Sunday, December 29, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Carson City ranch must make way for freeway bypass

Family says state not dealing fairly with them in negotiating a price for their land

Eva Lompa sits in the kitchen of her Carson City home. The view from the kitchen will change when a freeway bypass is constructed on land the family has owned since 1936. AP Photo

CARSON CITY -- In the small two-bedroom home her husband built for her, Eva Lompa sits at the round wooden kitchen table that looks out over the family ranch.

Her sheep dog, Molly, guards the back door and barks a warning at visitors as sheep dawdle quietly by the long-standing outbuildings close by. A 150-year-old wooden barn stands open, and bales of hay are stacked to feed cattle during the winter.

The kitchen view likely will change soon. Instead of an open field and pinon-covered hills where her children used to ride horses to the east, the 87-year-old widow will have a front-row view of a freeway bypass.

The thought is not distressing to Lompa and her grown children. It's the sign of a growing city and progress, they say. What is most stressful to the family are the drawn-out dealings with state officials who need to purchase the land to build the project.

Years of delay and discussions still have no end in sight.

"Get on with the show," is Lompa's message to the state, she said.

"It's not something you want, but there is nothing I can do to stop it," said Sam Lompa Jr., who raises and sells cattle on the 430-acre ranch. "All we want is what's fair."

Talk of building a bypass as a way to deal with traffic, which otherwise must travel through the middle of the city on Carson Street, has floated around for more than 50 years.

"Carson City -- A General Plan Study," written in April 1958, includes a freeway across the Lompa property, following almost the same route as proposed by the Nevada Department of Transportation today.

Now, an estimated 40,000 cars pass through downtown on Carson Street on an average weekday. Of those, the Transportation Department estimates 10,000 to 15,000 people drive the street without stopping, merely passing through Carson City to get to or from Reno.

Mike Lawson, the department's traffic information division chief, says that by building a freeway, the traffic in downtown will be cut by a third.

In the past few years, after the department settled on the current plan that bisects the Lompa property, the state offered the family $8,000 an acre for 123 acres, what they said they required at the time.

Then the family hired an attorney who had represented another property owner in dealings with the Transportation Department. State officials immediately rescinded their offer, Sam Lompa said.

Years passed, and the state completed its first phase of the project by building four bridges north of the property, setting the stage for continuing the planned route through the Lompa property.

The state has extended another offer of $28,000 per acre, saying it now only required 82 acres. The Lompas are hoping to get a counteroffer appraisal.

Transpiration Department spokesman Scott Magruder said the agency considered several options and held numerous public meetings before settling on the final proposed route through the Lompa property.

The agency approved final plans for the freeway in 1986. Magruder said state officials think they have offered the Lompas a fair price and are waiting to come to an agreement with the family.

Sam Lompa said the process already has taken too long. He said he told state officials at one point to just write out a big check, and he'd pay them back money he didn't need. He joked that he has done the same for buyers of his cattle in the past.

The ranch, originally 820 acres, has been sold off slowly as Carson City's growth has surrounded it. It's one of the few remaining open pieces of land in an otherwise subdivided city.

Eva Lompa and her husband worked the ranch through the Depression, World War II and into the 1960s, until his death.

She remembers marrying Sam Sr. on a Saturday when she was 18, driving back to the ranch to sleep the night, and waking up early the next morning to milk cows.

People visited the ranch to buy milk, cream and butter. The family also sold dairy products to a creamery in Minden. Once the creamery left town in the early 1960s, the ranch was converted into a cattle ranch.