Don Chairez for District Attorney

June 8, 1995, Las Vegas Review Journal, Editorial

Property rights restored

Victims of runaway land seizures find hero.

Knowing the property lay within the bounds of the city’s redevelopment district, established in 1986, the new owners of the Aztec Inn Casino, north of Sahara on Las Vegas Boulevard, decided a few years back to do their part to spruce up the area. They jumped through all the right bureaucratic hoops, winning approval of their plans by the appropriate city agencies, and ultimately spent $700,000 purchasing and remodeling the small casino.

But now, a bigger fish has swum into view. The Stratosphere Tower Corp. busy redeveloping Bob Stupak’s nearby Vegas World into a bigger and better tourist attraction has cast its covetous eyes on the Aztec Inn’s parking lot. And what a major redevelopment client wants, the city Redevelopment Agency is always quick to run and fetch.

In March, the Stratosphere folks offered the Aztec Inn $170,000 for the off-site parking it craved. The Aztec Inn, with an eight-day deadline to take it or leave it, turned down the offer. At that point, the city Redevelopment Agency put the legal wheels in motion to seize the property immediately, leaving it up to the District Court to later determine what “fair price’ the current owners would be paid.

Enter District Court Judge Don Chairez.

Taking away the Aztec Inn’s parking lot ‘will put it out of business.” the judge ruled Tuesday, foreshadowing the healthy dose of straight talk that city authorities were about to take upside the head.

“The city’s own exhibits show that this plan was entered into at the behest of the Stratosphere Corp., that is in the hotel and casino business,” Mr. Chairez continued in Tuesday’s decision. But, “The Aztec Inn is also in the hotel and casino business and entered into it under the same redevelopment plan that the city seeks to use on behalf of the Stratosphere.”

Under the circumstances, the claim of “redevelopment” becomes nothing more than mere labeling for a scheme to transfer property from a less favored private owner to one more favored. And that’s illegal under a 1982 Nevada Supreme Court decision which held that, “Property of a private corporation devoted to a public use cannot be taken or used in the same manner for the same purpose by a different corporation”

But Judge Chairez’s indictment of the buccaneer style of land-grabs currently practiced by the city goes much further.

The Aztec Inn complained it had no chance to testify at a public hearing about the Stratosphere Tower plan. The Redevelopment Agency responded that it had no obligation to hold a new hearing, since hearings were held on the creation of the redevelopment district back in 1986. If these property owners had objections, they should have voiced them four years before they even bought the land.

It is in ruling on that arrogant contention that Judge Chairez’s decision is most far-reaching: “It is clear that the Legislature intended for there to be hearings and public comment not just at the time of the original findings. The proper procedure is to amend the plan for each project and not to rely on findings that are many years old.”

Although the Redevelopment Agency may argue it “never follows that procedure ... past practice of the Agency does not create any kind of estoppel as to these or any other defendants where the Agency is violating the law.”

Telling the Redevelopment Agency to keep its mitts off the Aztec Inn parking lot, Judge Chairez’s blow to the cavalier methods that have become the common practice of the city Redevelopment Agency falls somewhere between a slap on the wrist and an amputation at the elbow. The nerve required to send a property owner an eight- day take-it-or-leave-it “offer” for his land when no school or road is to be built, no “public” use envisioned in the traditional sense, is almost unimaginable in a nation built on property rights.

It was high time for someone to jam the spokes of this run away wagon. The property rights of Las Vegans are considerably safer now than they were last week. And that’s a good day’s work, in anyone’s book.