and taxpayer subsidies to set up the Decatur Boulevard Experience LLC?<\/p>\n
Has \u201credevelopment\u201d really worked out so well downtown that everyone else is dying to take part? Or could it be — as I\u2019ve been told — that after 26 years, \u201credevelopment\u201d has been such a disaster that current downtown property tax revenues are no longer sufficient to keep all the Redevelopment Agency pencil-pushers in jobs, that there\u2019s talk of having to shift $3 million from the city general fund to keep them all employed next year? Might that be a reason to expand the \u201credevelopment area\u201d and its tax bite?<\/p>\n
Betsy Fretwell insists tax revenues from the old and new redevelopment areas \u201cwouldn\u2019t be commingled.\u201d So what are they up to?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Charleston Antique Mall, at Charleston Boulevard and Interstate 15, closed April 30. It was not voluntary. The state Department of Transportation deployed its powers of eminent domain to seize and destroy the building — originally the local 7-Up bottling plant, then for a time the \u201cRed Rooster\u201d antique mall — to make room for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[47,36,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-redevelopment","category-about-town","category-private-property"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-gP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1043"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1045,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043\/revisions\/1045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}