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March 28, 2024

Columnist Jeff German: Neighbors must be heard on casinos

Jeff German's column appears Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays in the Sun. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4067.

WEEKEND EDITION

May 21 - 22, 2005

It's the same old game in Carson City.

Powerful gaming and development companies are trying to get the Legislature at an 11th hour to pass a measure that could inhibit the ability of residents across the valley to oppose the spread of neighborhood casinos.

Last week lobbyists for neighborhood casino giants Station Casinos and Boyd Gaming and the Focus Property Group, an aggressive developer of master-planned communities, put a full-court press on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

With the help of Bill Bible, president of the Nevada Resort Association, gaming's political arm, the lobbyists persuaded the committee to attach a neighborhood casino amendment to Assembly Bill 485, an innocuous unrelated gaming measure. The panel approved the amendment by a 6-1 vote, and now it must pass the entire Senate and then the Assembly.

The amendment seeks changes in the 1997 law (commonly known by its bill number, SB208) that set limits on the spread of neighborhood casinos.

The high-powered lobbyists pitched the amendment under the guise that it is "good public policy" and would strengthen the 1997 law by putting new restrictions on future neighborhood casino projects.

Future casinos, the amendment says, would only be allowed in master-planned communities, and all developers would have to disclose the exact size and scope of the project up front, when they present their overall plans for the communities to local governments.

This presumably would prevent the kind of outcry that occurred last year when angry residents surrounding Red Rock Station learned years after Station Casinos had won its zoning rights that the company planned to build a 300-foot tower on the 70-acre site. The tower eventually was scaled back to 198 feet.

More public disclosure is a good idea. But what makes this bad legislation is that it takes away the ability of residents to appeal the decisions of their local governments to a higher authority (other than the courts) that isn't as easily influenced by the clout of the big companies.

Under the amendment, residents seeking to overturn the approval of a casino in a master-planned community no longer would be able to take their case to the review panel of the state's Gaming Policy Committee. This is the group of public officials and citizens created by the 1997 neighborhood casino law to scrutinize the local decision-making process.

Residents have successfully blocked a neighborhood casino project twice since the law was enacted, and both times they did it after going to the review panel.

In 2000 the panel overturned the County Commission's approval of a Boyd casino project in Spring Valley, and in 2001 it reversed a North Las Vegas City Council decision that would have allowed Station Casinos to build a resort on the Craig Ranch Golf Course.

It turns out that the review panel, the very thing the powerful special interests want to eliminate from the equation, is the best "public policy" to come out of the 1997 law.

"If we're going to go through some hoops on the front end, there has to be some stability on the back end," says attorney Mark Fiorentino, a lobbyist for both Boyd Gaming and the Focus Property Group.

His opinion on the review panel, thankfully, isn't shared by Station Casinos Executive Vice President Scott Nielsen.

"The current appeal process is fine with me," Nielsen says. "I don't know where that language originated."

That's giving Sen. Steven Horsford, D-North Las Vegas, the lone Judiciary Committee member who voted against the amendment, and a host of anti-neighborhood casino activists reason to be optimistic that the entire Senate will look more carefully at the ramifications of eliminating the appeal process.

If lawmakers truly want to improve the way we deal with neighborhood casino projects, they won't take away the only real leverage residents have to fight those projects.

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