Residents feel squeeze of planned development

Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2001 | 11:29 a.m.

Andre Murat has a comfortable, landscaped home, a couple of neighbors, a couple of dogs. He is surrounded, mostly, by empty desert.

But soon he and his neighbors off Blue Diamond Road may be surrounded by hundreds of families, thanks largely to 3-year-old decisions by the Bureau of Land Management and the Clark County Commission.

Blue Diamond Ranches is asking the County Commissioners to approve an application that will allow 462 homes on the 51 acres surrounding Murat's home on three sides.

Murat's home and those of four neighbors used to have the BLM as a neighbor, but in 1998 a federal land swap turned over the property to Blue Diamond Ranches, a business consortium that includes developers Olympic Group, Thomas & Mack Development Group and Diversified Realty.

Blue Diamond Ranches won commission approval of a development agreement that slated a mixed residential and commercial uses for the land.

As private property "inholders" on federal land, Murat and his neighbors didn't think they would ever have to face intensive development around them. But in the rapidly growing Las Vegas Valley, the land around them is quickly turning from desert to urban development.

Already Murat's back windows look out upon a recreational-vehicle park. He doesn't doubt that high-density residential will soon obscure the view out the other windows of his 2,600-square-foot house.

And Murat isn't opposed to the development, but doesn't believe he has gotten a square deal from Blue Diamond Ranches. The company should be willing to buy his property for its appraised value, he argues.

But company officers say that appraised value, although done twice by professionals in the last three years, is too much to pay for the property.

The latest appraisal by Grady Smith Jr. valued the home and surrounding 1.25 acres at $410,000. Murat said most of the value is in the home, which was little more than a shell when he moved into it a decade ago.

An appraisal a few years ago valued it at $350,000, he said.

"I'll take the difference between the two appraisals," Murat said. "I don't want to stand in the way of development. I want to sell.

"I don't care what they do. I just don't want to be a victim of it."

Murat has corresponded with Blue Diamond Ranches over the last three years, but he says that the company has never made an offer on his property.

He fears that when the development is complete, he will have a property that can't be sold to a home buyer, can't be converted to office use, and will have little or no value.

Barry Moore, president of Diversified Realty, said the price of homes isn't going down because of the consortium's development. It is going up. And that is the problem.

Citing the $410,000 figure for Murat's land, he said his company cannot make money on the prices that homeowners in the area are asking.

"The price is astronomical," he said. "It's literally staggering what they ask for."

Moore said the developers will lose money at the price the owners in the area, including Murat, are asking.

Nevertheless, the company has purchased properties when they are essential for the orderly development of the area, he said.

"We've always been in the market for lots there that we don't have," Moore said. "We've just bought in the last year two houses. We ended up paying more than the seller would get from anybody else."

Chuck Pulsipher, county zoning administrator, said residents in the area had the opportunity to protest the area's development plan. They aren't likely to defeat the zoning request that is within the parameters of the plan, he said.

The commissioners could add conditions such as intensive landscaping that would serve as a buffer between the sprawling Murat home and the tightly packed new homes, he said. But usually the commission doesn't scrap a development agreement they've previously signed off on.

The Blue Diamond Ranches project and much of the surrounding area has been tagged for substantial development, Pulsipher said.

"If the project is in the 'Enterprise Gateway' area," a designation for a large swath of land along Blue Diamond Road near Interstate 15, "it should not come as much surprise to anybody that this kind of project is proposed," Pulispher said.

"It is not like all of the sudden that this has come upon them as a nonconforming thing," he said.

Murat said he and his neighbors were notified of the land-use plan and objected when it was proposed in 1998, but to no avail.

Murat promises to fight the zoning application tonight in a meeting of the Enterprise Town Advisory Board, which recommends zoning decisions to the County Commission, and at the commission's regular zoning meeting next week.

If the zoning is approved, he fears his home will soon look like one owned by neighbor Pam Goerke about a quarter-mile away. Goerke's home on about 2.5 acres is surrounded by construction.

Developer Woodside Homes put up a chain-link fence to keep her dogs and horses on the property. Goerke said the developer isn't a bad one and has worked with her to limit the impact on her home.

But she cannot afford to move elsewhere with her animals, and so will stay unless somebody comes along willing to buy her property at a price that will allow her to relocate.

The developer offered to buy the land Goerke lives on, but not the home itself.

She looks out at the ripped-up ground around her house.

"I thought it was going to be BLM land forever."

The area lies in Commissioner Bruce Woodbury's district. Although the development plan for the area is a done deal, Woodbury said he isn't bound by that land use plan.

He voted against that plan in 1998, citing concerns about the impact of rural homeowners.

"I still have those concerns," Woodbury said. But the development agreement gives Blue Diamond Ranches "a substantial advantage."

"I have to look at the specifics before determining my vote," Woodbury said. "The development agreement is a general guideline. I think you can always take an independent look at each application that comes in."