For 15 years now, the Las Vegas city government has tried to use its powers -- including special powers authorized by the state Legislature for use only in "redevelopment districts," many reminisent of the methods of the Sheriff of Nottingham -- to force the "redevelopment" of the old downtown along lines envisioned by government urban planners.
The resulting catalog of fiascoes is now well known.
The quasi-private City Centre Development Corp. was created in 1997 in order to infuse some measure of "private sector entrepreneurship" into this calcified process -- sort of like flying a troupe of Pepsi-Cola executives to Moscow in the 1950s to explain to the commissars how to market soda pop.
Both Mayor Oscar Goodman and members of the CCDC now agree the key to any downtown renaissance will be the development of a residential core of middle-class, professional people actually willing to live there.
What kind of amenities would that require? Perhaps some local food markets, gas stations, restaurants, and dry cleaners?
Guess what? The last food market downtown was torn out to make room for the (stalled) NeoNecropolis movie theater project.
Scorecard: Food market gone; movie theater tenant bankrupt; new tenants for empty NeoNecropolis hole-in-the-ground being eagerly sought.
There used to be small restaurants and dry cleaning shops and even gas stations at several locations downtown. Many of those tenants were forced out a decade ago when those properties were seized under "eminent domain" and transferred to a coalition of the wealthiest downtown casino owners (and some well-connected legal firms) for use as parking garages and the like.
Small business owners have consistently complained they get no such favors -- in fact, swarming city inspectors and rigorous enforcement of inflexible codes drove Froggy's restaurant out of business, and former Mayor Jan Jones did her best to bestow the same fate on Herb Pastor's perfectly legal and popular "Topless Girls of Glitter Gulch" (not sufficiently "family-oriented" to please the mayor.)
District Court Judge Don Chairez ruled the City Council -- acting as the city's Redevelopment Agency -- violated its own rules when it drove those small businesses out of business, refusing to let existing land owners "participate," at least through ground leases, as required by law.
The city has now spent more than $1 million in legal fees fighting the last holdout against those illegal seizures -- the elderly Greek widow of John Pappas, who came to Nevada in 1901 and fed soup to jobless men out the back door of his White Spot restaurant on Fremont Street during the great Depression.
Now, both Mayor Oscar Goodman and members of the CCDC's own board agee that adding the private corporation while leaving the city's Office of Business Development in place has only doubled the amount of red tape and miscommunication facing anyone trying to open a business downtown -- that "the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing."
In a heated joint meeting between the CCDC and the City Council earlier this month, Mayor Goodman asked: "Is it reasonable to want developers to come downtown for altruistic reasons, or am I nuts?"
"You're nuts," replied City Centre board member Ken Templeton.
The mayor's solution? He now proposes to blackmail retail operations into building him the new stores he wants downtown, by withholding permits for compliant uses in more attractive venues, like swanky suburban Summerlin.
Gee, why doesn't he simply establish a "Commissariat of Consumer Services," handling the problems with "state stores," while rounding up and forcibly relocating citizens downtown at bayonet point?
The only triumph of downtown redevelopment to date is Fremont Street's metal awning, which was promoted as a "state-of-the-art laser light show," but instead forms crude pictures of square-dancing Buffalo Gals -- accompanied by hoaky roadhouse tunes -- through the clever mechanism of flashing lightbulbs on and off, a technology perfected in the 1960s.
And if the so-called Fremont Street Experience has generated increased gaming and thus increased tax revenues, as promised, why isn't the downtown now subsidizing new school construction, instead of continuing to suck up tax revenues which would otherwise go to school construction?
Time to fold the tents. Time for the city to admit "urban planning" under threat of government force has been a flop, always and everywhere.
The answer is to reduce taxes and regulation downtown, and let the free market build what it sees fit -- up to and including hashish bars and ornate Edwardian bordellos -- whether the result is "family-oriented" or not.
Or would the members of the City Council care to invest their own personal net worth, gambling on the profitability of their current "family oriented" downtown schemes?
After all, they seem happy enough investing (start ital)ours(end ital).
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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