Cemetery plans buried in boondoggle

Monday, Jan. 24, 2005 | 11:14 a.m.

The recent controversial commercial rezoning of a piece of former airport property that the county had sold was necessary because the land previously had been zoned residential and it shouldn't have been, a county official said Sunday.

That residential zoning of the land -- which was unsuitable because the land is too close to the airport and also could be prone to flooding -- was spearheaded by a former Clark County commissioner who was charged last year with taking bribes and using influence to benefit a Las Vegas strip club owner, officials said.

Although the County Department of Aviation proposed selling 37.5 acres near Windmill Lane and Durango Drive, with it remaining commercial, then Commissioner Erin Kenny had pushed for a change in the zoning to residential, Clark County's director of aviation Randy Walker said .

The land also is vulnerable to flooding from a wash that cuts across the southern portion of the property, Walker said.

The Enterprise Township master plan reflected the residential zone change wanted by Kenny when it was completed in the late 1990s.

That is, until Jan. 5, when the zoning in the master plan for the two parcels changed from residential to commercial.

Residents living near Windmill and Durango believed the land up for sale two years ago by McCarran International Airport would become a cemetery. That's what the legal description of the property declared, though the land use plan no longer calls for a cemetery to be put on the land.

"It's not an unusual thing," Walker said of the change.

"On the other hand, to be fair, the county staff could have done a better job on the deed restriction," Walker said, noting that the cemetery was specified in the deed.

The cemetery restriction was dropped when the zoning was changed.

"Actually on that I was surprised," Walker said, adding he would have kept the cemetery as part of the zone change.

Earlier this month, however, the County Commission rezoned all but 12.5 of the acres to commercial property with no specification about cemetery use only. A convenience store with gasoline pumps is part of the proposed development.

When the airport was looking to sell the land, broker Scott Gragson was the lone bidder for the two parcels. Gragson said Sunday that he had obtained the land from the airport by trading equitably priced land at Decatur Boulevard and Interstate 215 for the parcels in Enterprise Township, which were valued at $2.6 million by airport assessors.

Gragson said he had owned nearby property for four years before acquiring the airport parcels. He combined the former airport land with the other parcels and sold 42.5 acres to Windmill Durango for $7.8 million. The prices were set more than a year before the sale, he said.

Then the county rezoned the property to allow Windmill Durango to develop the land commercially.

"It can't go residential because it's in airport environs," Gragson said, noting that noise levels from aircraft taking off and landing at McCarran prohibit building homes there.

Gragson said that while one of the uses listed in the county's master plan was for a cemetery, as the master plan changed, so did land uses.

John Hiatt, a resident and member of the Enterprise Town Board for 27 years, said the airport deed said that the land could become a cemetery. After the master plan was changed earlier this month, the cemetery was no longer mentioned.

"It (the cemetery) disappeared after that," Hiatt said Sunday, "so suddenly it's like manna from heaven to the developer."

Hiatt said he has seen changes to zoning in master plans before this one.

When the Bureau of Land Management sold 3,000 acres of federal land to a developer in the south valley, county staff did not preserve any parcels for schools, fire stations or other public amenities, Hiatt said.

The Enterprise Town Board voted against commercial development on the Windmill-Durango parcels, but when it came before the County Commission, acting as the Zoning Board, despite 27 protests, the zone change was completed.