Thursday, March 13, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Quick and Dirty: A notebook of news and politics

The spoils of gaming

Times are tough in the gaming industry. A Nevada Resort Association-sponsored report out this week describes the industry's financial performance in recent years as grim, and it isn't optimistic about the future either. The report was commissioned to bolster the industry's case that Nevada's tax base should be broadened--and, naturally, that gaming taxes shouldn't be raised.

Interesting, though, to note another report that came out this week: Harrah's Entertainment President and CEO Gary Loveman received $9.49 million in salary, bonus and stock in 2002. Harrah's Chairman Phil Satre was paid $5.9 million in salary and bonus and exercised stock options for a gain of $9.9 million. Yeah, times are tough all over.--GS

Lost in the shuffle

The Destroy Nevada faction seems to have the upper hand in Carson City right now. Business lobbyists are working overtime to kill a key piece of Gov. Kenny Guinn's tax plan: the gross receipts tax.

What's particularly troubling about the anti-tax crowd is it offers no alternatives. It seems fully resigned to the fact that Nevada's educational system and other vital services will be sacrificed to preserve a healthy bottom line for the state's large businesses. Hey, who needs elementary school art programs and middle school music instruction anyway? If we set free a few thousand prison inmates, what's the harm, right?

The prospect of massive state and school budget cuts should have state lawmakers scrambling day and night to come up with solutions. If they don't like Guinn's plan, they should propose something else. Sadly, though, the Legislature collectively appears uninterested, preferring to debate any other issue before touching taxes. Carson City has a way of warping lawmakers' sense of reality--for one thing, the big-name lobbyists are like celebrities up there, attracting an undue amount of attention. For another, it's easy to get lost in the halls of the Legislature and not realize what's happening elsewhere in the state.

Destroy Nevada is on the rise. Who will knock it down?--GS

Jettisoned by jets

Apparently the prospect of "thousands of F-16s" zipping from Hill Air Force Base in Utah over a proposed high-level nuclear waste dump on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation, and possibly crashing into it, has given a Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing board a case of the jitters.

On Monday, the NRC's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board denied a license request by Private Fuel Storage, a private industry coalition, to build the temporary storage site for 40,000 tons of waste. The state of Utah, opposed to the project, had brought up the issue of the jets, and the NRC board agreed. It has told PFS that it can come back later, once it's either found a way to reroute the jets, or has demonstrated that the facility and casks "are robust enough to withstand an aircraft crash."

Huh. Sound familiar? Kalynda Tilges, executive director of the anti-nuclear Shundahai Network, says this "historic" decision just proves that "full-scale testing of transportation casks is critical, and that terrorist concerns must be addressed." And that goes not just for PFS's project, but for the Department of Energy's Yucca Mountain project in Nevada.

But Tilges adds that the decision might not mean squat, given that the NRC is known for overriding its licensing board's concerns.--HW

Latin nightclub shut down

Shopkeepers and property owners in Commercial Center will rejoice that their historic mall just got a little safer--and not because the sidewalks and asphalt are slated to get patched up. Rather, Metro Police shut down El Sinaloense restaurant and nightclub Saturday morning for a host of no-nos, after years of complaints that the place was the site of shootings, stabbings, underage drinking and trash.

With the county looking to refurbish the parking lot and sidewalks--on the property owners' dime--the news comes as a pleasant surprise to Commercial Center tenants, who say the nightclub was a major headache.

"I never personally had an issue with the nightclub," says Karl Vetter, owner of Kool Kollectibles and the head of a coalition of business owners in the East Sahara Avenue shopping center. "But when I first moved in and went around talking to business owners about what the center is like, 75 percent of the time they said the place was a point of stress and contention." Vetter says trash and fights in the parking lot were the two biggest issues.--AK

The new Metropolis

The Las Vegas Valley is lousy with developers, but few of them have reputations beyond the mountain ranges. That's about to change with the arrival of Houston condo builder Randall Davis. Davis is known for his preservation work in downtown Houston. He restored the historic Rice Hotel--where President Kennedy spent his last night before being killed--and converted it to condos. He's also developed several other condo projects in Houston.

