Titans battle over road plan

Clark County's ham-handed handling of the Harmon Avenue redesign project may spawn a court battle featuring developers of $2 billion-plus Strip resorts.

Aladdin Gaming LLC executives say the company will sue to overturn the County Commission's Aug. 31 approval of a plan to include two single-lane, S-shaped tunnels beneath the Las Vegas Strip in conversion of the road into a six-lane east-west thoroughfare.

But Mirage Resorts Inc. Chairman Steve Wynn says such a lawsuit "would be an embarrassment" to developers of the $1.3 billion-plus Aladdin resort complex.

"They don't have a leg to stand on," says Wynn, whose company is opening its own $1.8 billion project -- Bellagio -- across the Strip from the Aladdin complex on Oct. 15.

Wynn says Mirage is donating land, including a completed roadway called Frank Sinatra Boulevard running parallel to and just east of I-15, valued at $110 million to the county. The result will help alleviate traffic congestion along the Strip as well as on parallel east-west thoroughfares, he says.

"And that's $110 million of rights of way that the county would have had to buy," says county public works spokesman Bobby Shelton.

Aladdin executives, though, are furious over being excluded from hastily arranged negotiations between Mirage and county public works officials on the weekend before the commission's vote on the morning of Aug. 31.

They believe they were mislead by county officials who declined to review Aladdin proposals for the Harmon redesign until the afternoon of Aug. 31 -- after the scheduled commission vote on the Mirage-county proposal.

They also point to substantial changes between the agenda posted for the meeting and the agreement ultimately signed by Mirage and the county that called for a land swap and re-routing of Harmon Avenue.

They claim the tunnel proposal -- which calls for reducing three lanes of traffic each way into a single lane that winds through a subterranean S-shaped curve beneath the Strip -- is unsafe.

And they assert that the county's own traffic studies show that the redesign would reduce traffic flow past the Aladdin's main entrance, which they placed on Harmon Avenue to help relieve congestion on the Strip.

"We believe we have grounds to overturn the decision based on a violation of the open-meeting law," says Aladdin Senior Vice President Patricia Becker.

"We designed, got financing for and began building a $1.3 billion-plus project based in part on assurances by the county that Harmon would be extended straight across the Strip to I-15 as a six-lane thoroughfare," Becker says.

But Shelton says the furor can be resolved without a court battle.

"The misperception is that there's a plan that's set in concrete," he says. "Between now and the time the final design is done, the Aladdin people can propose a better design.

"One thing is for certain: The county and its traffic managers won't design a facility that wouldn't be safe for the commuting public. Before it's done, it will meet all the needs of the county, state and federal governments' safety standards."

For years, county planners and owners of land along Harmon have been considering ways to widen the road and extend it west over I-15 to help alleviate traffic congestion along the parallel east-west thoroughfares Tropicana and Flamingo Avenues.

In the process, Harmon east of the Strip has become something of a proposed resort corridor itself, with the Aladdin project, a planned MGM Grand Inc. expansion, the Hard Rock Hotel and other developments on the drawing board.

Meanwhile, on the west side of the Strip near Harmon, Mirage was busy assembling additional parcels of valuable property with the acquisitions of land between the Monte Carlo hotel-casino and Bellagio.

By the middle of last month, only two parcels remained -- a 10-acre site owned by Detroit lawyer Robert Zeff, and a similar-sized site housing the Jockey Club and acreage owned by former Frontier hotel-casino owner Margaret Elardi.

Clark County already owned a right of way that would permit construction of three lanes extending Harmon west from the Strip to I-15. It also had filed a condemnation lawsuit against Zeff's RZ Corp. seeking to obtain acreage that would allow it to add three more lanes.

"On Aug. 12, (Mirage Chief Financial Officer) Dan Lee called us and requested an urgent meeting," says Aladdin Gaming President James McKennon.

"He told us Mirage had an option on the Zeff property and wanted to move the Harmon Avenue extension to the north."

