‘Mayor for Day’ too young for city business

Tuesday, July 28, 1998 | 10:41 a.m.

If Monday's Las Vegas City Council meeting were a movie, it might have received an NC-17 rating and 6-year-old Talyn Fiore would not have been able to star in it.

However, thanks to the quick thinking of city officials, the diminutive "Mayor for a Day" was sent out of the City Hall council chambers just seconds before the council heard testimony accusing an applicant for a massage-therapist license of performing a sex act on an undercover cop.

"Usually these applicants don't show up for the appeal, but when we saw that this one did, we had to act pretty quickly because we had read the backup material and knew what was coming," City Councilman Arnie Adamsen said after the meeting.

"Being so young, she might not have understood it, but we didn't want to take that chance."

As Metro Police and the applicant for the massage license approached the dais, Mayor Jan Laverty Jones and Adamsen got city aides to escort the child from her seat between Jones and Adamsen to Jones' office. There, the child's photo was taken as she sat in the mayor's chair.

While Fiore did not hear the massage-license testimony, a group of about a dozen other children wearing purple YMCA shirts and sitting in the audience did. Moments later, they were marched out of the council chambers by adult supervisors.

A short time later, Fiore returned to her seat on the council.

"We often have groups of children who are brought in to observe City Council," Adamsen said. "Two weeks ago, we had a civics class here when we voted against a woman with a drug conviction who was appealing the denial of a sheriff's card so that she could work in child care.

"I took the opportunity after that vote to tell those teenagers in the audience that they should take note that a felony drug conviction follows you for the rest of your life."

Still, Adamsen and Jones felt that the discussion Monday, though educational, would be a little too frank for Fiore, whose father was sitting in the audience.

He had won an auction in a "Mayor for a Day" contest sponsored by the Muscular Dystrophy Association and had given the honor to his little girl. Ironically, the second-highest bidder in that contest was Adamsen.

"I just thought it would have been interesting to be honorary mayor for a day," Adamsen, a former mayor pro tem, said.