Saturday, Sept. 16, 2006 | 8:15 a.m.
The Starbucks where Kermitt Waters is cooling down with a Frappuccino is in a lovely part of town.
Outside are palm trees. Its all quite suburban and orderly and pleasant. Not one gravel pit in sight. Or an old trailer home or junkyard or strip club. Cant build them here, zoning wont allow it.
That irks Kermitt Waters.
His Frappuccino was made with electricity piped in over transmission lines on a right-of-way the government owns. The parkway outside leads to the Las Vegas Beltway, also built on land the government bought years ago.
Its another symbol of government abuse, in Waters libertarian world view. As far as the 70-year-old eminent domain lawyer is concerned, politicians and government workers are next to useless.
In his world, private property owners should have the power to do what they want with their land and that includes refusing to sell it to government for transmission lines or freeways or even sewer lines unless the reward is the highest possible price. In other words, some say, prohibitively expensive.
Kermitt Waters is an eccentric, by any definition. His politics lie somewhere in that netherworld where the far left of anarchism circles around to meet the far right of libertarianism. He thinks Republicans and Democrats alike are puppets.
So how in the name of Nevada did he manage to get an initiative on the November ballot that would impose his politics on an entire state?
The answer is his money and that of Howard Rich, a New York real estate mogul and libertarian activist. Together, they gave more than $278,000 to gather signatures to put the initiative on the ballot.
But lets not get hung up on their money. Whats important is yours. And if Waters and Rich have their way, you could be spending a lot more of your tax money to buy land for freeways, airports, railroads, electrical lines and anything else that we now take for granted.
To be sure, the state Supreme Court has thrown out the provisions of his initiative that would effectively destroy planning and zoning, which means, for now, that Waters neednt wipe gravel dust from the lip of his Frappuccino. Never fear, he says he may try again to get them on the ballot.
For now, however, the fit, engaging fellow sitting there with the cup in his hand is content to abolish eminent domain as we know it in Nevada.
Of course, he says, thats only fair.
In May, Waters paid for an automated phone message that encouraged about 50,000 Clark County residents to vote against every incumbent on the ballot and to run for office themselves. He even told them where to file their paperwork.
Looking back, in the living room of his second home in Henderson on Thursday, Waters says that was just the beginning. With the eminent domain initiative the Peoples Initiative to Stop the Taking of Our Land, or PISTOL rankling local government authorities, he couldnt be happier. If they hate me now, just wait until they see whats next, he says, with a grin.
Waters says hes already considering another initiative, one that would prohibit Nevada lawmakers from accepting campaign funds from out-of-state contributors. Then theres the one that would eliminate real estate taxes for single-family homeowners by raising the gross receipts tax for casinos.
Theres another that would forgo traditional elections, instead randomly selecting the Assembly from the phone book. (It couldnt be any worse, he says.) Theres also Waters strategy to win the global war on terrorism, which might involve firing State Department personnel and replacing them with used-car dealers. (Let them negotiate with Iran, he says.)
And sure, all of its in good fun at least the bits about a phone book Legislature and used-car statesmen but the sharp Southern humor belies a deep-seated disdain for government, especially one that he says has been cheating the little guy for decades.
Besides co-authoring the PISTOL initiative, Waters says he shelled out $3,000 just before the primary to orchestrate a telephone campaign against state Supreme Court Justice Nancy Becker, who he says has demonstrated a bias against landowners in eminent domain cases. Typically, I dont get riled up against judges, he says. But (Becker) has a pattern of not being reasonable.
The phone messages, which highlight Beckers role in two controversial cases, may be rolled out again before the general election, he says.
Were all a bunch of sheep, and theyll fl eece us as much as they can, he says. Short of a revolution, people dont know what to do. Right now is a time when something needs to be done.
Critics, led by Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury, charge that approval of the proposed constitutional amendment will give Waters a windfall of eminent domain clients and legal fees. Taxpayers will see their hard-earned tax dollars diverted into the pockets of trial lawyers, Woodbury said.
Waters strongly disagrees.
He argues that court actions will drop dramatically thus producing fewer clients for him because the government would be required to treat property owners more fairly than it does now. Under existing law, he says, property owners in an eminent domain action often end up receiving compensation that is considerably less as much as 30 percent than the fair market value of their home.
As Waters puts it: Its compensation as they want it to be.
According to Waters and the measures other co-author, former District Judge Don Chairez, the inclusion of the provision that defines market value as the highest price the property would bring on the open market used to be state law but the law was changed in 1993 at the urging of the Nevada Transportation Department, to most probable price that the property would bring.
I think I will probably take a big hit, Waters said. I may have to find something else to do.
Waters traces his love of the land back to Childress, Texas, where he grew up on his familys cattle ranch. Im a country boy, said Waters, who spurns suits in favor of jeans and button-up shirts. I have an appreciation for land and the value that comes with it.
After 17 years on the horse, inspecting livestock and tending cattle, Waters left Texas for the University of Colorado. He didnt last long. Describing himself as a C student, Waters says he returned home to finish his undergraduate work at Texas Southern University, before going on to law school. Most of the things Ive learned in life, Ive learned on my own, he says.
And it was there, while working for a small law firm in Houston, that Waters tried his first eminent domain case. On the invitation of a lawyer friend, he visited Nevada in 1966. His heavy West Texas accent caught the attention of then-Attorney General Harvey Dickerson, who offered him a job.
Acquiring property for the state highway department as a deputy, Waters says he saw firsthand how government pits itself against landowners. Three years later he moved to Las Vegas to work as a prosecutor in the city attorneys office. There, he fought a series of utility rate hikes, managing to anger both his supervisors and the city commission later renamed the City Council in the process. They wanted to have me shot, he says.
In 1972, he went into private practice, specializing in eminent domain cases and rising to the top of the field over the next three decades. People come to me because they think I know what Im doing, Waters says.
While Waters says he has watched eminent domain in Nevada slowly get out of hand, nothing could have prepared him for the U.S. Supreme Courts June 2005 ruling in Susette Kelo v. the City of New London, Conn.
The high courts 5-4 ruling upheld the citys decision to take away residential property held by nine homeowners for a private redevelopment project that officials in the economically depressed city claimed would be for the public good. But in doing so, the court left the door open for states to interpret their own eminent domain laws.
I went ballistic, Waters says. So I took them up on it.
He and Chairez spent the next three months writing the Nevada Property Owners Bill of Rights. We fought over every word, Waters says. Writing a constitutional amendment is tough.
At first focused solely on preventing Kelo-type rulings here, Waters and Chairez took the opportunity to fix what they saw as other abuses, finishing with a 14-section petition.
Waters, through his Liberty Oil and Refining Association Inc., initially spent $65,000 to fund the Nevada ballot measure. Enter New Yorker Rich, head of Americans for Limited Government, a Chicago-based organization backing similar efforts in other states.
According to Waters, Rich expressed interest in contributing to the PISTOL campaign but thought the initiatives language was too strong. Waters says he refused to budge, and Richs group ultimately donated more than $168,000.
Still, Waters rebuffs criticism that the initiative is primarily backed by out-of-state interests. Ive spent substantially more than Rich on this, he says. While state filings show that Waters has spent $110,000 as of Aug. 3, he claims he has shelled out at least $150,000, with more to come.
Although the state Supreme Court whittled back the initiative, Waters is satisfied with what will go before voters in November. It still has enough meat in it to be valuable, he said.
Or, as opponents would argue, to be dangerous.
Sun reporter Steve Kanigher contributed to this report.
Michael J. Mishak can be reached at 259-2347 or at michael.mishak@ lasvegassun.com.
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