Mislocation is everything

Life with garbage dumps, fire stations, freeways and casinos as neighbors

By Andrew Kiraly

As a little girl, Ellen Haynes used to sit on the porch of her North Las Vegas home, letting her young imagination run wild. Inspired by late-night horror movies, she'd often daydream about a monster crawling over the hill that sat due north of her house.

"I'd watch that hill and just wait to see some giant spider come crawling over it, like in some movie," Haynes says. "See, years ago, that used to be a great big old hill."

A monster came, but it wasn't a giant spider or any other B-movie terror. What arrived was a Republic Services dump transfer station where trucks roar in and out daily, unloading garbage as they fill up during their routes across the valley.

Ellen and Clarence Haynes live next to the dump. It would be the stuff of a sitcom premise if it wasn't so literally true. See, they don't live down the street from the dump. They don't live in the vicinity of the dump. They don't live unpleasantly downwind from the dump. They live right across the street from the dump, a snorting behemoth of noise and odor that has all but soured their retirement years.

"The smell fills the whole house sometimes,"' says Clarence, 62, a retired government worker. "We're always coughing and gagging. I get migraines a lot. It's got to be having an effect on our bodies." (But David Tonelli, spokesman for the Clark County Health District, says recent inspections of the station result in a passing grade. "There is no immediate concern to public health in connection to the odor," he says.)

Ellen concurs with her husband: "You can't relax good. You never know when the scent's going to be there. One time, we were having a family barbecue when the scent just invaded. 'What is that smell?'" The Hayneses learned their lesson: "Now when we want to barbecue, we go to a friend's house," says Ellen. And at night, when the smell gets particularly bad--due to milder winds and the fact the trash is moved around for transport, Republic officials surmise--sometimes the Hayneses don't stick around at all. "Pretty often we'll get ourselves a room at the Stardust or Budget Suites," says Clarence.

Call it home not-so-sweet home, a dreary state of affairs the Haynes share with a handful of other residents in the area, many of them retirees on fixed incomes. Their living conditions might be unique, but they're not alone in having unusual neighbors. Between the curiosities of zoning and the vagaries of business, not everyone who calls home home looks out his window and sees a house next door. Some see trash, some see fire trucks, some freeways and some nothing but the sheer wall of a Strip casinosaurus. In this case, mislocation is everything; but whether such arrangements present residents with neighbors from hell or a novel lifestyle depends on attitude as much as latitude.

As for the Hayneses, the whole thing stinks. The 70,000-square-foot facility across Brooks Avenue (which, from the Haynes' front porch, looks like some triple-gated industrial castle) handles 60 percent of Republic's fleet of garbage trucks, which daily drop off 5,500 tons of garbage that's later transferred to Apex. About 180 trucks come in and out all day, as well as 600 public vehicles, according to Republic Services spokeswoman Lee Haney. The Cheyenne Avenue transfer station is the oldest and busiest of Republic's three transfer stations.

Haney points out that, unfortunate though the situation may be for the Hayneses, Republic does try to be a good neighbor. She points out that a deodorizing system mists over the waste at periodic intervals, and can also be increased manually if the stench gets to be too much; nearby residents are encouraged to call if they get one noseful too many. "We try to let the residents know we do have a system in place that tries to minimize [the dump's effects]," Haney says.

But other residents say it isn't enough. Alan Paine, who lives one street up on Plymouth Avenue with his mother, Edna, says he's used to the truck noise, but the smell is a whole different can of stank. "I grew up in this house, and the dump wasn't always here," says Paine. "The smell's as bad as you would think. Some days you don't notice. Other days--whew! I always wonder why the dump wasn't put a little farther away."

Yeah. An industrial zone right next door to residential housing? Calls to North Las Vegas City Councilman William Robinson were referred to spokeswoman Brenda Johnson, who confirmed that the zoning of the area was kosher--Republic is zoned general industrial, while across the street is zoned R-CL, or residential compact lot.

According to Jory Stewart, North Las Vegas director of planning and zoning, the site was approved for industrial zoning in 1979, and Clark Sanitation Inc. secured a use permit for a transfer facility in 1980. Stewart explains: "Notification [of the permit application] was for property owners, and it appears from the record that property owners were largely absentee." The fact that owners weren't around to protest could have simplified approval of the project. "The record does not show any controversy," Stewart says.

Why don't the Hayneses just move? They sneeze at the thought--but not for lack of desire. Even in today's bull housing market that has given the valley flip-it fever, the couple doubts its home would command a sufficient amount to put them in another--one not in the noxious wake of the Republic Services transfer station.

"We're retired," Ellen says. "We're old folks and it's hard to just up and move. Besides, I doubt this house would [sell for] more than a drop in the bucket for a new one."

Meanwhile, those satisfying amenities of home ownership--front porch lazings, backyard cookouts, pool frolicks--just aren't much fun at the Haynes household.

"We had a little pool in the back you'd fill up with the hose," says Clarence. "But the thing would get to smell, and this film would settle on the water. I just got tired of dumping it out all the time."

I live next to a fire station

Verlene Chiodini's alarm clock is chainsaws rattling to life every morning at 8. The retired schoolteacher lives on what looks like a quiet curl of street west of downtown; it peels north as Upland Drive off Charleston Boulevard. Driving up, you see the occasional church and school. By the time you reach Chiodini's neck of the woods, however, you realize quiet is a premium. Surrounded: She's got a fire station across the street and the U.S. 95--complete with convenient onramp--to her west.

