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.
Look carefully at the above table. It contains a list of proposed layoffs offered up to city council Thursday night as a means to fill up a $33 million shortfall in the city budget.
It offers up 273 layoffs (at the bottom of the second column) to achieve the goal of about $36 million savings (bottom of the last column) to the city.
If you look at the second to last row, you will find there are 39 police positions on the chopping block. It was, in essence, that figure that brought out hordes of police officers to the city council meeting on Wednesday, and filled Alexander Library to the brim Thursday. Indeed it left many people unable to actually witness the meeting as the Nevada Open Meeting Law requires.
But more about that later. The one fact I want you to focus on at this moment is that the above table, the basis for all the gnashing of teeth in city hall, is pretty much complete and utter bullshit.
Tonight the essential lesson learned is that if you can get enough city employees to wear a brightly colored shirt saying something to the effect that Nor’Town is only 78% safe, then the city will take the very rules of mathematics, stored, immutable, in the changeless mind of God, and bend them as if they were made of Play Doh.
It probably helps if your unions are essential to the mayor’s political survival, too.
So, although it looks like, on the chart anyways, that 39 of our brave boys and girls in blue will get pink slips, actually, it will only be about 5. Somehow, the police were allowed, unlike other departments, to count people who may or may not take early retirement as not being on the force, hence their salaries don’t count against the budget short fall. That, plus some other accounting shenanigans, allowed the police to avoid the 39 layoffs.
No, don’t expect me to make complete sense of what happened. Go ask Ben Bernanke to explain it.
No other department got off so well, prompting the spokesman for the fire fighters into an angry tirade wherein he expressed shock at the fact that council spent more time discussing shopping carts than fire fighters.
Speaking of shopping carts, lots of services will be cut as well. The city will be cutting back on its shopping cart pickup program as well as graffiti removal. City leaders will be considering whether volunteers might be able to pick up some of the slack. Also, libraries and recreation centers will probably have shorter hours, and two city pools may be shut down.
The mayor insisted that she could not support layoffs for firefighters or other public safety employees. When councilperson Anita Wood suggested there could be no sacred cows in the budget process, the mayor insisted that she had never agreed to that concept. Indeed, she suggested that any councilmember who supported firefighter layoffs should agree that the layoffs be applied to station houses in that councilmember’s ward.
I suspect everyone agreed that that was a cheap shot. Indeed, among the crowd sequestered in a separate meeting room at the library where we listened to the meeting through a loud speaker because the regular meeting room was full, there was a loud, collective “woah” at the suggestion. Ms. Wood then wondered where the mayor would find the $2 million that the laid off firefighters would save the city. The mayor replied rather unconvincingly that she was “working on it.”
No doubt we can all expect more name-calling as the budget process proceeds.
Oh, and for those at the meeting who embraced the principle that “perception is realty,” try out the Latin version: esse est percipi favored by the late Bishop Berkeley. It sounds classier.
That was the message North Las Vegas Firefighters and Police brought to council chambers Wednesday night. That is, we’ll be murdered in our beds if council decides to cut personnel from those departments. (KTNV,LVNow,Sun,RJ) Council members seemed surprised by the uprising. The mayor pro temp William Robinson insisted that no one was talking about cuts to the police department.
At least not yet. The city has $33 million budget gap that needs to be filled and the money will have to come from somewhere. Indeed, while discussing capital improvement projects whose funding is mostly covered by external entities such as the Bureau of Land Management, mayor Buck requested that police abandon improvements to their shooting range during the budget crunch.
Say, who do you call if a protest by the police gets out of hand?
Council also passed the ordinance regulating the sale of animals outdoors. It allows vendors to sell animals only within certain temperature ranges and when posting signs about Nor’Town’s spay and neuter laws. (RJ,KTNV) Animal activists favored a complete ban, but supported the ordinance as the best they’ll be able to do at the time. Councilman Richard Cherchio said that part of the problem of mistreated animals at open air markets is the import of animals from out of state and suggested that the state take up the issue. Councilwoman Anita Wood claimed that when Broadacres Swap Meet voluntarily adopted the standards recently that the number of animal vendors decreased from over 90 to just 5.
Council also unanimously supported paying a settlement of $300,000 to Jeffrey Smith, who filed a civil rights suit against the city. The city’s lawyer said he privately explained to each councilperson why the city had to pay up. It’d be nice if somebody would explain to us’n folks who actually pay for it, though. Just to make it look a little more like a representative democracy around here.
Council also approved the STARS Safety Town. It will be the second such entity in the U.S. and will be modeled on a Safety Town in Frisco, Texas. It will contain scaled models of buildings from Nor’Town, and its purpose is to teach safe habits to kids. Part of the cost will be borne by business sponsorship, although the mayor expressed the hope that businesses such as the Palomino Strip Club be excluded therefrom. I’m sure I speak from everyone when I say that we’ll all be disappointed if there isn’t a scale model of that venerable institution at the site.
Apparently the Frisco Safety Town allows kids to drive miniature cars around. That would seem to be a good idea for the Nor’Town town, especially if it teaches the kids how to scatter during a drive-by shooting. That would dove-tail nicely with all the skills they’ll be picking up in and around the Shooting Park–and at school.
And I have a perfect name for the place. You guessed it: HunterLand! Why not have the kids learn some American Lit. at the same time? Surely there will be a replica of that North Las Vegas literary mecca, too: The North Star cafe!
Or pretty close, anyways, to those of us towards the south…
Here’s the press release:
Las Vegas, NV – Rory Reid will attend a house party hosted by Assemblyman Harvey Munford on Friday, January 5, at 6 p.m. near Martin Luther King Boulevard and Washington Street.
Munford, a state assemblyman representing the established neighborhoods of West Las Vegas since 2004, taught Rory ninth grade U.S. history and physical education at Cashman Junior High.
“I’m excited to see one of my former students succeed,” Munford said. “Rory is making education and economic diversity priorities in his important campaign. As a teacher and public official those have also been my top priorities.”
Members of the community are welcome to attend this event. An RSVP for space planning purposes is requested by email to rsvp@roryreid.com or by calling 1-877-767-9201. The event will be in Munford’s home at 809 Sunny Place in Las Vegas (click for map).
Munford taught in the Clark County School District for more than 36 years and at the College of Southern Nevada for 25 years. He now serves District 6, which includes neighborhoods in West Las Vegas, as well as part of the downtown casino area and the Doolittle Community Center.
Rory Reid is the first candidate to offer a plan that offers solutions for today and a vision for Nevada’s future success. Reid’s vision includes plans for the future of our state’s economy, workforce, education system, energy production and business development.
Copies of the 30-page document — “The Virtual Crossroads: Rory Reid’s Vision for the Future of Nevada” – are available at RoryReid.com.
I’m guessing they’ll even let in RIROs, like yours truly.
The Las Vegas Sun apparently found a staffer still on the payroll to pen a piece about the BLM’s generally favorable position on the proposed Upper Las Vegas Wash national monument. (Sun)
One thing that strikes me about the article is how all the cooperation between all the various government agencies would not have happened if the development bubble had not burst.
If Park Highlands were half-finished right now and Boyd Gaming was building the casino next to it, and developers were, like Alexander, looking for more worlds to conquer, just how willing would everyone had been to make all that land into an untouchable monument? Somebody was pushing for that Sheepdip Parkway, too, which would have plowed right through the fossils just a few years ago, and they had the County on board.
So, even the nasty dark clouds of the Great Recession have a silver lining or two.
Lot’s o’meetings coming up this week at City Council.
To start off, there’s the Redevelopment Meeting at 5:30 pm Weds, Feb. 3 over at city hall, 2200 Civic Center Drive, North Las Vegas, Nevada.
After that, there’s the regular meeting at 6 pm, same place, where there’s all sorts of fun:
Council will be taking up that animal ordinance which will regulate, but not ban, the outdoor sale of animals. Clark County Commissioners Tom Collins and Chris Guinchigliani favor an outright ban, but the folks out at Broadacres Swap Meet prefer the current, more toothless ordinance because a ban would shut down the Puppy Torturing Booth, which is a real hit with the kiddies. Okay, I may have made up that bit about the Puppy Torturing Booth, but, heck, just how much enforcement do we really expect from the Byzantine current proposal? Might was well open up a Puppy Torturing Booth.
The Capital Improvement Plan for the next few years will be up for review. I suspect the list of new projects will be kinda short.
Council will be paying out more settlement money, this time $300,000 to Jeffrey Smith, for civil rights violations at the corrections center. You know, if the city’s going to keep that up, they might as well set up a Civil Rights Violation Booth at the Swap Meet, too.
The meetings don’t end there, though. There will be at least one budget retreat over at the Alexander Library – 1755 West Alexander Road, North Las Vegas – on Thurs, Feb. 4, at 5 pm. However, if we’re really good boys and girls, they might have one on Fri., Feb. 5th, too. Items include “program elimination and organizational restructuring,” which is a nice way of saying fewer services and staff lay-offs.