Davis' first venture in Las Vegas will be another loft-style condo project, Metropolis, on East Desert Inn Road overlooking the La Reve golf course. (We're assuming it's not named after the former Las Vegas Mercury news section.) A long-closed, rundown, two-story time-share complex will be torn down to make way for the 18-story, 65-unit building. While Davis has maintained a neoclassical architectural style in Houston, the Las Vegas project will reflect a 1920s-era art deco, glass-exterior facade.

Metropolis will compete head-to-head with the existing Turnberry Place and Park Towers condo high-rises along the Strip. The units, 19 of which already have been sold, run from $400,000 to $1.7 million.

On a related front, Mayor Oscar Goodman is attempting to lure another prominent entity with great credentials: the Cleveland Clinic. Goodman traveled to Cleveland last week to entice clinic officials to build an academic medical center in downtown Las Vegas. While Goodman said clinic officials expressed considerable interest in the idea, they may have other problems to deal with first: The New York Times reported this week that the Cleveland Clinic has run into financial problems because of some aggressive stock investing gone bad.--GS

What a dodo

The Center for Biological Diversity says President Bush doesn't give a damn about protecting the nation's species--unless he's forced to by court order.

Desert ecologist Daniel Patterson with the CBD says Bush has listed only 20 species under the Endangered Species Act since he became president. All of these listings were the result of lawsuits, including one in Nevada, a butterfly called the "Carson's wandering skipper." During a similar span, only President Ronald Reagan listed fewer (17), whereas Bill Clinton listed 211 (in his first term in office) and George Bush Sr. listed 80.

The CBD accuses Bush of filing many declining species into a wait-forever crack in the system by declaring them warranting of protection but precluded for now by other species that got in line first. It's a stall tactic, Patterson says. And species could languish, without protection, for years on this "candidate" list.

"The candidate list is viewed by many biologists, including myself, as where politically driven bureaucrats send species to die," Patterson says.

Species in Nevada in this predicament include the relict leopard frog (thought to be extinct until it was recently discovered in six springs in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area), the elongate mud meadows pyrg (a snail found in one spring in Humboldt County) and the Columbia spotted frog. But maybe they were lucky to get any attention at all.

"Nevada's one of the states that's been avoided because of the politics of livestock and mining," Patterson says.--HW

Good as Goldberg

Mercury columnist Tod Goldberg is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the mystery division for his latest novel, Living Dead Girl. The winner will be announced April 26 during the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

Gov't

Valets under siege

The city of Las Vegas is considering limiting to 20 percent the amount of space that can be dedicated to valet parking in permanent parking lots. Such a restriction would, of course, correspond to a reduction in tokes for the guys and gals who can park those Beemers quicker than Oscar Goodman downing a martini.

According to city planning officials, the proposal stems from instances where "a substantial number of required or good parking spaces" had been taken by the valets or at places where there was no other option than valet parking. Two places mentioned were Mountain View Hospital and P.F. Chang's Restaurant on West Charleston Boulevard. Those same officials said other jurisdictions don't have, or use, percentages, "so we just kicked it around and thought one in every five parking spaces was a good place to start."--FC

Spreading the love

The next time Strip casinos cry foul over competition and how it's hurting their bottom line, perhaps they should look at their corporate portfolios and stop shooting themselves in the feet.

Las Vegas loves to boast about its 125,000 hotel rooms, but the five corporations that control more than 46 percent of those rooms also have substantial casino operations outside Nevada.

The MGM Mirage (19,020 rooms) has casinos in Mississippi, Michigan, Atlantic City and Australia. Mandalay Resort Group (15,529 rooms) is in Mississippi and Illinois. Boyd Gaming Corp. (3,834 rooms) has casinos in Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, two in Louisiana and the new Borgata in Atlantic City. Park Place Entertainment (14,670 rooms) has five properties in Mississippi, four in Atlantic City and one each in Indiana and Louisiana. With 28 properties worldwide, it also says on its website that "the company has operations on four continents and in five countries--the U.S., Canada, South Africa, Uruguay and Australia." The kicker is Harrah's Entertainment (5,000+ rooms), which has only two of its 26 casinos in Las Vegas. It has 20 casinos in 12 other states.--FC