Hot issues on tap for LV council

Erin Neff

Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2001 | 11:25 a.m.

The Las Vegas City Council may have a sense of deja vu Wednesday as some of the biggest news stories of 2000 return for another round.

Sig Rogich and the sordid tavern license are back, complete with the police report on the prospective owners that turned heads at City Hall.

And while Councilman Michael McDonald will surely abstain from the Rogich item, he'll make some news of his own by proposing that non-conforming uses be allowed to expand in certain cases.

What's a non-conforming use? Crazy Horse Too -- the very strip club with whom McDonald's ties have led to many of his ethics troubles.

Throw in an appeal by Olympic Garden owner Pete Eliades to expand his club's parking lot -- over the objections of neighbors and the Planning Commission -- and you have another council meeting with plenty of potential drama.

If those names aren't enough to pique interest, the council also will hire a federal lobbyist, name the northwest area of the city, annex 620 acres from Clark County and discuss plans for a new Wal-Mart in Town Center and a huge commercial center near Summerlin.

And so not to forget redevelopment, the council will pause at lunch to break ground on a City Hall expansion project.

The meeting really gets going when officials representing Rogich's Ranger Building Corp. ask the board to change the ownership of a building on Westwood Drive to Ali and Hassan Davari of Houston.

Rogich, arguably Nevada's most influential political consultant, won a hotly contested tavern license from the council last year. But when he sold his former offices to the Davaris, city planners initially rejected their bid to turn the building into a topless club called The Boardroom.

The license was rejected at the time because officials found the Universal Church for Life Enhancement -- a new age religious facility run by the sister of Crazy Horse Too owner Rick Rizzolo.

Media reports of Rizzolo's ties to the church and McDonald's possible involvement in helping the church find space so near the other building led Metro Police to investigate. That investigation -- the first of two into McDonald's possible conflicts of interest -- led to city ethics violations and a bid to remove McDonald from office for malfeasance.

The Nevada Ethics Commission will consider the same case next month.

As for Wednesday's item, the Davaris have a tough road ahead of them. When the same item was delayed last month, the city had just completed a background check of the brothers that highlighted some criminal trouble at some of their Houston clubs.

The council will have to decide whether those incidents are reason enough to sink Rogich's request to transfer the license.

McDonald's proposal for the non-conforming uses was not submitted for distribution with the council's regular agenda backup material. Although the item is on the agenda, the public will have to wait until Wednesday to see what McDonald's intentions are.

Dozens of residents, on the other hand, know what Eliades wants to build on a half acre on Rexford Place, a block off Las Vegas Boulevard, and smack in the middle of a residential area.

Eliades wants zoning to allow an additional parking lot for his topless club. But 58 residents protested the item when it went before the Planning Commission, and that board denied the request.

Now Eliades is appealing that decision to the City Council, saying the parking lot is needed to reduce conflict between vehicles and taxis in the current lot. City staff thinks Eliades ought to reconfigure his current lot to ease traffic flow.

In the less contested items, the council will likely: