Playing with the Parks

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.