Real Estate & Property Law

Nevada Fight on PISTOL Continues

By Alan Ackerman

Vin Suprynowicz, a lead columnist for the Las Vegas News, did it right. He wonders why the yelling is so loud by governmental agencies which will be minimally affected by PISTOL amendment to the Constitution in Nevada, yet the same people maintain the project has no effect, for future activities.

The reality is that PISTOL may be a slight overreaction to an aggressive government, but with mining and gambling controlling the state, protection of private rights have totally failed in Nevada.

Las Vegas Review-Journal

For instance, PISTOL allows landowners to collect attorneys' fees if they fight a threatened eminent domain taking. Mr. Snow says this provision is already generating many "scurrilous suits," including one in which a landowner is suing on the contention his property's value has been decreased because regional transportation planners marked his land as a future bridge site.

Get it? If you can't sell your land, or if you have to sell it for less because it's identified on an official government map for future seizure to provide the space for a police station or a bridge abutment, and you sue for the amount by which they've thus devalued your land, Mr. Snow considers you "scurrilous."

Meantime, Mr. Woodbury insists they don't want a very big change: Under their plan, the landowner still would be able to "apply to the court" for attorney fees ... and cross their fingers.

PISTOL, easily approved by voters in 2006 and 2008, calls for separate jury trials to determine "public use" as well as property value. Mr. Woodbury et al. say that will take too long -- they'd rather have such decisions made by local judges, like Stephen Huffaker, the one who made several adverse rulings against the Pappases before acknowledging that, maybe, his ownership of stock in the Four Queens downtown casino constituted, um, maybe, just a slight conflict of interest.

Full post as published by National Eminent Domain Blog on October 30, 2010 (boomark / email).