Columnist Ken McCall: Alta resident resigned to giving up house for road project

Ken McCall

Monday, May 5, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

AFTERNOON RUSH HOUR is approaching and the traffic begins to back up on Alta Drive.

Standing in front of her home just east of Rancho Drive, longtime resident Judy Cornett watches with a weary resignation. The noise and the fumes and boneheaded stunts pulled by impatient drivers drain the humor from her otherwise effervescent personality.

A truck pulls up on Parkway East, one of two exits onto Alta from the Rancho Park neighborhood. Despite the large "DO NOT BLOCK THE INTERSECTION" sign, westbound traffic has it blocked.

"There's no way at this point that this man can safely go left," says the 40-year-old mother of three.

Even if someone on the westbound side of the street lets you through, Cornett says, eastbound traffic squeezes through the congestion at breakneck speeds.

"You feel like a sitting duck, which is really scary," she says. "Those of us who live here are just really, really careful. We try never to be in a hurry to go anywhere."

* While Alta's traffic problem has been building for several years, residents say it really exploded when the street was pushed through to downtown and the Clark County Government Center opened.

The impact on the neighborhood has been dramatic, especially for those living on or near Alta, as Cornett has for most of her life.

Cornett grew up in a house just a bit up Parkway East, where her parents still live. Her sister, Linda Giannosa, lives a little farther up the street with her family.

The sisters cherish the circa-1950s neighborhood with its large lots, custom homes and towering shade trees.

Cornett has loved her house, which includes custom stonework and a shake roof, since she was a kid.

She loves it so much, she jokes, that she bought it twice, moving to the edge of town only to move back a couple of years later.

Giannosa and family, meanwhile, are just finishing a tear-down renovation of their home.

But the sisters are saddened by the changes they've seen in Rancho Park as a result of all the growth miles away in northwest Las Vegas.

Rancho and Alta are often used as a Spaghetti Bowl bypass for downtown-bound commuters.

"Growing up in this neighborhood allowed us to have a very protected, secure life," says Giannosa, a teacher at Faith Lutheran Junior-Senior High School. "It was not a real wealthy neighborhood by any means, but it was real safe."

Now, she says, the traffic makes it nerve-wracking to get out much of the day, and she has a "gut feeling" that crime is going up in the area.

"This is an old, established typically suburban neighborhood and the traffic is not compatible," Gianossa says.

"Driveways (on Alta) are not usable. There are times when we are absolutely penned in."

Cornett says she doesn't let her children play in the front yard anymore. She's afraid, with the increasing traffic and speed, that someone will lose control of their car and run right into her house.

As it is, she says, people often drive up on the sidewalk to get through the two-block bottleneck by her house.

Fortunately, the city and state have a solution.

Unfortunately, it means bulldozing Cornett's home.

* The so-called Rancho/Alta Connector, part of the larger U.S. 95 widening project, will widen Alta to six lanes from Rancho to Martin Luther King Boulevard. That means taking about a dozen homes along the north side of Alta.

The proposed plan would close off both Rancho Park exits onto Alta, erect a wall and build an interior street to complete an oval around the neighborhood. Its only entrance would be on Rancho, where a stoplight would be installed.

Unlike many homeowners along U.S. 95 who face losing their homes to freeway concrete, Cornett and her neighbors aren't fighting the move. The traffic situation has become untenable, they say, and the project will improve the neighborhood.

"It's kind of a double-feeling deal," Cornett says. "On the one hand, I've just loved this house. It's a really cool house.

"But the flip side of this coin is I can't raise children in a house that's not safe."

And now that the decision has been made, Cornett, for one, wants to get it over with. Immediately.

But because the widening will add capacity to the existing roadways, federal regulations require an environmental impact study. So any move to buy the doomed Alta homes is at least two years away.

For Cornett and her family, it will be two years of living in limbo -- limbo with lots of traffic and no option to move away. They can't sell the house now, she points out.

"It'll be really hard," Cornett says of leaving her home. "But it's like taking off a Band-Aid. We know it has to happen, and there's no sense in delaying the inevitable.

"It doesn't matter how good your house is if you're living in a freeway."