In his downtown apartment overlooking the Truckee River, John Iliescu, 96, a former cosmetic and reconstructive surgeon and World War Two veteran, who has invested extensively in local real estate, has a low table full of photos, maps and court documents.
These reflect a drawn out legal feud with the Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County, after their construction of a new roundabout in Midtown led them to entirely eliminate a driveway from the front of one of his lots on Virginia Street.
In bold at the top of one document it reads “the ‘taking clause’ of the 5th Amendment to the United States Constitution says ‘Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.’” Quoting lawyers representing the RTC it states: “it was not necessary to obtain an easement or exercise eminent domain to eliminate the driveway because the entrance to the driveway was already in the public right-of-way and plaintiffs had no ownership interest in it.”
A 2019 printed out email from Dane Anderson, with Woodburn and Wedge, includes: “I understand your frustration, but it is something that cannot be designed around at this point.”
The current google image of the spot in question with a tree, a curved sidewalk and a pedestrian crosswalk, where there was once an exit point from the Iliescu-owned lot on Virginia Street.
“About four years ago … they said, we're going to take your whole front entrance to the lot that abuts the roundabout … because when the cars come up there, they may have to hesitate for a minute to get onto the roundabout,” Iliescu remembers, sitting by the window, with a Stars and Stripes cane by his side.
After hoping for a compromise, such as RTC buying up his lot, which he says was worth $400,000 when it had the driveway, instead officials just went ahead and built a new curved sidewalk portion without any driveway left.
“As a result the only way you'll be able to get in and out of the lot will be through the alley,” he says. “Well, when you look at the alley, it’s a nightmare, and we have pictures of it. Trucks block it because there's a couple of businesses right around it, and they have to have space to park their trucks while they're unloading.”
The added median in Midtown he says has just made it worse. “To get to the alley, assuming that it's not blocked by a delivery truck, you'd have to go all the way down here past this …” he explains as he shows one of his detailed maps.
The lot which lost its driveway is highlighted on the left.
Iliescu says he’s invested a lot of money into properties across Reno, especially in Midtown and downtown, and that his tenants include corner store owners, a Mexican restaurant, pawn shops and loan centers.
He says he feels his properties and tenants are being targeted for not fitting in with the current narrative of how some want to change downtown.
“I used to go hunting with O’Callaghan (Donal Neil “Mike” O’Callaghan who served as the 23rd Governor of Nevada from 1971 to 1979). I knew most of the mayors, all nice people,” he remembers. “They were concerned about the community. And, in those days you could sit down and tell them, look, this doesn't make sense because people would have to go way out of the way.”
While he recounts his ordeals with RTC he mentions a period where there was a “temporary construction easement,” which was granted in exchange for a rental fee, but then it unraveled.
“So now when they come back after three years, they're supposed to put everything back the way it was. Well, they plant a tree in front, they completely block it. A good portion of it. So we said to them, well why do all that? Why don't they just condemn us? Just condemn and pay us for what you're taking. Just do it the way you're supposed to do it. Because in condemnation, the way it works is if we want your property, we come and we get our appraisers to appraise it…and you come to some agreement. I would've gone with that. I had no choice because they can do that. Okay, well, they decide they're not going do that. They're going to plant a tree there and they're not going to pay me anything more. They said, ‘well, we can do it because we have a public right of way.’”
So far his legal attempts to reverse the situation have been unsuccessful.
Other disputes Iliescu has had have taken him to City Council for public comment, including earlier this year to defend the Wrightway Market, his tenant at 330 Evans Ave. across from the main bus station.
Despite his pleas then, the City Council voted to revoke the store’s liquor license, blaming its alcohol sales for a high volume of police calls in the area.
“If I go to rent it now, I can't say to the guy, you can use it for this and this and that, because the city says, oh no, you are a bad boy,” he said during our interview.
Despite several City Council discussions, and meetings where arguments were made the store was a victim of its location when people call about problems in the area, a reversal hasn’t happened for that decision either.
“You talk to any one of the city council people, I send out letters to the governor and people, you never hear from them,” Iliescu lamented. “You talk to the city council people and individually, they're all nice people, but nothing happens. Nobody seems to care. We just want it to work.”
Other recent feuds have involved the old 1885 195 N Virginia Street commercial building which he owns.
“If the windows, somebody comes by and etches them or cracks them, I gotta repair it. And not only that, but they make it worse. They tell me if it's even got a little scratch, I gotta fix this and do that. But I don't see anybody helping me. Remember I love Reno and I want it to be good. But we got a lot of greed there. And you all wanna beat on me. You already have beat on me. What else are you gonna do to me?” he asks incredulously.
At this point of the interview, his grandson Chase McMullen, who wears many hats, including as a tech entrepreneur, editor of the Senior Spectrum, and an organizer for skateboarders and seniors, explained the family decided to put plywood onto that property because they were tired of the broken windows.
“Code enforcement comes around and constantly wants to give you a bunch of violations for things that are excessive,” McMullen said. “We've had ten broken windows and they want to tell us to fix another one. And since we've received this violation notice that says fix the plywood in the window, we've had two more broken windows in just June. There's plywood on another door. So it's a merry-go-round where the people downtown are vandalizing the properties and then the city comes along and penalizes you for them vandalizing your building… We’re worried if we fix that glass window, it's going to get broken again. So the city says you can board up your windows and you can paint them or beautify them. That's not going to help us get a tenant in the building.”
McMullen says big companies like Bird, Jacobs Entertainment and the main casinos get their way with different projects and facilitation, while surveys conducted by out of towners lead to new decisions, but that smaller, local business owners feel constantly penalized, ignored and unwanted.
“They take the advice of the money and the money doesn't understand Reno, which is why we have this problem downtown in the first place,” he said.
McMullen sees the 2022 law to ban single-serve alcohol in containers less than 20 ounces in the downtown corridor (see above) in the same vein.
“If you really think about what they passed a year ago, getting those little bottles of liquor out of those stores that caters to those casinos,” he said. “So we have tenants, you know, we work with small businesses, we work with the little guy. We don't have casinos across the entire country. My grandfather and my grandmother worked their entire life to get these buildings and put tenants in there… The city is so backhanded and heavy with their decision making, but so fluff and nice to you up front.”
McMullen is proud of his grandfather though for fighting back. “Somebody around here has to do it,” he said.
When asked to speak, Sonnia Iliescu, who deferred to her husband and grandson during the rest of the interview, pointed to the elimination of parking on Virginia Street as a pivotal moment to what she believes is its downward trend. “You look at all the old pictures of historic Reno and it was thriving but now locals don't go downtown anymore very often,” she said.
“They don't want to go down there and park in a casino parking lot. And that was the agenda, was to get the people off the street and in the parking lots of the casinos. When we had a beautiful downtown, we had a lot of fun downtown. We've been here for over 50 years and it's changed incredibly and not for the better, I'm sorry to say, but my husband loves Reno. I love Reno, and we have invested our future in Reno. All of our investments have been in Reno, so we believed in it, and hopefully we will see things change for the better,” she concluded.