Supreme Court refuses eminent domain appeal

Monday, March 8, 2004 | 11:22 a.m.

SUN STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

The U.S. Supreme Court refused without comment today to hear an appeal from a family contesting the taking of its downtown Las Vegas property for a Fremont Street Experience parking garage.

The Pappas family had appealed a Sept. 8 ruling by the Nevada Supreme Court that favored the Las Vegas Downtown Redevelopment Agency in the eminent-domain purchase of their property.

That would seem to mark the end the decadelong fight over one of the first redevelopment projects in downtown Las Vegas. The case now will return to District Court in Clark County to determine a fair price for the property.

Lawyers for the Pappases -- brothers Harry and John and their mother, Carol -- contended the agency violated the family's property rights when it took the land and sought a ruling that would effectively have given them control of part of the $23 million parking garage on the corner of Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard.

The city appraiser had originally set the price at $500,000. The city's last offer on the property was $4.5 million.

Harry Pappas had said when the case was appealed to the nation's high court that money was not the issue.

"My goal is to be sitting in a bulldozer with a hard hat on and knocking down that garage," he said in September.

It was a matter of property rights for the family, he said. "In this country your property is your own and you ought to be able to set any price you want, and if the buyer doesn't like your price, they can move on," he said.

But attorneys for the city and the Fremont Street Experience said the 7,000-square-foot Pappas property was appropriately taken through an eminent domain action in 1993.

The Pappas family had won at the lower court level, getting a Clark County District Court ruling that said the city broke several state and federal redevelopment statutes, took the property without just cause and then handed it over to casinos.

However, the state Supreme Court said in a 4-2 ruling that as long as any individual redevelopment project bears a "rational relationship" to the eradication of physical, social or economic blight, it serves a public purposes within the power of eminent domain.

Justice Nancy Becker wrote for the majority that the garage "furthers the public purpose of eliminating blight in downtown Las Vegas."

The Pappas family argued that blight didn't exist on their property.

Sun reporters

Jean Reid Norman, Sito Negron and the Associated Press contributed to this story.