"If I've planned on sleeping in, the chainsaws can be a bit of a bother," says Chiodini, who says the fire station was already there when she and her husband, Ron, bought the house in 1966. "Every morning, they're out there testing their chainsaws at 8." Special bonus: The fire truck responds to an alarm--lock, stock and wailing sirens--10 to 12 times a day, residents say. "But I really don't notice the sirens so much. I've gotten used to that. We've had friends come over and they'd hear it, and we wouldn't even notice until they pointed it out."

Neighbor and longtime resident Jean Andersen agrees: "It doesn't bother me," she says. "They're careful not to come out blaring. They're considerate about it. Besides, your mind gets used to it."

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, the station is quiet enough, but that belies its increasingly active role in fighting fires in the ever-expanding valley. One of the older, more storied fire stations in town, the city of Las Vegas' Station 6 was built in 1963 and is one of 15 stations in the city, says Tim Szymanski of Las Vegas Fire and Rescue. It hosts a fire engine, a ladder truck and an ambulance. Despite its vital central location, it's been the topic of occasional talk of a shutdown--not because of resident complaints, but despite residents' support. Barring the once-in-a-while peeve of a siren's peal--which firefighters try to switch on after they're well away from houses--residents consider the station a neighborhood anchor, Szymanski says.

"I know we've talked about shutting it down. It's real limited on space and it's terrible for parking, but the more established neighbors look at it as being another neighbor," he says. "I know a lot of kids stop there on the way home from school to visit the firefighters. When we talked about moving it to a different location, you realize nobody doesn't like it. They want their fire station." The station has even been the recipient of community largesse when Station 6 was the star of a local news channel's take on home-makeover cable show "Trading Spaces." Originally limited to a $1,500 budget for a makeover, Szymanski says, the station saw donations flood in, totaling more than $10,000. Neighbors have come to accept and embrace the station--even if the snarl of a chainsaw is their de facto wake-up call.

"Yes, everybody checks everything at 8 a.m.," Szymanski says. "We have to make sure everything works before the shift starts by turning on the equipment one time. We might toot the horn or tap the siren too, because sometimes fuses blow out. We can't get around that. But when we have a meeting with a councilperson, when residents bring up that they don't like this or that, 99.9 percent of the time it's something we can fix." The outside public-address system was a little loud for some homeowners' ears, for instance, so Station 6 turned it down.

And in a Rockwell-worthy act of neighborly niceness, Chiodini often brings the firefighters cake. "If I'm making a cake for me and my husband, I'll make one little one [for us] and then a separate one and take it over." After all, if she needs a favor done around the house, she can always ask a fireman. Though they used to come over for a different reason.

"When we first moved in years ago and I was a pretty young thing, I had a bikini bathing suit that I'd only wear while suntanning in the back yard," Chiodini explains. "One day, I had to run into the front yard and change the water. Later that day, two firemen with clipboards came over and asked if I'd had my annual fire inspection, and they walked with me through the house and garage.

"I said to the neighbor, 'Did you get your annual fire inspection?' And she told me, 'They don't do annual fire inspections!'" Chiodini suspects the bikini inspired the firemen's sudden safety-consciousness.

All told, Chiodini is more peeved with the freeway than the firehouse. While the U.S. 95 widening project has been halted, Chiodini says whether the freeway is six lanes or 10 doesn't matter. The noise and pollution have made her golden years a little smoggy. "The freeway's more of a bother than the fire station," she says. "We get black dust all over our patio furniture. I think it's burnt-up tires."

I live in a parking lot

Lloyd Ewert's neighbor is the TI hotel-casino, rising up like a monolith in what might charitably be called his back yard. The apartment complex where he lives, Villa de Flores, is an island in a sea of backlot busy-busy, abuzz with hotel employees' cars and work trucks navigating the whorls of an asphalt thumbprint west of the megaresort.

Ewert loves it.

"I like it because it's convenient for me," says Ewert, 34, production manager of events for a company that throws corporate parties. Ewert creates themes, styles and props for suit-and-tie shindigs that take place on or near the Strip. "I'm just right up the street from my work, and if I want to hang out on the Strip and have dollar beers, I don't have to worry about drinking and driving. And everyone [at the apartment] kind of looks out for everyone."

Ewert has only been living at Villa de Flores for four months now, lured there by tales from a friend about the 36-unit apartment complex that has survived the supersizing of the Strip and become something of a local legend. He has no complaints about the decidedly unhomey feel of the place that, when you step outside, confronts residents and visitors alike with a barrage of warning signs saying don't park here, don't park there, get towed here, get ticketed there.

"It's an advantage to people because it's such a central location," says Michael Flores, who owns and manages the complex with his wife, Gail, "especially for new people in town who don't know anything yet other than the Strip. It's a very unique property in that way."

But it won't be a haven for Vegas newbies for long; Flores, who's owned the property for 32 years, has sold it to investment company PRNS for $4 million. The deal is in escrow; while Flores has weathered many skirmishes over the years with neighbors such as Steve Wynn ("Wynn is to the good neighbor policy what Jeffrey Dahmer was to dining etiquette," he says) and entertained many buyout offers that fell through ("I'm like a hooker," says Flores. "I get to sell it and still keep it"), this one looks real. PRNS was granted a building permit earlier this month and plans to begin developing the property next year, says PRNS president Kevin Ghafouria. Ghafouria says PRNS will develop a 148-unit, 13-story timeshare on the site.

The buyout ends an interesting chapter in Vegas residential quirk, but Flores says he's had a good run. "We'll miss it. You take 32 years of being in the same spot, putting two kids through college. I've probably made $10 million off this property in the last 32 years."

Then the veteran apartment mini-mogul starts thinking out loud. "Now, see, I can defray the capital gains on the property if I buy another within 45 days. Four to eight million could get me into 150 units or so..."