Summerlin residents dispute notice on resort expansion

Denise Cardinal

Tuesday, Dec. 23, 1997 | 10:56 a.m.

Andrea Glenn wants to kick herself.

When she and her husband bought their home at Eagle Hills in Summerlin in October 1993, she didn't pay much attention to the 15 pages of notices and contracts she had to sign.

"We were handed it, and we just signed it," she said.

Included in the bundle was a contract with the Howard Hughes Corp., the developer of Summerlin. Unbeknownst to Glenn, the contract read that there may or may not be a gaming development in section 3 of the master-planned community.

Also included was a map that showed the zoning for the area in her neighborhood. There wasn't a section that showed a casino, or where section 3 in Summerlin is.

So when she received a brochure in the mail about The Resort at Summerlin, a hotel-casino planned a few miles south of Eagle Hills, she didn't think it was a problem.

"I didn't even keep the brochure," she said. "The way it was first presented to us was that it was a destination resort for golfing with a spa and shops. So we didn't feel any reason to question it."

When she started reading about The Resort's request for a 300-room expansion of its hotel, the project caught her attention because she didn't remember ever hearing about it.

State law requires developers to disclose the zoning surrounding any home before the buyer agrees to purchase it. And since the Las Vegas City Council gave approval for The Resort's expansion, home owners in the area have been questioning whether they knew about The Resort in the first place.

"We were never notified of any casino," said Teresa Olszewski, a two-year resident of Angel Park. "That's why we bought here."

Olszewski and Glenn attended a meeting for home owners at Bonner Elementary School last week. Faye Steinberg, a resident of Tournament Hills who collected 500 petitions against The Resort's expansion, coordinated the meeting with attorney and former Las Vegas Councilman Matthew Callister.

During the meeting, Callister briefed residents on Nevada's disclosure laws and discussed whether Howard Hughes did its job in making sure residents knew about the casino. Though no final decisions were made, some residents have discussed taking legal action, and others have talked about sending the Hughes Corp. a petition asking for an explanation.

For officials at Howard Hughes, this has been the issue that will not die. After a messy public battle to get the hotel expansion approved by the council after the city's planning department denied it, the company recently received a letter from Callister saying he's been retained by a Summerlin resident to pursue the disclosure issue.

"We have probably gone beyond what the law requires us to disclose," said Mark Brown, vice president of the Howard Hughes Corp., adding that disclosure laws have changed in recent years, so there were different qualifications at different times. "What you're seeing is a continuation of the effort by Matt Callister to stir up this issue."

Callister could not be reached for comment.

"In retrospect," Brown said, "some of those people may wish they hadn't purchased their home, but the fact is they knew gaming would be at that site prior to their purchase."

Brown said Callister has been an enemy of the Hughes Corp. since this year's City Council race. During the election for Ward 4, Callister was accused of not disclosing a $10,000 check from Hughes. Though Callister returned the check, the political fallout was credited with his loss to Larry Brown.

And the fact that Callister is a lawyer, Brown said, furthers the theory that his involvement is a personal vendetta.

"Our company has a long history of harassment by attorneys," Brown said. "In the past, over the years, the Hughes name has attracted a bunch of two-bit lawyers who have tried to make a quick buck."

Residents, who know about the Callister-Hughes feud, deny that their questions about disclosure have anything to do with politics.

"I think they didn't disclose it properly," said Glenn. "There isn't anything on the map, and they never mentioned it. I know we talked with the agent at the time and said it was so great to get away from casinos and the noise. No one indicated anything to us that just south of us there's going to be a big gaming casino or two and six or seven more before Summerlin is complete."