Stuff to do in Ward Two

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This Friday evening, check out the classic car show and concert at Tivoli.
On Saturday, I cannot more highly recommend interested citizens stop by the Sahara West Library on Saturday, May 19, 2012, between 3 and 5 in the afternoon. There, you’ll find former Clark County Manager and UNLV Public Administration professor Thom Reilly (more recently, he’s been hired away by UCSD and commutes enough to still call Nevada home). For $30 or so, he’ll sell you a signed copy of his book, “Rethinking Public Sector Compensation: What Ever Happened to the Public Interest?”
Professor Reilly’s short but powerful textbook will be particularly interesting for people convinced that Southern Nevada’s system of compensating our public servants is deficient in transparency and equity.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
3:00 – 5:00pm
book signing
Sahara West Library
9600 West Sahara Ave, Las Vegas NV 89117
(702) 507-3630

Traffic Mess This Weekend

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Beginning Friday, May 18, the Nevada Department of Transportation will close a portion of Rainbow Boulevard and detour U.S. 95 southbound traffic in order to safely perform a concrete pour on the bridge decks for the Summerlin high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) flyover bridge that currently is under construction. Traffic will be rerouted beginning at 9 p.m. Friday. The roadways will be open to traffic again by 5 a.m. Sunday, May 20.
Drivers heading south on U.S. 95 will be detoured through Rainbow Boulevard. Motorists driving east on Summerlin Parkway will be diverted through Buffalo Avenue to connect to U.S. 95 northbound. Access to connect from U.S. 95 northbound to Summerlin Parkway westbound will be maintained. Drivers that need to get across Rainbow Boulevard will be diverted through surface streets and marked detours. Northbound U.S. 95 will be restricted to one lane near the construction area. Silverstream Avenue also will be closed at Rainbow Boulevard.

Detours and delay times will be provided using dynamic message signs, construction signs and overhead signals. Pedestrians will be escorted at the Rainbow Boulevard bridge and directed when to cross. Nevada Highway Patrol will patrol the area to ensure drivers use caution near the construction zone.

The Summerlin HOV connector is a federally funded project designed to create an overpass for drivers using the U.S. 95 HOV lanes to safely exit onto Summerlin Parkway. The $26 million project is expected to be completed by the end of July 2012.

Good morning, Women’s Health Week!

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This is National Women’s Health Week.

One of my ODAS (Other Duties As Assigned) is sitting on the board of the Southern Nevada Health District. They’re running a quick clinic over at Valley Hospital today from 9AM till 1PM. Here’s a map to Valley.

The health district will provide family planning services at the health fair, and you can make appointments for low cost mammograms, pelvic exams, and primary care services, and explore welfare if you need it. Additional services will include free blood pressure screenings, fasting glucose tests (eight-hour fasting required for an accurate reading), risk assessments for breast cancer/heart disease/diabetes/strokes/mental illness, and information about access to affordable health care coverage.

The Old Spanish Trail

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At what we know today as the Springs Preserve, water used to naturally jet up with enough force to easily keep someone who did not know how to swim afloat. Its runoff, filling a channel five feet wide and two feet deep, ran off toward today’s Cashman Field, then down the hill into a wash that eventually led to the Colorado River.

In 1829, traveling from the Muddy River, about the same year Charles Darwin boarded the HMS Beagle on his five year tour of isolated ocean islands that led him to conceive his theory of evolution, the first recorded visitors found us at the end of the longest waterless stretch on the trail to the ocean. So we became a place of legend.

http://www.nevada-landmarks.com/mias/shl32.htm

WSJ: California Town Weighs Bankruptcy Protection

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Amongst local governments, North Las Vegas is closer to the precarious position of the City of Stockton, described in today’s Wall Street Journal (reproduced below) but many of the underlying symptoms plaguing Stockton are true for us, in varying degrees:

  • few new businesses or jobs
  • high and stagnant unemployment
  • falling property values
  • extreme foreclosure rates
  • falling tax revenue despite more taxes and higher rates

The City of Las Vegas now has to fit escalating mortgage payments, capped at $13-million per year, for its new City Hall into the budget starting this coming July 1. And it’s future finances are built on receiving back $6-million in cash from the Mob Museum, not a certain proposition. Meanwhile, the City is choosing to short-staff a new fire station a quarter-mile north of the Ward 2 boundary.

Bob Beers is the only candidate for Las Vegas City Council who has experience understanding how government finance works. He’s a Certified Public Accountant and Certified Fraud Examiner. He spent ten years representing Las Vegans in the state legislature, and was always assigned to the finance committees.

Other candidates for City Council have experience making zoning decisions (one was even a real estate developer while simultaneously “serving” on the Planning Commission, believe it or not!). Well, we won’t be needing to do any zoning decisions if we don’t get the City’s financial house in order.

Wall Street Journal

February 25, 2012
By MIKE CHERNEY And KELLY NOLAN

Stockton, Calif., one of the hardest-hit cities in the country in terms of real-estate foreclosures, is weighing whether to seek Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection from its creditors.

“The city is in an immediate and severe fiscal crisis and it is or likely will become unable to meet its financial obligations,” City Manager Bob Deis wrote in a memo to council members. “Absent some negotiated adjustments to the city’s financial obligations, the city will be insolvent and will have no alternative than to seek bankruptcy protection.”

The City Council will meet Tuesday to consider a resolution that will authorize the city to enter a “neutral evaluation process” with creditors, which is the first step under state law for a municipality considering bankruptcy. The resolution would also allow the city manager to suspend certain bond payments for the rest of the fiscal year…

For the fiscal year that began July 1, 2011, the budget deficit was $37 million, about one-fifth of the city’s general fund revenue.

According to data from RealtyTrac, Stockton has ranked in the top 10 metro foreclosure rates every year since 2007, when it was No. 1. Meanwhile, the city’s unemployment level has nearly doubled since 2006, hovering around 16% in December 2011, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Stockton, a city of about 290,000, is about 80 miles from San Francisco and 45 miles from the state capital, Sacramento.

Last year, Stockton again declared a state of fiscal emergency, allowing it to make steep spending cuts as it tried to rebuild its finances. In a budget message last June, Mr. Deis said Stockton was nearing “insolvency.”