Keeping the city safe from taxpaying businesses

The Charleston Antique Mall is one of those seven-day-a-week outfits that rents out space to 45 or so independent antique vendors. Think Victorian furniture, Depression glass, Coca-Cola collectibles, old Elvis records.

Proprietor Cal Tully says the mall is doing fine, despite the current economic squeeze -- maybe because of it. (Full disclosure: The brunette sells vintage fashion and collectible used books and records at the Charleston Antique Mall, her four rooms in the northeast corner comprising "Cat's Curiosities." I help out with the books.)

But the Charleston Antique Mall has a problem -- a problem not of its own making.

You can see the mall -- formerly known as the "Red Rooster Shops," though the two businesses are now divorced -- from Charleston Boulevard between Interstate 15 and the railroad tracks, just west of downtown. But you "can't get there from here." When they put in the I-15 entrance and exit ramps, the engineers cut off direct access to the mall from Charleston.

Yes, some folks park in the lot east of the old Holsum Bread factory, now converted into a professional office park. But to get to the antique mall's actual parking lot you have to go west on Charleston under I-15, turn south on Martin Luther King Boulevard (past all the parked ambulances), then east to pass back under I-15 on Wall Street, and finally left (north again) on Western Avenue.

The obvious solution is for the proprietors to put up signs with arrows at the two ends of Wall Street, on the steel mesh fences there, helping customers find the mall. Other local businesses have also posted signs on the privately owned steel mesh fence at Wall and Western.

But the business owners put up signs -- nice, sturdy, professionally lettered signs. Then Las Vegas city code enforcement officers come around and repeatedly either tear down the signs or instruct the Tullys and other business owners to tear down their own signs, even though they're attached to a private fence, whose owner has apparently never been heard from.

Cal Tully tried to put up flags and banners along the guard rail in front of his mall; the state highway people told him he had to take them down.

On May 2, the Charleston Antique Mall held a sidewalk sale in its own rear parking lot. City code enforcement officers came by and informed Mr. Tully he could be fined $125 for holding a parking lot sale without a permit ... on his own property, in an area where customers never park, anyway.

Cal Tully says he's also been threatened with fines of $100 to $125 for putting up his signs.

What's going on, here? Not enough businesses failing in Las Vegas -- where, I should note, the pride and joy of the tax-funded municipal redevelopment projects, the movie theater at Neonecropolis, finally and predictably went belly up recently, leaving that whole downtown block (originally seized by the city under eminent domain from actual, going businesses) to the pigeons?

"That's what I want to know," says Cal Tully. "If I was blocking the street or something, I'd understand. But he (the code enforcement officer) says that doesn't matter, you need a permit."

I talked to Mayor Oscar Goodman and to Mayor Pro Tem Gary Reese, who's also the councilman for the ward in which these businesses sit, the latter at his barber shop Wednesday afternoon.

"They're certainly not trying to put anybody out of business," Mr. Reese said of the omnipresent code enforcement officers. "They told 'em they'll work with 'em. Code enforcement will lead them right down the right way to do it. (But) we can't give 'em a permit to put (signs) on somebody else's fence."

But isn't that a matter between the two private property owners? Who's the complainant, if no one can track down the owner of that specific piece of fence? People rent out space for signs all the time. Other businesses hold what amount to "parking lot sales" every day of the year. We're expected to believe they take out a new $100 "city permit" every day? Why is this one little community of businesses -- in a not particularly upscale neighborhood -- getting all this code enforcement attention?

"Somebody is complaining," says Mr. Reese. "I don't know who it is."

Is that it? Is the city allowing itself to be used in some kind of private vendetta by an unnamed, unhappy neighborhood snitch?

Both the mayor and Councilman Reese told me they hadn't heard about the threatened fine for the May 2 parking lot sale.

"I didn't know about that. I'm going out there next Monday. Talk to me next week, will you?" asked Councilman Reese.

Mayor Goodman said he also plans to go visit the proprietors. "Anything I can do to help a local, entrepreneurial business, you know I'm going to do it," the mayor said.

Actually, the city of Las Vegas is famous for this kind of anti-business behavior. Former Mayor Jan Jones didn't like the Topless Girls of Glitter Gulch ruining the "family image" she had in mind for the Fremont Street Experience, so she sent in city inspectors to crawl around on their hands and knees, with orders to cite the property for any and every violation they could find.

When Andre Rochat tried to make a go of his Frogeez restaurant and bakery on Fourth Street downtown, they made him put in all new ovens and hoods -- replacing the ovens that had been perfectly acceptable for the previous tenant. They made him spend $100,000 erecting a steel scaffolding above a couple of tables he wanted to place out on the sidewalk, "sturdy enough to hold up a city bus if one should fall on it," he laughed. Then they sent the meter maids to ticket his customers -- even after 6 p.m., when the street was otherwise deserted.

Frogeez soon closed, as did (eventually) Andre's original, far more upscale downtown restaurant. Andre Rochat is no longer causing the city any trouble in downtown Las Vegas. Or attracting any customers there. Or paying any taxes there.

Which seems to be just the way the city's code enforcement officers want it.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal, and author of "Send in the Waco Killers" and the novel "The Black Arrow." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com/