The proposed rerouting took the Harmon extension to the northern edge of the Zeff property and gave Mirage Resorts a 55-acre parcel for future resort development that wouldn't be bisected by a roadway.

"The problem with that Mirage plan," says McKennon, "is that the six lanes cut across our main entrance and took out about half the Harmon restaurant row. We told him he'd have to look south.

"As we were working with Mirage, we were also working with the county, and they called us a week prior to the Aug. 31 meeting and asked if we had a response to the Mirage proposal.

"We called them on Aug. 26 and said we had a good design we'd like to share with them based on Mirage's desire to move the roadway. They said the only date available was the afternoon of Aug. 31."

The problem with that, however, was that the vote on the new Mirage proposal was scheduled for the morning of Aug. 31. And the Aladdin executives hadn't been notified about it by the county.

"We didn't learn about the special meeting until we read it in the Sun Aug. 27," Becker says.

The Aladdin executives scrambled to get an agenda of the special county commission meeting. The exhibits accompanying the agenda still showed the proposed Harmon Avenue extension as a straight line extending west of the Strip. And there was no reference to the condemnation proceedings on the Zeff property.

Aladdin officials called county Public Works Director Marty Manning Aug. 28 to find out what was occurring, but were told he was unavailable. Though a spokesman, Manning said he was too busy to respond to requests for comment about this article.

Aladdin officials first learned of the S-shaped tunnel proposal on the morning of the meeting and urged a delay in the vote pending traffic studies.

The Aladdin "has been designed based ... on three years' worth of traffic studies done by your design engineers stating the traffic flow on Harmon would be fixed," Becker said at the meeting.

"That project is being built at this time based on assurances that at a bare minimum, you would use proper procedure and allow for at least an iota of due process before you place before you something of this magnitude."

Becker also noted that the county's traffic engineers indicated the new design would substantially retard the flow of traffic along Harmon.

But Lee argued that the Zeff option would expire that day unless the county approved the redesign. The commission voted unanimously to do so.

Later that week, executives from MGM Grand, Aladdin and other resorts met with public works officials to protest the redesign. But the county experts refused to be pinned down on the impact the new plan would have on traffic, McKennon says.

"All they would say is that the roadway could deal with 1,200 cars at peak capacity. They refused to calculate a daily average, but I've been led to believe the number is close to 36,000 cars."

That's substantially below the 60,000-car estimate by consulting engineers G.C. Wallace for a straight roadway. And that has Aladdin executives steaming.

The eastbound single-lane tunnel beneath the Strip emerges just 100 feet from the Aladdin's Harmon Avenue entrance, McKennon notes, "meaning you'd have to go through two lanes to get to our left turn lanes. And our engineers say you can't do that safely.

"It could have a significant impact on our business," McKennon says. "But there's another angle, as well. When you decrease that number of cars along Harmon, there's only two places for them to go -- Tropicana or Flamingo."

The single-lane S-shaped configuration itself -- dubbed by some critics "the Princess Diana curve" -- also has sparked controversy.

"The way it appears is just bizarre," says MGM Grand Chief Financial Officer Jim Murren. "It looks very dangerous to me."

Few critics of the tunnel plan quibble with Mirage's desire to avoid a roadway that would bisect a potential resort development. But they are angered over the perception of backroom dealings caused by the weekend huddle between Mirage and county officials that excluded other property owners and altered the agenda for the special meeting. No county commissioners attended the meetings.

Yet, even though the agreement between the county and Mirage that was signed Aug. 31 contains at least 21 differences from the posted agenda, the county insists it complied with all open-meeting law provisions.

The law says public agencies may negotiate privately in the sale or purchase of property.

Wynn acknowledges the perception problem, but he insists that the new design will ultimately end up increasing the flow of traffic along Harmon, thus benefitting Aladdin and other businesses fronting the roadway.

And Shelton stresses that the plan faces a series of public hearings before a final version is adopted.

"We'll come up with the best possible design for the Harmon-Strip intersection, and the public will have its say," he says.

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