Airport land deals leave plenty of wreckage

Friday, Feb. 18, 2005 | 11:15 a.m.

Clark County commissioners say the controversy over the airport land deals comes down to short-sighted planning decisions and a rush to push zoning.

And, some say, hanging over the issues is the shadow of former Commissioner Erin Kenny.

The spark for a county-ordered audit, now under way and expected to take at least another six weeks, was a land-use decision by the commission that put commercial zoning on a piece of land a county advertisement had once said could only be used as a cemetery.

Kenny, who has since agreed to plead guilty in an alleged money-for-votes scheme involving a Las Vegas strip club owner, represented much of the area in Enterprise and Spring Valley that includes the Cooperative Management Area.

The area, a swath of land given to the airport by the federal government, was designed to limit development incompatible with noise from and potential expansion of McCarran International Airport.

But as the airport has sold or traded land in the area away, various deals have been called into question.

It was Kenny, according to commissioners and aviation department officials, who insisted that a 38-acre parcel at Durango Drive and Windmill Lane be zoned master-planned residential, a use that would be out-of-bounds for any county-controlled land within the management area.

Without a commercial designation, and without the ability to build homes by any future owner, the county said one of the few, if only, uses would be to use it for a cemetery, county officials said.

A land broker bought the land and re-sold it for a $5 million profit. The new owner then tried to change the zoning and failed.

In the commission's effort to repair a broken process, the master planning for the area went through a yearlong reconsideration, which produced a commercial designation for the area. This opened the door for a matching zone change, which will allow the owner to develop the property.

Randy Walker, aviation department director, said the problem came from failure to apply a deed restriction to the land requiring its use to be a cemetery.

But when prompted, he said that the issue would have been avoided altogether if Kenny and the commission had accepted the recommendation of the airport staff to designate the property for commercial use.

This wasn't the only time that Kenny bucked the airport and Comprehensive Planning staff. In late 2002, in the closing days of her tenure as a commissioner, Kenny backed an effort by Las Vegas home builder Woodside Homes to put more than 300 houses near the departure runway for the airport.

The approval came despite opposition from Commissioner Bruce Woodbury, who represented the district, and the airport and planning staff at the county.

"That was passed over my strong objection," Woodbury said. It was, he added, a very frustrating time for him.

"Towards the end of 2002, I expressed to the commissioners that the developers were getting whatever they wanted ... I was very upset about. It seemed like towards the end of 2002 there was a lot of that going on."

And a lot of it was going on in the Cooperative Management Area.

"She (Kenny) was the one who asked for the master plan update," Woodbury said. "She came forward with the zone change. She was the most vocal supporter of Woodside Homes."

Her support included scheduling a vote on the Woodside Homes issue while Woodbury was out of town having a cochlear implant surgically inserted to assist his failing hearing.

On this issue, however, Woodbury eventually triumphed. After Kenny left office in January 2003, Woodbury asked for and received a reconsideration of the issue and a subsequent vote overturned the approval.

Coincidentally, the same area once slated for hundreds of homes is now going through the process for industrial development -- a use fully compatible with proximity to the airport.

"It's coming back for a use conforming to the master plan, light industrial," Woodbury said. "The owners are working it out with neighbors. Nobody is trying to force anything down our throats like they were then."

Kenny did not return messages left at her home.

In the last two years, Clark County has moved to strengthen the land-use rules that govern where homes, businesses, factories or schools will go.

Commissioner Lynette Boggs McDonald now represents Kenny's former district. She said the land-use decisions that overturned existing land-use plans within the Cooperative Management Area are not likely to be repeated.

"We have gone through extensive land-use updates in the Spring Valley and Enterprise towns," Boggs McDonald said. "That provides the blueprint on which we need to base our zoning decisions on.

"Residential development is prohibited. The goal of having this land under the control of the airport was to have compatible uses, with residential an incompatible use within the airport environs ... You know, we need to uphold that policy."

Boggs McDonald said the success or failure of the policy around McCarran has much wider implications in the future when the county develops the still-embryonic Ivanpah Valley airport 40 miles south of Las Vegas. The management area around the planned airport would be 17,000 acres.

There will be no residential development within the new management area, she said. At the same time, the county must identify land suitable for development needs outside the management area.

With the existing Cooperative Management Area, the county needs to do the best it can to eliminate potential conflicts now and in the future, she said.

"It's always tough to make land-use decisions based on things that were inherited," Boggs McDonald said. "You try to do the best that you can with the hand you've been dealt, but some of the things just boggle the mind, such as the development of a cemetery at two section-line streets," which are the county's major rights-of-way for arterial roads.

The cemetery was never going to happen at such a juncture of major thoroughfares, she said.

"If we really had been looking at things comprehensively, what is the highest and best use for two section-line streets, if that had been advertised, the county would have received a $10 million bid for land that we received $2.5 million," Boggs McDonald said.

The county received less because under the rules set up with the federal government, the Bureau of Land Management receives 85 percent of the money from such sales. However, if such a land-use designation had existed for the sale of the land at Durango and Windmill, the county would not now be embroiled in the question of how the profit occurred.

Woodbury agreed. The land-use decisions of the past allowed some people to make a lot of money, he said.

"That's the crux of the whole problem, is that if it was an unrealistic master plan any smart developer would recognize that they could get it changed to a more realistic master plan."

The appraisals, by county rules, had to deal with what the plans for an area were, not what they were likely to become if the developer successfully lobbied the commission. It created a situation in which unrealistic land-use designations contrary to staff recommendations would ultimately allow developers to profit.

"And so, someone made a lot of money because the recommendation wasn't followed," Woodbury said.

Such an outcome would not now occur, Boggs McDonald said.

"Just in general there is enhanced communication among the board," she said. "We think about the broader context of these land use decisions. All these districts at one point or another run into each other ... We really do look out for one another, especially bringing to light the issues the issues and challenges."

Sue Allen, president of the South West Action Network, said citizens groups such as hers have a lot less to fear than they did three years ago.

That wasn't true in "Erin Kenny's day, before the makeup of the board changed," Allen said.

"The board as it is now does not appear to be making those types of random decisions," she said. "They are paying a lot more attention to the citizens. We're moving in a good direction on that."

Commission Chairman Rory Reid helped push the rules changes that make it more difficult for the elected leaders to ignore staff recommendations and change master plans. He said such issues as the Woodside Homes reversal helped bring about the changes.

"Most of those transactions occurred prior to my tenure," said Reid, who took office in January 2003. "In the last couple of years, we recognized the policy needed to be changed, and we changed it.

"There will be a lot more scrutiny of these transactions, scrutiny related to things that have happened in the past," he said. "We're supposed to learn from history."

He said further policy changes might come from the audit now under way. One thing that has to remain in place, Reid added, is a commitment to keep the land surrounding the airport compatible with airport uses.

"We had 41 million people come here last year through the airport," he said. "We need to make sure that continues to happen."

That is also the goal of Walker, the aviation department director. He acknowledges the department has taken a black eye publicly for the would-be cemetery issues, but said what people may have missed is that the department's overall goal has been largely successful.

"The airport is a very large industrial center. There's no way around it. There is noise that is generated that is aggravating to people," he said. "If we expand the airport, more noise is generated. What happens in most communities is people say enough is enough."

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