Thursday, May 29, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Quick and Dirty: A notebook of news and politics

Eye in the sky

Look up and say cheese, local skateboarders--in coming months, your city skateparks will be outfitted with surveillance cameras. The camera idea comes from the Skatepark Safety Coalition in response to a recent bout of badness at public skateparks, including graffiti, violence and drug use. The coalition initially pitched having full-time monitors at each park, but that proved too costly.

"It would've been financially tough to staff each park," says Joe Wichert, the city's extreme sports coordinator. "This is a way to have them staffed, but not." Wichert adds that the parks are much safer and enjoyable since the Skatepark Safety Coalition formed earlier this year. The cameras--one for each of the 10 parks in the city--will be paid for with money left over from skatepark construction. Do a trick for Big Brother!--AK

Times plugs a book

The New York Times op-ed page had a commentary of considerable local interest on Saturday titled, "Sally Denton's A Utah Massacre and Mormon Memory: What Happened at Mountain Meadows in 1857?" It's based on Denton's new book, American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 11, 1857. Knopf will release it June 17, and a book signing will be coming up in Southern Nevada about a week later. Denton is a native Nevadan raised in Las Vegas and Boulder City. "This, the darkest stain on the history of the religion, is a bitter reality and challenging predicament for a modern Mormon Church struggling to shed its extremist history," writes Denton, who co-authored The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America.

Indeed, it was a great day to read the paper: Paul Krugman, a regular Times columnist, had a column beside it explaining how disastrous our current economic policies are.

Money huggers

The American Evergreen Foundation is trumpeting its move into Southern Nevada. It's a nonprofit group that purports to groom schoolchildren to be good stewards of the Earth. It sponsors Junior Ranger programs, brings conservation programs into the classroom and gets the kiddies out into the woods to help plant trees and clean up trash and do other nice tree-hugging things. The group, started in 1995 in Reno, also produces a conservation-oriented program called "R-Environment"--which can be seen on Clark County Community Channel 4 at 4 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And all this is swell. As AEF Executive Director Richard Van Dyke likes to say, "We're focusing on young people because they represent 25 percent of the population and 100 percent of the future." He also adds, with emphasis, "We're nonpolitical."

Which is where a note of caution should come in: On its website, www.usagreen.org, the AEF announces it is going to be censoring its Q&A Forum from now on because it was getting too political. "We were expecting questions like, 'What's the best time to plant, what can we do to help'..." the AEF writes. Instead, it says, it got oodles of questions revealing "people's disillusion with the agencies that manage our state and federal lands."

"It's sad," writes the AEF, "that there seems to be a widening gap in the job being done and what citizens expect from their governmental agencies." But such angst is not the AEF's problem, and for now on it aims to keep the forum "as positive as we can." (And maybe it doesn't want to piss off its big corporate donors--Home Depot among them.)

And yet, if you check out the current Q&A Forum, you'll find an insidious political message in the AEF's responses to citizens' questions. You'll find that it supports the Bush administration's highly controversial, extremely politically charged plan to log more forests (hey, more lumber for Home Depot!). It also supports privatization of governmental agencies--at least that's what can be gathered from the answer to "Mark," who asked why he has to pay taxes and also a fee to go on public lands. The AEF answered: "Mark, talk on the street and in government circles is that it's time to privatize the many agencies that manage our lands. Studies have shown that taxpayers would save 20-35 percent in tax dollars and would have a much better product if privatized. Remember you have a voice, use it!"

Now, if that ain't playing politics, we don't know what is. And not very green politics, at that.--HW

Ethnic cleansing at Nellis

Some folks had a little fun with that "freedom fries" flap, but the Bush administration's latest maneuvers are tantamount to ethnic cleansing. Last week, the Pentagon withdrew France's long-standing invitation to participate in Red Flag training exercises at Nellis Air Force Base. The gist of the U.S. complaint is that France had ties with the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. But, of course, the United States had thick-as-thieves relations with Hussein for many years before it decided to change course.

Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, told the Washington Post that the Pentagon's vendetta is counterproductive for several reasons: "It's not smart. Military-to-military cooperation was not the problem here and the French Ministry of Defense was not the problem. We need the French Ministry of Defense to help in the stabilization of Iraq. This just smacks of vengeance for pettiness sake."--GS

Birdman of Las Vegas

For Las Vegas Current Planning Supervisor Dave Clapsaddle, 2003 got off to a fowl start. First, it was a zoning request for Liborio Market that turned sour, and then it was a text amendment that temporarily ruffled more feathers.

The Liborio Market wanted to slaughter chickens in a residential neighborhood, and when that sank faster than a giblet in duck soup, Clapsaddle had a finger-lickin' good time wingin' it through a paltry amount of poultry legalese, but eventually came up with a bunch of nuggets, in the form of new language that allows chicken slaughtering in commercial areas under strict conditions.

His flock of fellow workers were so glad he dove right in without abandoning the pecking order that they honored Clapsaddle at Easter time with a gaggle of tiny yellow and pink marshmallow birds and gave him a new nickname--Mr. Peeps.--FC