I expect you’ll have to elbow some city folk out of the way if you’ll want a seat. And bring some of them air horns, too, in case anybody starts to drift off.
The Nevada Environmental Coalition (NEC) at a news conference on Friday, Jan. 29th accused the Bureau of Land Management of failing to provide legally required oversight of the Clark County Shooting Park.
In the NEC’s response to the FONSI, available here (.doc), the NEC had the following concerns:
The BLM based the FONSI on out-of-date data.
The only way to obtain up-to-date information would be to do a full Environmental Impact Study for the park.
The BLM failed to take into consideration the effects of large numbers of visitors, including out-of-town tourist traffic, on the surrounding neighborhoods.
Local officials for the cities of Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, and Clark County ignored the impact of the park when making zoning decisions about surrounding areas. For example, why wasn’t the surrounding area zoned commercial or mixed-use instead of residential? (Hmm. Why not put some gasoline stations around the park? That way errant bullets will fly into gas pumps instead of people and the family dog. More collateral damage for your buck, public officials!) Of course, the answer was obvious: back in the bubble, local officials were happy to kowtow to developers and carpet bomb the valley with housing developments.
Citizens of Nor’Town won’t be able to tell the difference between shots fired at the park and shots fired during a holdup, or the weekend disagreement at the local watering hole. Now, that’s a very important Nor’Townie survival skill they’re messing with there.
And apparently the park won’t be solving one of the problems officials – like state Senator John Lee – promised it would. The park was supposed to reduce and possibly eliminate the practice of folks heading out into the North Valley Wash and setting up illegal practice targets for their gun play. There have been reports, however, that such “rogue” target practice continues just south of the park.
Yeah, about where the proposed national monument will be. I guess mammoth bones make pretty nice targets.
So, what happens when the BLM trots out to do environmental impact studies for the national monument and finds all the traffic, noise, dust, litter, corpses, and leaching lead incompatible with a national monument? Crank up the shooting park fees to pay for the clean-up?
Forget “the community of choice.” Nor’Town is officially “the community of cognitive dissonance.”
In the January 20th meeting of city council, old Phil “Downer” Stoeckinger, the director of finance of the city and lately the most depressing person in Nor’Town, outlined how throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the city’s budget gap just won’t fill it up. (RJ,VN)
Lynnette Curtis had some fun with the cognitive dissonance between the Council Meeting and the SOTC:
[Buck] spoke about the $132 million City Hall complex under construction on Las Vegas Boulevard North near Civic Center Drive and the new $9.4 million fire station planned for a portion of City View Park, on Cheyenne Avenue at North Fifth Street.
Buck didn’t mention that the City Council on Wednesday voted to delay the opening of the fire station and use furniture and equipment it already owns to outfit the new City Hall to save money. The city still has an additional $33.4 million to trim to make it through fiscal year 2011. Layoffs are likely. (RJ)
To add even further to the fun, the state’s Economic Forum held meetings on the very next day wherein one economist after another told us we’re doomed. (Sun)
Sigh, who are ya gonna believe?
Among the mayor’s proposals for saving Nor’Town in these times of darkness is an old-timey appeal to “buy local”, which should give one pause. Does visiting the local Wal-Mart count as “buying local” since the corporate headquarters is in Arkansas? What about a booze-filled evening feeding the gambling addiction at Aliante Station? Doesn’t that simply flow into the pockets of Greenspun enterprises and the Fertitta bros down in Sou’Town and Clark County?
By the way, a few things happened at that dark City Council meeting which, as far as I know, didn’t make the papes:
Council voted to settle the Lamar Kiles’ lawsuit unanimously and without a peep. The city lawyer seemed to be keeping a sharp eye on council members, too, perhaps because a no belly-aching rule may have been part of the settlement. Nor’Townies will enjoy a similar settlement on Weds. Feb. 3rd, when council will probably vote for another settlement of a civil rights suit against the detention center and its medical facility.
Even as the council meeting fell into darkness, council members voted in favor of an agreement with the firefighters’ union to allow one less firefighter to sit on the truck during calls. It will presumably allow for a reduction in overtime pay while maintaining “operational readiness.” Extra large people may find themselves left behind in a fire or two, too, but given how we’re all on starvation diets now anyway, perhaps that won’t matter too much.
Also in the dark the city passed a resolution allowing them to float a $145 million dollar bond to pay for water connections and the waste water facilities. I wonder how that’ll affect our new AA- rating?
And one final question: do meetings in the dark really count as “open meetings” under state law?
