- There’s a special session of the North Las Vegas City Council at 4:30pm, Weds. Mar. 3rd to discuss staffing of city Utilities personnel. Don’t know if that will bring out the Utilities folk and make for another sardeen-like council meeting, but no one can predict these days.
- Redevelopment follows at 5:30 where they’ll be looking into a proposal for development at Lake Mead and 5th Street.
- At the regular meeting at 6pm, you’ll get to see the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada hand over $7 million for a bit of Losee real estate. Woah, is any piece of land worth that much in Nor’Town any more? Also, watch council pay off their Carson City lobbyists for $10,000. You think anyone will ask why the lobbyists let the State government dip into Clark County funds? Come on! Somebody say it: Heck of job, Senator Bryan!
- They stole Councilman Eliason’s water pipe! (Sun)
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The North Las Vegas Police request the help of Nor’Townies in identifying a robbery suspect. Follow the link ftp://media:cnlvpd@ftp.cityofnorthlasvegas.com/ and click on the folder titled 10-3993. You may have to click and drag the .avi file to your desktop in order to view it. If you have information regarding this or any crime in or around North Las Vegas , contact CrimeStoppers at 702 385-5555. Cash rewards, up to $2,000 are offered to anonymous persons who telephone the Crime Stoppers hotline with information that leads to the arrest or indictment of the person(s) responsible for felony offenses. Oh, okay. It depends on what you mean by exciting. However, here’s the lineup for this week:
The report is online here. The Draft SEIS describes and analyzes possible boundary adjustments to the Conservation Transfer Area referenced in the 2004 Final Las Vegas Valley Disposal Boundary Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) and Record of Decision.
The meetings are scheduled from 6 p.m. – 8 p.m. on February 22, 23, and 24, in Las Vegas and North Las Vegas, and will be in an open house format:
· Monday, Feb. 22: BLM Southern Nevada District Office, 4701 North Torrey Pines Drive, Las Vegas · Tuesday, Feb. 23: Centennial Hills Community Center YMCA, 6601 North Buffalo Drive, Las Vegas · Wednesday, Feb. 24,: North Las Vegas Library, 2300 Civic Center, North Las Vegas, NV. Written comments may be submitted to the address below or emailed to NV_LVFO_Planning@nv.blm.gov.
BLM Las Vegas Field Office
Attention: Gayle Marrs-Smith 4701 N. Torrey Pines Drive Las Vegas, NV 89130 The BLM encourages your participation in this scoping process. Please contact Gayle Marrs-Smith, BLM Project Manager, at (702) 515-5156 to request additional information regarding the scoping meetings.
Although it is important to take part in the process so that the BLM knows folks around here don’t want the land under study handed over to developers, this process is distinct from that currently in motion in Washington to declare portions of the area a fossil beds national monument. According to a Harry Reid spokester at the Protectors of Tule Springs meeting last Wednesday, that process seems to be moving along fairly well, and there may be draft legislation coming along soon. Oooo look, other fossil beds national monuments:
And wasn’t that a pleasant meeting, too? Quite the contrast with the City Council meetings, where anarchy reigned, especially in the special meeting over whether the firefighters should take over the job of transporting emergency cases to the local hospital. (RJ,Fox5,Sun,KLAS) I gave up on that meeting when I couldn’t find a parking place. Seeing that MedicWest had brought in two busloads of folks convinced me that, like most council meetings of late, it would be impossible to get in. Open meetings, indeed. Council decided 4-1 (Buck in the minority again) to punt on the fire department’s proposal. They’ll be bringing it up again in two weeks at what will no doubt be another popular meeting. At the Upper Wash meeting, however, all of the northern valley’s political tribes, excluding the beleaguered Nor’Town city council, were in attendance, in peaceful harmony and unity, mainly because 10,000 Nor’Townies and Nor’Vallies got organized. Something to think about there. Say, anybody plan yet to run Jill DeStephano DeStefano against Shelley Berkley? Could be fun… And the pic doesn’t really have anything to do with this post. It’s from some pics Cal Farnsworth sent me a link to awhile back, for which I am grateful. It shows some desert bighorns being transfered to better habitat by the Fraternity of Desert Bighorn. (RJ) I’m guessing city council knows what being towed through the air by a helicopter is like. In what is surely a sign of anarchy at City Hall, the HOA alliance is now announcing that the Special City Council meeting on emergency transport will be held at 4:30pm this afternoon. I have just called the City Clerk’s office, and they say the meeting will be held. Frankly this kind of nonsense is completely unacceptable and makes a joke of whatever vestiges of democratic government still exist in Nor’Town. It’s like holding a meeting in a room designed for 20 when a hundred or so folk show up, like at that last