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Sunday, February 13, 2000
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
BUILDING ON THE EDGE
Residents and recreationists are fighting a developer's proposal for the site of the state's oldest hard-rock mine.
By Michael Weissenstein
Review-Journal
"A lot of people don't get the opportunity to visit a different world," caver Steve Deveny said as he clipped a thick gray rope to his safety harness and rappelled backward into an empty mine shaft.
The light of his headlamp disappeared into the black depths of Pinnacle Cave, a series of tight subterranean passages deep in the bowels of Mount Potosi, a craggy, wind-blown redoubt of limestone arches and pinyon groves high on the southwestern edge of the sprawling Las Vegas Valley.
It is here, at the end of a deeply rutted single-lane dirt road, that Las Vegas developer Augie Bustos wants to build his Shangri-La: a 112-room hotel complex with a spring-water bottling plant, an artificial lake and an 18-hole putting green on the site of Nevada's oldest hard-rock mine.
But when the project comes before the Clark County Commission for approval Wednesday, Deveny's avid group of cavers and residents of the nearby hamlet of Mountain Springs plan to protest what they call an ill-conceived project that could draw thousands of unsuspecting tourists to a wildfire and flash flood-prone rural area without adequate fire, police or medical protection.
"I'd like my boys to come here one day," said Deveny, a surveyor who has twin 18-month-old sons. "To come out here and see this and all of a sudden let this become a hotel just doesn't make sense."
Calling such concerns overblown, Bustos says the hotel would be a boon to Southern Nevadans who want family-oriented resorts offering upscale outdoor activities. With planned batting cages, badminton and volleyball courts, the project would be marketed toward families like his who are bored by the placid nature of mountain escapes such as Mount Charleston.
"We enjoy getting away where I can ride horses, play golf, hike and be away from people," he said. "There is no place in Clark County where children and families can go to have fun and get away from the city within 20 minutes."
The county's seven-member Planning Commission stunned protesters last month by unanimously approving Bustos' request to rezone his rural 45-acre property encircled by national forest land to permit commercial and light manufacturing activities up the road from a Boy Scout camp and a Methodist Church camp. The decision came over the objections of county staff, local residents and business people.
"Our main concern is the road and the amount of traffic that will come up and down this road," said Phyllis Murray, site director of Potosi Pines United Methodist Camp. "It will affect the safety, the tranquility, the noise level and the pollution."
Bustos bought the property in 1985 and tried for years to trade it with federal land agencies for more desirable commercial properties on the valley floor, including a site near Las Vegas' planned Town Center commercial hub, he said.
He said his offers were rejected because the area was not environmentally threatened.
"I said, `I have to go threaten the environment to be a priority on an exchange with the Forest Service?' They said, `Yeah,' and I said `OK,' " he recounted.
Bustos was granted a similar request in 1987 but his permits lapsed after he didn't develop the property, county officials said. He denied that his recent request, which includes plans for a tram running over forest land to a proposed mining museum, is an attempt to force the hands of Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service officials who haven't wanted to trade for his property.
"This is not to tell the Forest Service that we want to threaten them," he said. "This is to tell the Forest Service, the Boy Scouts and everyone else that we have no other choice."
Boy Scouts spokesman Frank Hutchings said the group does not oppose Bustos' project, which could be built on the condition that the developer widen and pave the road serving their camp.
The facility would sit within sight of the abandoned Potosi zinc and lead mine, which was opened in 1857 by the Mormon pioneers who settled the Las Vegas Valley. By 1917, the settlers had established approximately 20 buildings, a bunkhouse and a swimming pool whose foundation can still be seen on the site, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Bustos has hired Lucy Stewart, former assistant director of Clark County comprehensive planning, to represent him on zoning issues related to his project.
Current county planning staff strongly objected to Bustos' request, saying the move violates the area's master plan designating the mountain for parks and recreational uses. The project also would have insufficient sewer and water supplies, they said, a claim that is supported by state and local water agency figures.
And by drawing down the mountain's water table, the project would lower the humidity inside the federally protected Pinnacle Cave, stopping the infinitesimally slow formation of its dramatic flowstone formations and effectively killing the cave, which is home to albino crickets, rodents and bats, Deveny said.