Well, the baby has arrived!!! Baby being the BLM supplemental environmental impact study DRAFT!
The actual document is 2″ thick and having just received the hard copy this AM, I have not read every word.
However, the preferred alternative is 11,007 acres! Three years ago, when Protectors of Tule Springs was formed and began to get involved in this process, I was actually told by an unnamed person that we might as well not bother….that only 2900 acres would be saved or maybe 5500 acres if we worked real hard. Well, out of 12,900 acres studied, even the BLM is recommending protecting 11,007!
Now, we have 60 days to comment before the BLM publishes their FINAL decision. We will be turning in the 10,000 signatures collected over a year ago at the upcoming public meetings.
Of course, we are still pushing for another 10-14,000 acres of fossil bearing acres to be protected north of this studied area. This would give 20-27,000 acres of land protected as a National Monument. This will need to be legislation that our Congressional delegation submits to Congress! But, what an incredible benefit to the Las Vegas Valley for tourism and open space for our families!
The Protectors of Tule Springs will be having a meeting on Wednesday night, February 17th from 6-8pm. Location to be announced but we are trying to get the Sun City Aliante Clubhouse. Agenda as follows:
We will discuss the public meetings scheduled for February 22, 23, and 24th. (locations and time to be determined)
Gayle Marrs-Smith of the BLM will give us a presentation of the preferred alternative and the process from here on. She will also tell you how to comment, and even have forms with her for comment.
Kathleen Springer of the San Bernardino County Museum will be coming to take a vote on when the site steward/paleontological classes will start as we learn to help the paleontologists in the field and help protect the fossil sites.
An exciting and IMPORTANT guest, to be announced if schedules work out!
So, I have CD’s of the DRAFT to check out if you want one….. or please go to:
http://www.blm.gov/nv/st/en/fo/lvfo.html Click on link on right that says EIS draft. The document is divided into chapters. The executive summary is vital along with chapter 2, alternatives A&B
Just a few notes on what happened at the Special City Council Meeting Wednesday about various park issues:
Park naming: the main proposal was to limit the naming of parks to people dead for at least two years. The idea was to avoid problems like that associated with Floyd Lamb park, which is named after a Senator who got caught taking money in a FBI sting. (RJ) Councilguy Robert Eliason felt that living people should be able to enjoy the honor of having bits of city property named after them. Council decided to review Clark County School criteria for naming stuff after people since they have protocols for pandering to local celebrities before they croak.
Donations: Staff fussed over guidelines for donations to parks. Mainly the concern was to avoid filling parks with large numbers of naked sculptures with Mike Montandon’s name on them, which amounts to a form of sign pollution. Okay, okay. None of that was a direct quote from anyone. There was a concern, however, about rich donors stuffing the parks with statuary dedicated to rich, dead relatives, all adorned with signs saying how wonderful the donors are for putting up the monstrosity. Staff proposed memorial groves at places like Kiel Ranch to ease such hankerings to do something for the dead they’d never do for ‘em alive. Staff was sent back to work on the definitions section of the proposal, so folks could figure out what they were talking about.
Cell phone poles: Staff were indeed concerned about filling up parks with lovely fake trees with antennae on them as I suggested in an earlier post. The basic idea is to use existing structures like light poles for the antennae, cuz the poles bring in substantial money to the city. Therein was the rub: one main question was whether the money should go into the general fund or to Parks and Rec. For the present consensus seemed to be to send it to the ailing general fund which is more and more resembling a black hole. Some flag poles have been built to disguise cell phone antennae, councilgal Anita Wood noted, that don’t ever seem to have a flag attached. Flags turn out to be a pain because either someone has to take them down every night and put ‘em back up every day, or a light needs to be shined on a flag that stays up all night. The obvious solution, it seems to me, is to not put the Stars and Stripes or even the State Flag up them things. The city should simply put up a flag with a naked picture of Mike Montandon on it. That will ease the urge anyone might have to put naked statues of him in the parks, and we will finally find out exactly what people will salute if you run it up a flagpole.
That was the message North Las Vegas Firefighters and Police brought to council chambers Wednesday night. That is, we’ll be murdered in our beds if council decides to cut personnel from those departments. (
The Las Vegas Sun apparently found a staffer still on the payroll to pen a piece about the BLM’s generally favorable position on the proposed Upper Las Vegas Wash national monument. (
Lot’s o’meetings coming up this week at City Council.
The 
Yet, just a day later, at the state of the city address, the mayor all but sang that tune “
From Jill DeStefano for 
Just a few notes on what happened at the Special City Council Meeting Wednesday about various park issues:
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