They should rename the town Dr. Jeckyll, Mr. Nor’Town, it has so many faces.
The opening of Aliante Station presented the town’s face that the Mayor and City Council prefer to have in the public eye. And they had much help from the local newspapers telling us over and over just how nifty the first Casino Alley casino is. You’d expect it from the Sun which is owned by a co-owner of the casino, but they were buying so much ad-space in the Review Journal it was hard to find a bit of news in the local fish-wrapper of record. Except for a piece or two saying how nifty the opening night was. (RJ,RJ)
Despite having to lay off a few workers. (RJ)
And isn’t it soothing for the Sun to assure us that the traffic tie-ups on the Woodbury beltway and parking lot will go away, maybe in January. Maybe. (Sun)
Just wait until there are five or six Casinos along there.
Indeed, you can find the Mayor if you want a comment on Aliante Station. It’s a little harder to reach him on the unfolding story of the wretched Casa Rosa apartments, a nasty tenement apparently ignored for years by the North Las Vegas Housing Authority. We learn:
- After reports of bugs, sewage, mold and other nastiness, the Board called for an emergency relocation of tenants. The use of the word “Emergency,” however, should not be considered to entail swiftness as the tenants are still in their hovels and will probably remain there for another week. (RJ)
- You do not want to piss off Carl Rowe, grand poobah of the Las Vegas Housing Authority. After concluding he’d been snookered by Nor’Town’s housing authority into taking on a hopeless, wrecked tenement, he explained his dismay to his counterpart in Nor’Town, Don England:
the City of North Las Vegas staff knows, my staff knows, and, most of
all, you know, you have issued no request for our services beyond our
existing agreement. At best, this looks like a disingenuous attempt to
transfer responsibility that is and has been yours, alone, to someone
else.”
“I am absolutely loath to deal with someone who is as blatantly
interested in ducking responsibility as you are. If it weren’t for the
residents that need some relief from your failed stewardship,” Rowe
continued, “it would not bother me at all to leave you ‘high and dry’
to take care of this fiasco yourself.” (Sun)
But wait, there’s more to the seamy side of Nor’Town. During the city council meeting on November 5th, council members tussled over how to use their share of federal funds aimed at alleviating the foreclosure mess. One plan, backed by Mayor Mike Montandon, Shari Buck, and William Robinson, would take the money and use it to tear down yet another set of crummy Nor’Town apartments called Buena Vista Springs.
Those stinkholes sure have nice names, don’t they?
Stephanie Smith and Robert Eliason were opposed mainly because the money was meant to buy up recently foreclosed homes and “rehabilitate” them so that surrounding neighborhoods wouldn’t also go down the toilet. Smith and Eliason seemed a little dubious that tearing down an apartment complex and using the money for other bits of blight that have graced the city for years would do that. (Sun)
Be sure to look at the comments to that Sun story. You’ll especially enjoy the story of the new teacher who wanted to live close to her new school which was near the Buena Vista Apartments, then known as the Carey Arms. She found the NLV police investigating a crime at the place, and they advised her to run away and never look back.
You know, maybe the city should offer all it’s tenement dwellers a discount coupon to the Aliante Station or something. Oh, wait. We wouldn’t want to bankrupt the place so soon, would we?
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