Deveny and fellow members of the Southern Nevada chapter of the National Speleological Society spend most weekends exploring the 1,000-foot-long cave, relishing the moments when they can turn off their headlamps and sit in a pure blackness and absolute silence never found above ground.
"If the water drops 50 feet, it'll never flood again and won't clean itself out and the animals that live in the cave will die out," he said as he squeezed through a body-width passage to a room festooned with formations. "If the water table dropped, there would be no stalactites and stalagmites."
Only seven Metropolitan Police Department officers serve a sparsely populated 1,200-square-mile area of Clark County that includes the project site. They are concerned that the added visitors at the hotel could outpace their ability to quickly respond to situations there.
"They could be arresting someone for credit card fraud at Primm and it might be hours before they get up there," Sgt. Greg Weeks said. "My fear is that we're going to run into a situation that just because of the location and nature of the site is going to make it more difficult for us to respond as rapidly as we would like to an emergency situation."
And the seven-man Mountain Springs Volunteer Fire Department would be unable to effectively fight blazes at the hotel with its two fire trucks, Chief Dick "Appaloosa" Draper said.
Bustos said the project will have sprinklers and he plans to staff his planned hotel with a security guard and a trained firefighter with a fire engine.
"There is going to be a fire truck there ... and someone on shift will probably know how to start and run that fire truck if they have to," he said.
That proposal worries Draper, who has spent many seasons battling slow-moving, lightning-sparked blazes that charred dozens of acres of sage and juniper on the gently sloping sides of Mount Potosi Canyon. Such fires could easily scorch the planned hotel before firefighting teams arrived, he said.
"It'd burn to the ground," he said.
Planning Commissioners Richard Bonar and Bernard Malamud acknowledged this week that Bustos bought them and Commissioner Charley Johnson lunch during a fact-finding trip to the property before their Jan. 20 decision, a purchase that one project critic called ethically questionable.
"I just don't think it's appropriate," said Helen Thornburg, chairman of the Mountain Springs Citizens Advisory Council. "I think that would give (Bustos) an advantage when he came up before the board."
Johnson could not be reached to comment.
The citizens advisory council's five members unanimously voted against the project in late December.
The Planning Commission annually reviews hundreds of zoning change requests but members have approved changes from rural open land to general commercial or light manufacturing only five times since 1998, county records show.
The commissioners' decision constituted spot zoning, or giving a single developer the unique ability to build where development is not planned, county staff members said.
"Spot zoning is the granting of rights for development in an area that it's not only not planned for but that would be a privilege for one property owner," Assistant Current Planning Director Lesa Coder said. "I can't think of any circumstances under which (the decision) would not constitute spot zoning."
Bustos has the right to annually draw 19.3 acre-feet from a spring on his property, according to the state engineer's office. An acre-foot is enough water to serve a family of four or five for a year.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority estimates that hotels with less than 500 rooms annually use 9.2 acre-feet of water per acre of land, meaning that Bustos' 15 acres of commercial and manufacturing properly could require 138 acre-feet a year.
That has Mountain Springs residents worried that Bustos' project could deplete their town's water supply.
"He'll suck our water," Thornburg said.
Bustos denied that his project would harm the local people or environment.
"The issue here is that people perceive that you can't make something work because they're short-sighted," he said.
"The last thing I want to do is develop this property, but I don't have a choice.
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Printable version of this story
Caver Steve Deveny squeezes through a tight section of Pinnacle Cave deep inside Mount Potosi. Deveny believes the cave's formations could be destroyed by a planned development that could lower the mountain's water table.
Photo by K.M. Cannon.
Mountain Springs Volunteer Fire Chief Dick "Appaloosa" Draper looks toward the scorched slopes of Mount Potosi in the distance. Volunteer firefighters in the hamlet southwest of Las Vegas worry that they will be unable to fight fires at a proposed development on the mountain.
Photo by K.M. Cannon.
Horses graze in a boggy meadow fed by a mountain spring that is expected to serve a proposed hotel project in Mount Potosi Canyon southwest of Las Vegas.
Photo by K.M. Cannon.
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