Columnist Susan Snyder: Landowner has growing concerns

Saturday, July 12, 2003 | 3:48 a.m.

Two years ago Sharon Lisenbardt had trouble with people illegally hunting doves on her property.

These days intrusions don't come with gunfire. They come with stucco walls and red tile roofs or in the beds of trucks filled with gravel.

Construction drown the chatter of Lisenbardt's chickens and the distinctive cries of the peacocks that roam her five-acre compound at Grand Teton Drive and Tenaya Way in the extreme northwest section of the valley.

The beeping of backhoes driving in reverse across the street seems endless.

"Does a truck ever go forward?" Lisenbardt asked.

She stands at her fence daily and surveys the ever-changing landscape.

"How did I -- with as much paying attention and reading and work that I do -- how did I end up with 10 houses per acre across the street from me? They're two stories tall and have 42-by-75-foot lots. You can't put a mobile home on a lot that small," she said. "This is unbelievable."

Now Clark County School District officials want to add a high school on land abutting the west side of Gilcrease Orchard, an 80-year-old public pick-it-yourself garden that sits across the road from Lisenbardt's.

For two years she has watched plans, attended meetings and pestered government officials trying to keep tabs on the school district's intentions.

"They kept telling me the land was 'in inventory,' and was 'more than likely going to be an elementary school and a park,' which would be the least obtrusive," she said.

Lisenbardt now envisions teenage drivers tearing down her street, 22 school buses a day idling a fence post away from from Gilcrease's peach trees and pumpkin patches, and fertilizer runoff from school sports fields fouling the garden.

"The Gilcrease boys are wonderful people. They have given so much to the community. But the best thing they've given is the ability to go out and taste nature by picking a peach. There is no other peach orchard. There is no other pumpkin patch," she said. "There is no other."

Tuesday night Lisenbardt and about 70 of her neighbors met with Las Vegas City Councilman Michael Mack to figure out how to fight this latest human invasion.

They have little ammunition. In the last two years the land-use designation for the 40 acres next to the orchard changed from agricultural to public facility, clearing the way for a school. Mack and city planning officials say it likely happened when the city and Clark County were unifying language in overlapping areas while writing the Lone Mountain master plan.

But those meetings, Lisenbardt and other residents said, were advertised as being for "cleaning up language," not changing land-use designations. The Las Vegas Valley is growing in all directions. It would be hard for a full-time planner to follow such meeting minutiae. Yet, we expect average citizens with full-time jobs and families to navigate cryptic bureaucratic jargon and figure out when to care.

Lisenbardt has lived in two houses the past 55 years -- her current home and a previous one that was relinquished when U.S. 95 was built.

"They took my house, so I moved out here," she said. "I have fought and fought to preserve the land out here. But I don't know what else to do."

She could move again. But where?

"There is nowhere else to go."