Showing heart on Valentine’s Day

Monday, Feb. 8, 1999 | 10:44 a.m.

Here's a wedding gift from Clark County taxpayers to couples who come to Las Vegas this Valentine's Day weekend to get married.

County Clerk Shirley Parraguirre is planning to spend about $1 more of taxpayer money per couple in hopes of cutting by one-half the five-hour-plus wait some people have endured to get hitched on Cupid's holiday.

In return for spending about $3,000 more to open additional clerk windows and use more county staff to go through the long lines and help people fill out the applications, Parraguirre hopes to earn a lot of good will and boost the local economy a hundredfold.

"Las Vegas gets a lot of international attention on Valentine's Day, and this will give us an opportunity to show we provide good customer service," she said. "At the same time, we will help alleviate the long lines so that people can spend their time and money doing other things."

A record 3,099 marriage licenses were issued over a three-day period last year over the Valentine's Day weekend, said Cheryl Vernon, supervisor of the Clark County Marriage License Bureau.

This year, she said, the bureau is projecting 3,169 licenses at $35 a pop will be issued from Friday through Valentine's Day on Sunday. And neither of those figures includes the following Monday, which was the Presidents Day holiday both this year and last year.

"Compared to how this will help the local economy," Parraguirre said, "the money we are spending is a drop in the bucket. If I could, I'd offer the people standing in line free coffee and doughnuts. But I'm not going to ask the county to pay for that."

Parraguirre figures it's a good investment based on Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority figures that estimate visitors on average spend $11 per person per hour on non-gambling activities during their stay in Las Vegas.

So if her office can save couples 2 1/2 hours -- time lost in past years standing in line -- they can spend at least $55 more each.

The cost to taxpayers: 50 cents more per lovebird to pay overtime to county workers.

"No question the wedding industry is big in Southern Nevada," Vernon said. "Anything we can do to help that industry helps Las Vegas."

In the past, six Marriage License Bureau stations have doled out the Valentine's Day licenses during peak hours. This year, under Parraguirre's plan, three more will be added.

Another three or four employees will walk through the lines and help people answer questions on the application form: Name? Residence? Birth date? Number of past marriages? How they ended? Father's name? Mother's maiden name? (That question stumps a lot of people, Vernon said.) Where dad was born? Where mom was born?

And to cope with the language barrier that always arises, marriage license workers will have special translator forms in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese and four other languages, including Russian, which recently was added.

To further speed things up, county workers assigned to walk through the lines will take the payments and make change -- a task that had further slowed window clerks in the past.

In past years, Vernon said, some couples missed appointments to get married at local chapels, because they were stuck in lines that stretched around the block at the Clark County Courthouse, 200 S. 3rd St.

Now area chapel operators routinely tell couples when they make Valentine's weekend wedding reservations to get the license well in advance.

The Marriage License Bureau on New Year's Eve, another big wedding holiday, implemented its overtime plan on a smaller scale and was able to issue about 900 licenses efficiently.

"The line never went out of the building," Vernon said. "That's how we gauged that it worked well."

However, with more than three times that workload expected on the Valentine's Day weekend, the 19 marriage license workers and eight additional staffers will face a much stiffer challenge during round-the-clock holiday shifts.

"In the past, we have not been intimidated by the long lines, but over the years we have done what we could to reduce them," Vernon said. "Amazingly people waiting in those lines have not gotten irate at us."