budget retreat. Oh wait, council has done that too. UPDATE: THIS MEETING IS NOT CANCELED. SEE NEXT POST! According to the North Las Vegas HOA Alliance folk, the special meeting at 4:30 pm of City Council is canceled. That’s the one where council was going to consider a proposal from the firefighters to take over some emergency transport services. I guess the city has fired so many staffers, though, that it can’t make an official announcement on their webpage or use the email alert thing that the NLV police use. That system got out the news of the mayor’s town hall easy enough, too. And after Lynnette Curtis went to all that work to do a nice write up on the proposal, too. (RJ) I’m just guessing that council, which benefits nicely from campaign contributions from the local ambulance company, had some second thoughts when that very company began to complain about the firefighters’ proposal to start carting bodies in their place: But such [city] revenue shouldn’t come at the expense of private business, said John Wilson, local general manager of the private ambulance service that transports most of North Las Vegas’ emergency patients. The city “is trying to fix their budget shortfall by taking revenue and jobs from the private sector and shifting it to the public sector to minimize the impact on public employees,” Wilson said. “This is sending the wrong message to the business community.” Now, most emergency ambulance calls in North Las Vegas are handled by American Medical Response and MedicWest, both of which are owned by the same parent company, Emergency Medical Services Corp. MedicWest handed Shari Buck $4,000 in 2006 for her council run in 2007 and EMS Management (Emergency Medical Services) coughed up $1,500 for her mayor race. They gave the same amount to William Robinson, too, apparently hedging their bets. Pretty much at the same time, too. Now I ask you, is that nice? Anyways, I just didn’t want anybody to get the idea that the cancellation was, shall we say, unmotivated. By the way, EMS has its corporate headquarters in Colorado. So, it that in keeping with the mayor’s suggestion that we “buy local”? And is this the end of “Firefighters for Buck”? This weeks’ events include:
Have a read of Timothy Egan’s Slumurbia, and tell me if it don’t sound just a tad too close to home. And then wonder if our civic leaders shouldn’t do a little soul searching before jumping into more carpet-bombing development as soon as they smell an end to the Great Recession: A few lessons about urban planning can be picked from the stucco pile. One is that, at least here in California, the outlying cities themselves encouraged the boom, spurred by the state’s broken tax system. Hemmed in by property tax limitations, cities were compelled to increase revenue by the easiest route: expanding urban boundaries. They let developers plow up walnut groves and vineyards and places that were supposed to be strawberry fields forever to pay for services demanded by new school parents and park users. Second, look at the cities with stable and recovering home markets. On this coast, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and San Diego come to mind. All of these cities have fairly strict development codes, trying to hem in their excess sprawl. Developers, many of them, hate these restrictions. They said the coastal cities would eventually price the middle class out, and start to empty. It hasn’t happened. Just the opposite. The developers’ favorite role models, the laissez faire free-for-alls — Las Vegas, the Phoenix metro area, South Florida, this valley — are the most troubled, the suburban slums. Come see: this is what happens when money and market, alone, guide the way we live. (NYT) Feel the urge to scream at a government official? Teabag a Town Hall? You’ll have plenty of chances in the coming weeks to have some fun with North Las Vegas elected officials. First Up: Mayor Pro Temp William Robinson: Ward 2. WHEN: 6 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 11 WHERE: Nevada Partners Culinary Academy, 710 W. Lake Mead Boulevard. Next Up: Councilwoman Anita G. Wood, Ward 3 WHEN: 6 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 18 WHERE: Silver Mesa Recreation Center, 4025 Allen Lane. Great chance to ask why police can count unfilled, frozen positions as “lay offs,” but no other city department can. More info on more Town Halls over on the city website. Nevada Senate Majority Leader Steven Horford is having a Høøt the Gøøb party in Nor’Town during Nevada governor Jim Gibbons’ “emergency” state of the state (subtitled: time to move to Idaho!) speech this Monday. Oh, okay, it’s not really called a “Høøt the Gøøb” party, but I’m sure the senator won’t mind some høøting during the speech. What: Watch (and Høøt) the Gube’s State of the State speech. I’ll probably be tweeting the sots over at: http://twitter.com/Scandalmonger. Thanks to IFartInUrGeneralDirection and freesound.org for the sound effect. Don’t see stupid graphic? Get Adobe Flash Player. |
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BLM folk will be out and about next week soliciting comments on the draft of their
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