That was the message North Las Vegas Firefighters and Police brought to council chambers Wednesday night. That is, we’ll be murdered in our beds if council decides to cut personnel from those departments. (KTNV,LVNow,Sun,RJ) Council members seemed surprised by the uprising. The mayor pro temp William Robinson insisted that no one was talking about cuts to the police department.
At least not yet. The city has $33 million budget gap that needs to be filled and the money will have to come from somewhere. Indeed, while discussing capital improvement projects whose funding is mostly covered by external entities such as the Bureau of Land Management, mayor Buck requested that police abandon improvements to their shooting range during the budget crunch.
Say, who do you call if a protest by the police gets out of hand?
Council also passed the ordinance regulating the sale of animals outdoors. It allows vendors to sell animals only within certain temperature ranges and when posting signs about Nor’Town’s spay and neuter laws. (RJ,KTNV) Animal activists favored a complete ban, but supported the ordinance as the best they’ll be able to do at the time. Councilman Richard Cherchio said that part of the problem of mistreated animals at open air markets is the import of animals from out of state and suggested that the state take up the issue. Councilwoman Anita Wood claimed that when Broadacres Swap Meet voluntarily adopted the standards recently that the number of animal vendors decreased from over 90 to just 5.
Council also unanimously supported paying a settlement of $300,000 to Jeffrey Smith, who filed a civil rights suit against the city. The city’s lawyer said he privately explained to each councilperson why the city had to pay up. It’d be nice if somebody would explain to us’n folks who actually pay for it, though. Just to make it look a little more like a representative democracy around here.
Council also approved the STARS Safety Town. It will be the second such entity in the U.S. and will be modeled on a Safety Town in Frisco, Texas. It will contain scaled models of buildings from Nor’Town, and its purpose is to teach safe habits to kids. Part of the cost will be borne by business sponsorship, although the mayor expressed the hope that businesses such as the Palomino Strip Club be excluded therefrom. I’m sure I speak from everyone when I say that we’ll all be disappointed if there isn’t a scale model of that venerable institution at the site.
Apparently the Frisco Safety Town allows kids to drive miniature cars around. That would seem to be a good idea for the Nor’Town town, especially if it teaches the kids how to scatter during a drive-by shooting. That would dove-tail nicely with all the skills they’ll be picking up in and around the Shooting Park–and at school.
And I have a perfect name for the place. You guessed it: HunterLand! Why not have the kids learn some American Lit. at the same time? Surely there will be a replica of that North Las Vegas literary mecca, too: The North Star cafe!
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