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By Glenn Campbell
At the Clark County Commission meeting on Nov. 21, 2006, the commissioners accepted the donation of a 15-acre parcel of land on the eastern edge of the Las Vegas Valley to be used as a family training center for the Clark County Department of Family Services. I was present at the meeting. One of the donor's conditions of the gift was that whatever was built there would be named after departing commissioner Myrna Torme Williams and that Williams would also head a committee that would be responsible for managing the use of the property. The property was located at 601 N. Hollywood Blvd. and was being donated by a corporate trust whose name I did not recognize.
The agenda item stated:
Item #113: Accept the donation of Assessor's Parcel No. 140-34-503-009, located at 601 North Hollywood Boulevard, to be known as the Myrna Torme Williams complex, for the purpose of providing training, program, and education facilities for children and families services by the County Department of Family Services; and authorize the Director of Real Property Management to execute the documents necessary to effect the transfer, or take other action as the Board deems appropriate.
Although I don't recall the details, it was mentioned at the meeting that if the property was not used by the county within a certain number of years, the property could be sold, with the proceeds to benefit DFS.
As a child welfare activist, my main concern is that the location might be inappropriate for the purpose, being too far from DFS headquarters and the majority of its potential clients. To follow up on my concerns, I visited the property on Nov. 30 and conducted a simple internet search regarding it.
This superficial investigation has turned up several interesting leads which may merit further investigation. One amusing detail is that the property was once owned by The Walters Group, a name associated with a recent real estate scandal in Las Vegas.
Below is the sequence of my investigation, along with photos of the estate.
The property is located in unincorporated Clark County on the easternmost major street in the Las Vegas Valley. It is at the foot of Frenchman Mountain and about 1/4 mile from a prominent, multi-spired Mormon temple which is visible throughout the valley. The property's nearest cross-street is Bonanza, which is the same street that the Family Court Complex is on, about five miles away.
Many of the clients who would use this complex would be taking the city bus. There is currently no CAT bus service directly to the property. To reach the property from Child Haven (where parents might visit their children), you would walk 1/4 mile to the corner of Pecos and Washington, take the twice-hourly 208 bus for 17 minutes to the corner of Hollywood and Bonanza, then walk 1/4 mile to the property. Given that 1/4 mile takes about 10-15 minutes to walk, the total journey time would be about 45 minutes.
The property is located in an area of expensive homes with swimming pools where there are unlikely to be many local DFS clients. (I consider the epicenter of DFS activity to to be the corner of Lake Mead and Las Vegas Blvd.)
I spoke to a neighbor in a house adjoining the property, who turned out to be the president of that neighborhood's homeowner's association. She was not previously aware that the property had been donated to the county. She understood, instead, that it would be used for a development of 1/2-acre homes. She also revealed these facts:
The front of the mansion is shown at the top of the page. (Yes, it is a house! The scale is hard to judge in the photo, but it's huge!) Here are our other photos...
South side of the house.
The caretaker's home, far more attractive (in my view)
than the mansion itself.
View of the "animal cage", looking northeast toward the
Mormon temple and Frenchman Mountain.
A large cage, apparently for some kind of exotic animal.
The mansion (lower center) seen from a lower part of
Frenchman Mountain.
Aerial detail from the Assessor's website. The caretaker's
house and the animal cage are visible on the right.
Insignia on the front gate, possibly "dr".
A personal observation: Raising a "single family" in place like this is going to thoroughly screw up your children psychologically. I mean, worst than Paris Hilton! Can you imagine having any sort of normal relationships with any other children? And what happens when you eventually have to leave and integrate with the rest of the world?It's child abuse!
I was hoping to find a sequence of ownership for the property, but I found only one recorded document online, a "Grant, Bargain, Sale Deed," which is apparently a 2004 re-recording of a deed previously recorded in 1996. The buyer is Denver Square Trust and the seller is The Walters Group. The Walters group was recently involved in what some regard as a shady deal to turn a golf course near a sewer treatment plant into a housing development.
To further boost the application, Commissioner Mary Kincaid wants the county to buy the Donald Reynolds Mansion at the southwest corner of Hollywood and Bonanza. Kincaid hopes the move would preserve the historic home of the late founder of the Donrey Media Group, which owns the Review-Journal, and turn it into a cultural and recreational center.Commissioners will vote May 4 on whether to spend $5,500 on an appraisal of the 15-acre estate, which has been priced at about $8 million. Woodbury expressed reservations about buying the mansion because of the cost, but Kincaid said it's worth getting an appraisal and seeing if the current owners, Denver Square Trust, are willing to make a deal.
I also found a Zoning Agenda from a 2004 town meeting in which Denver Square Trust was seeking to build 29 homes on the property. (I don't know if the request was approved or why the homes were never built.)
This 2003
article in the Las Vegas Mercury, cites the Reynolds
Mansion as the No. 2 water user of all Clark County
single-family residences. (It is hard to see it using much
water now. The land is mostly barren, and the only thing
using water is a ring of shrubbery.)
The property and its location have a certain Shangri La
quality to them that doesn't seem appropriate to the
pragmatic business of any DFS training. The job of DFS is
not to create utopia but just to fix the most serious
problems and get out of people's lives. A storefront in
North Las Vegas would be closer to the clientele and more
appropriate to the task.
This doesn't make the donation a bad deal, however. The
property appears to be valuable, and the county can
presumably sell or trade it for more appropriate property
elsewhere. (The Library District does the same when it
receives a donation of property: It trades it for the
location it really wants.)
I am curious to know what lead the owner to donate the
property. It could be pure benevolence, of course, but
given the property's tortured history, I suspect there is
something more than that. Most developers don't buy an $8
million property, fight a long-running lawsuit over it, then
just give it up.
The county probably doesn't need the "historic" Reynolds
home in its property inventory. That's more
trouble than its worth, and the county shouldn't have to
take the heat for tearing it down.
The property would make a very nice county park, but then
there's the problem of the albatross of a mansion in the
middle of it.
I would love to see the property turned into another
facility like St. Judes: A collection of cottages housing
children in an "institutional" but family-like setting. This
kind of institutional care may be the only solution to our
current "foster crisis," because we are probably never going
to squeeze enough good foster parents out of the Las Vegas
demographic. The mansion itself could be turned into dormitories
(which is kind of what it looks like anyway). Such a facility might be
better managed by a private nonprofit, rather than the
county itself, but the county could lend the property to an
appropriate organization.
Another alternative: In short order, the mansion could
become a separate branch of Child Haven reserved for older
children, who tend to be disruptive at the Pecos campus.
Note: The mansion's square footage is probably about the
same as ALL the buildings of Child Haven.
There is one other solution: SELL THE PROPERTY TO LONNIE
HAMMARGREN! He could transfer his menagerie there and have
much more space. It would be a fine little Neverland for
him, and we would all benefit from having him further
away.
We could also offer the property to Michael Jackson, but
he's probably burned out on the whole Neverland
concept.
A final note: Even if he owned a 18,000 sq ft mansion,
Donald Reynolds is still dead. You can't take it with
you, but if you leave it behind, people might be laughing
at you long after you're gone.
Conclusions
The property appears to be in a ridiculous location for a
family training center, since it is far from any potential
clientele. The size of the property is also far more than
DFS would ever need, short of relocating all of Child Haven
there.
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©2005-07, Glenn Campbell, PO Box 30303, Las
Vegas, NV 89173.
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