Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman now says the key to downtown redevelopment is getting middle-class people with jobs to live there. To facilitate this goal, the city now seeks incentives to lure certain businesses -- groceries and the like -- to locate in the downtown area.
Good. (Here's a hint: Try a tax-free zone.)
But why (start ital)aren't(end ital) there any grocery stores or related small businesses in the downtown?
Because the city forcibly evicted them to make room for its grandiose white-elephant "redevelopment" schemes, of course. Only a year back, the city booted the last substantial downtown grocery from the very corner of Fremont and Las Vegas Boulevard where now stands te NeoNecropolis movie theater project, a half-finished white whale drifting dead in the water and starting to stink to high heaven.
Why don't folks like the last downtown grocer run out by the "redevelopment" gang go to court and fight for higher compensation than the city's first, low-ball, offer?
Because they don't want to end up being dragged through the courts for years, running up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, like the widow Carol Pappas.
The city started harassing Mrs. Pappas' downtown comercial tenants, urging them to move out of her premises, as early as 1986. By 1994, they had seized her building, bulldozed it to the ground, and replaced it with the big Red Square parking garage (since repainted in a less Leninesque color scheme.)
The widow Pappas -- a Greek immigrant who survived the Nazi occupation and then a communist insurrection to escape to what she believed was a free country with property rights -- has been fighting the city for six years now, receiving not a penny in compensation for her seized property.
District Court Judge Don Chairez in 1996 ruled the city's seizure of the Pappas property was illegal -- the redevelopment agency hadn't even followed its own rules. The city appealed, and has now spent at least $1 million in legal fees, dragging out the Pappas case.
Once again, on March 29, the Nevada Supreme Court threw out the city's appeal of the case, ruling -- for the second time -- that the District Court must complete the original case, conducting a tial to determine what the city owes the Pappas family in compensation and damages for stealing their property.
Then guess what the city will do? The city will appeal again, of course. Because if they pay Mrs. Pappas a fair price, others might start "fighting city hall." Why, if Mrs. Pappas were allowed to win, the whole 1986 redevelopment plan might have to be revamped. And considering how well it's worked, it might just be tossed out completely.
How far have the city's lawyers gone? This time, the state Supreme Court did an unusual thing. In its March 29 order, the state's highest court warned the city's attorneys -- Mark Wasser of Sacramento and the local firm of Beckley, Singleton, Jemison & List -- in writing:
"Appellant's (the city's) docketing statement ... contained misleading answers. Specifically, in its docketing statement, appellant stated that there were no counterclaims pending. ... This court has explained that providing misleading information on docketing statements is subject to sanctions. ... We caution appellant's counsel that any misleading answers in future docketing statements will result in the imposition of sanctions."
Not content with simply using every legal trick in the book to drag this matter out until the widow Pappas is called back to her maker, the city's lawyers went further. They lied to the court.
Even Mayor Oscar Goodman agrees this admonition from the state Supreme Court was "pretty severe. Lying to the court -- if that's what happened -- is a very serious matter. It's very egregious. It's not taken lightly."
The citizens and taxpayers of Las Vegas should be outraged by such behavior. The late John Pappas came to this town in 1901, and handed free bowls of soup out the back door of his White Spot restaurant on Fremont Street to men out of work during the Great Depression, long before most of the current Barons of Fremont Street even came to town.
John Pappas fed the men who built Hoover Dam, and in his old age he left the rental property in question to his young bride, to provide for her in her old age.
Mayor Goodman says he's trying to settle this case, but he refuses to even discuss giving back the property. He refuses to even discuss granting the widow Pappas a ground lease, as the city is required by the redevelopment law to consider.
Mayor Goodman appears to be acting as nothing but an errand boy for the downtown casinos in this matter -- casino owners who lick their chops and smile like contented cats every time the white-haired widow Pappas crosses another birthday off the calendar.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at $24.95 postpaid by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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