Final stand

Jeffrey Libby

Friday, May 18, 2001 | 11:08 a.m.

The palm tree Jean Ikuma planted in 1976 is now too tall to prune. Ikuma mentions that minor frustration while standing at her half-opened front screen door.

Ikuma, 62, walked the tree home in a pickle bucket in the weeks after she and her husband, then employees of the National Park Service, arrived from Utah and signed a 25-year mortgage for a $30,000 house in Henderson's old downtown.

In June they will make their last payment on the three-bedroom Magnesium Street home.

But over the last three years, instead of looking forward to retirement in the first house she called home, Ikuma has watched through her back garden as neighbors have moved out, backhoes have arrived and homes have been torn down.

The Ikumas' home is one of three residential properties the city has yet to purchase in a four-acre area southwest of Water Street and Victory Road. The city has purchased 20 other properties there, and plans to seek building proposals for a commercial complex on the site within five months.

The Ikumas' home is one of 1,000 built by the federal government in the early 1940s to house workers at magnesium processing plants during World War II. Today city officials view the two- and three-bedroom homes as part of the "blight" they hope to revitalize into a small urban core of independently owned shops.

"My husband doesn't say anything about it. It's just me that worries," said Ikuma, who works nights as a custodian at a Boulder Highway casino. "I've got used to it here. To say goodbye -- it would be sad. But I want to do the right thing."

For the city, doing the right thing means paying homeowners fair market value plus any moving expenses, Mary Kay Peck, director of community development, said.

"We'll make sure it's not a financial sacrifice for them," Peck said. But the city's redevelopment agency also reserves the legal right to take homes in areas rezoned for commercial development under eminent domain laws, in the event that a homeowner declines to sell. Since 1996, when the redevelopment agency was created, the city has not taken a home by eminent domain.

In all, the city has purchased about 30 homes. About half were Ikuma's neighbors, the other 17 on the south end of Water Street, where developer Phyllis Thompson plans to build a retail and office complex. But that project, called Fountain Plaza, has been delayed nearly a year, and no redevelopment projects in the downtown area have broken ground.

"Redevelopment isn't one of those things that goes off like a firecracker," Peck said. "It's more of an incremental change. One business expands, one person opens their dream restaurant, an attorney moves closer to the courthouse. It's usually a slower, quiet thing."

But the bottom line, Peck said, is to build a "symbolic unifying center for the city" around City Hall and the courthouse.

"One of the things that makes a community successful is to have a heart, and that heart is downtown," she said.

Peck said her priority for now is to see Colorado-based Clarion Associates complete a $164,000 marketing study to determine how the city can best proceed in constructing new office and retail buildings along Water Street. This latest study, approved by the City Council in March, covers much of the same ground as a previous city-funded study in 1997.

Many residents wonder what is causing delays and how the city is making decisions about what businesses open in the downtown.

John Lymo, a retired Timet welder who has lived in the old downtown since 1963, said, "They're not doing what they said they were going to do."

City officials said they wanted to make Water Street attractive to pedestrians, Lymo said, and then they approved a utility building on a major corner with no windows or doors on the main street.

Lymo also remembers officials saying they wanted to get rid of the three bail bondsmen shops and a motorcycle dealership.

That hasn't happened. In fact, the motorcycle dealership is undergoing a major expansion. In many ways, the dealership has become a part of the city's redevelopment plans.

A Harley Davidson rally in September will feature a caravan of the stomach-jarring hogs arriving for a Water Street barbecue and motorcyle "Olympics" following a convention in Las Vegas.

That event will dovetail with a planned hot rod festival and a beach party with trucked-in sand.

These events, along with Artfest and Heritage Days, two annual events, and a weekly farmers market, are all part of the city's efforts to attract more people to the old downtown.

But they are competing with the Galleria Mall and 4 million square feet of surrounding retail and office space built in the mid-1990s just west of U.S. 95 along Sunset Road and Stephanie Street.

If location is a concern, so too is time.

Some say that with five years already gone on the 30-year redevelopment "clock" and nothing built, potential developers may not have enough time to earn a return on their investments.

According to the redevelopment plan, city officials in 1996 assessed the total property value of the 1,307-acre old downtown. The plan stated that over the next 30 years, as property values increased beyond that assessed value of $47 million, the redevelopment agency would divert a percentage of those taxes for reinvestment in the old downtown.

But for developers, five years of potential tax revenues have already been lost. Of the remaining 25 years, they stand to earn progressively less as years go by. For the next nine years, developers would keep 100 percent of the share of redevelopment taxes generated by their projects. But for the last nine years of the deal, the developer collects just half of the revenue. The redevelopment agency takes the other half.

After the 30 years are up, tax revenues will be routed back to the general fund for services throughout town.

As of 2001, the 1,307 acres have an assessed valuation of $79 million, an increase of $21 million in five years despite no new redevelopment projects. The agency expects to collect taxes of $2.1 million in 2002. But for the agency to see more significant tax revenues, it needs to complete a major commercial development.

For that to happen, for redevelopment projects to even break ground, the few remaining homeowners on land planned for commercial development -- people such as Jean Ikuma -- will have to move. Ikuma is attached to her home after living there 25 years, but she says if it is "the right thing to do," she will move.

Other residents, frustrated by their attempts to gain what they consider a fair price for their homes, don't feel quite the same.

Jim Orndoff, a commercial real estate broker, has been trying to negotiate a deal with developer Phyllis Thompson for about a year. He is the last of 11 homeowners Thompson needs to sign a contract. Orndoff, who is assisting his father, says Thompson has yet to make an offer in writing.

Alan Tillery, owner of a home at 62 Magnesium St., just up the street from the Ikumas, is dealing directly with the city and has tentatively agreed to sell his home for $115,000. A graduate of Basic High School, he recently moved to Las Vegas. Like the Ikumas, he and his wife bought the home in 1976, shortly after their daughter was born.

His daughter, now a mother herself, is living in the home until a deal can be reached. The view on the east side of the street beyond the front yard mulberry tree and small plastic swing is one of graded sand lots in all directions. Even so, she says the neighborhood still feels safe.

As for the Ikumas, it may be difficult for them to find a home in their price range that provides similar comforts.

They may need to start looking soon.

With the city parking garage due to be complete in mid-July, city employees will no longer need to park at a temporary lot at the corner of Basic Road and Water Street. That 6.5-acre lot is the same space Thompson hopes to break ground on by June 30 for her retail and office project. The city has given her until July 16 to obtain binding financial backing for the project.

If that long-elusive hurdle is cleared, the redevelopment agency will have that much more time to focus on getting its second major downtown project off the ground.

Though the Ikumas have received only sporadic letters and phone calls until now, it is likely that the city will then want to bring them to the table to negotiate.

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