Northwest land dispute moves toward resolution

Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2001 | 9:31 a.m.

The classic American dream: Buy property and build a home for the family.

For a hundred or so residents in the Las Vegas Valley's far northwest, it has been a dream deferred. But Monday night, they came a step closer to realizing their goal with a complex shuffle of property deeds.

The residents were stuck in a longstanding surveying dispute that left their properties in limbo. In many cases, the property owners were unable to build on their land or sell it to anyone else.

City and county officials said the deal struck Monday night among landholders in the area will ensure that no one loses property and that people's homes now will be on the land they own.

The roots of the problem go back to the 1870s, when the federal government first surveyed the land. In the 1950s, people started to buy land and set up homes and ranches in the area. But the companies couldn't find the original property lines.

In 1992 the federal Bureau of Land Management re-surveyed the area. They found that the roads and ranches in the area are as much as 200 feet off the true property lines. In some cases, whole homes and yards lie completely off the actual property.

Complicating the picture was the fact that the city of Las Vegas and Clark County both had jurisdiction over the patchwork of ranches, homes and vacant property on the half-mile by mile rectangle.

Last year the city and county signed an agreement that would push all the landowners to adjust the property lines in a wholesale shuffle of land deeds. City and county officials greeted the property owners at Monday's meeting.

"It's been a long time coming, but we're going to make these people whole," Las Vegas surveyor Rita Lumos said at the meeting.

For some residents, the problem has been a decade-long headache of multiple tax bills. Other residents, unable to sell their property or get building permits while the land's status remained unclear, suffered full-blown waking nightmares.

Don White, a resident who works for the city's building department, was one of those who was shocked to find he couldn't build on the lot he thought he owned. Like some of his neighbors, the real estate agents who sold him the land in 1997 didn't disclose the property boundary uncertainty. The title insurance he paid for with the deed also didn't protect him from the problem.

He spent about $14,000 trying to resolve the issue at least enough for the county to issue a building permit.

White said he finally got a building permit two years ago, thanks to a county official who may not have been aware of the title problem. Not everyone was as lucky.

Randy and Ana Marie Crosby, with their two children, have lived in a small mobile home for four years waiting for a resolution to the issue. They moved into the mobile home expecting to immediately begin construction on a new home, but were shocked to find they couldn't get a building permit.

Because legally, their entire property was in fact across the road from the lot they now call home.

Every one of their neighbors suffered similar tribulations, although those who had built homes years or decades before the 1992 resurveying didn't have to move out. Some neighbors found half their house in the city, the other in the county and got property tax bills from both governments.

"It's thrown the neighborhood into turmoil," Clark County surveyor Brett Lane said. "It froze the whole area."

Lumos and Lane said other areas of the northwest have had similar problems, but the 320-acre area targeted Monday is the last of the big headaches for government officials and residents.

The entire mess should be cleared up within the next six months or so, Lumos said -- although a handful of residents may still have to pay county taxes on some of their property, city taxes on the rest, for now.

Lane predicted that eventually the city will annex the entire area.

City Councilman Michael Mack, who represents the city part of the area, attended the meeting. He said the issue has been important for him since he took the council seat two years ago.

Cooperation between the city and county was key to getting the interlocal agreement passed that opened the door for the deed transfers, Mack said.

Almost all of the owners in the area have agreed to the shuffle of deeds that will move the actual property lines onto the lines that people have always lived by, Lumos said.

One or two holdouts could be a problem because, like falling dominoes, one person who refuses to turn over land to a neighbor would upset every other adjoining property.

But Lumos said the city will take any holdouts to court. She predicted that only one or two property owners would resist the deal.

"I'm confident that the court would adjudicate in our favor," Lumos said. "Fortunately, there are no losers. Everyone ends up with what they thought they had."