County Aviation Director Slow on Uptake About Property Rights Ruling

By Jane Ann Morrison

The six-year fight between Steve Sisolak and McCarran International Airport over property rights and airspace has ended, and the winner is … Sisolak, whose knees buckled when he first saw his check for nearly $15 million. His attorney, Laura FitzSimmons, got her own check for $6.4 million.

Even after taxes, that’s lifestyle-changing money.

The airport could have paid a $6.5 million judgment and saved nearly $15 million, but Clark County Aviation Director Randy Walker, whose department is now $21.4 million poorer, said Friday that it did the right thing by refusing to settle with Sisolak. Airport officials fought Sisolak all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court … losing every step of the way.

So instead of paying a $6.5 million judgment in 2003, on March 8 two gigantic checks were cut by Clark County from the Aviation Department.

Sisolak, a successful businessman and university regent, said that winning was more important than the money itself. (I tried not to snicker in disbelief.)

The case pitted his property rights against the airport’s airspace needs. Sisolak bought 10 acres on Las Vegas Boulevard South near the airport in the early 1980s. At that time, it was zoned for casinos, hotels or apartments. But by the 1990s, jets were flying over his land, so the Clark County Commission said he couldn’t build anything more than 35 feet high. Later, the County Commission cut him some slack and said he could build something as high as 66 feet, basically limiting him to offices or industrial development.

In 2001, Sisolak sued, saying the height restrictions meant he couldn’t sell his land to someone who wanted to put up a high-rise or a casino tower, and he argued that the zoning was an unreasonable seizure of his property. He also wanted compensation for the devaluation of his property because of planes flying 500 feet over it.

In 2003, he won his case in state court. The airport appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court, which agreed with him in 2006. So the airport appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in February said go away, we won’t hear your case.

Three times FitzSimmons tried to settle the case. Three times she received curt rejections. After the $6.5 million verdict, a Jones Vargas attorney offered an insulting $250,000 settlement. Before the trial, Sisolak offered to settle the case by trading his land for other land the airport controlled. No deal, the airport lawyers answered.

Sisolak says he was treated contemptuously by Walker and the Jones Vargas attorneys, and he wonders whether it somehow was personal with Walker, and whether that impacted the case and led to the airport’s refusal to settle. Walker denied that he had any personal opposition to Sisolak.

“I don’t know him personally,” Walker said.

But Sisolak and FitzSimmons said other landowners, such as Howard Bulloch, received more favorable treatment from Walker.

FitzSimmons said the lawyers – and at one time, she said, there were 38 attorneys actively working against her – were happy to see the case drag on because it extended their billable hours. Most of the attorneys were from Jones Vargas, one of Nevada’s preeminent firms. “The airport spent $2.5 million for lawyers to fight this,” FitzSimmons said. “I keep wondering why someone from the policy side doesn’t look at this.”

Someone such as, say, the Clark County Commission?

The money doesn’t come directly from taxpayers, just indirectly. McCarran gets its money from fees from the airlines, which get their money from passengers.

Walker said there are seven or eight other height restriction cases pending against the airport, and he had no idea how much money might be involved in resolving those cases, saying only that it is “substantial” and that the facts differ in each case.

He insisted that the airport was right in not settling the Sisolak case and cited a prior height restriction case in which the airport won.

“This was a very important case, here and nationwide,” he said. “We still don’t agree with the decisions.”

He might not agree, but those fat checks cut for Sisolak and FitzSimmons are clues that legally he’s wrong. There’s a price for failing to recognize that property rights advocates are winning in today’s courts.

Jane Ann Morrison’s column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0275.

(c) 2007 Las Vegas Review – Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.