Street name changed to honor Delaney

Monday, April 12, 2004 | 9:26 a.m.

The Paradise Town Advisory Board was against it, Clark County staff opposed it and if longtime Las Vegas Sun entertainment columnist Joe Delaney were alive, he too would have objected.

But last Thursday the Clark County Planning Commission, by a 6-0 vote, changed the name of a portion of Dorothy Avenue on the western side of Maryland Parkway just north of Tropicana Avenue to Joe Delaney Lane.

If a protest is not filed by Thursday, the decision will stand as final and the one-block cul-de-sac in the shadow of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where Delaney was a longtime professor at the hotel school, will be renamed.

Should a protest be filed, the matter would go to the Clark County Commission for a vote.

"Joe told me two years ago that he was flattered that I wanted to get a street named for him, but he told me it had to be done posthumously," said J. Michael Schaefer, a longtime friend who in 1996 successfully petitioned that Mel Street be changed to Debbie Reynolds Drive near Desert Inn and Paradise roads.

"Joe was a humble man, but he deserved the honor as an entertainment writer who knew every star in town, as a humanitarian who raised millions of dollars for charity and as a professor in UNLV's hotel school for a quarter of a century. It was just the right thing to do to rename a street near UNLV for Joe."

Delaney died Aug. 7, 2002, at age 80.

But getting a street name changed to honor anyone is not easy. Schaefer ran into a roadblock late last month when he took his proposal before the Paradise Town Advisory Board.

There it was soundly defeated over concerns the Clark County Fire Department would be confused during an emergency situation if Dorothy abruptly ended and Joe Delaney began. Schaefer appealed to the planning commission.

County staff, in a memo to the Planning Commission, argued that the street name change request "does not conform to and is not consistent with the policies and practices of the Las Vegas Valley Street Naming and Address Assignment Policy."

Staff said, by law, if a street "changes its alignment at an intersection by no more than 150 feet, it shall take on the name of the original alignment to provide traffic and addressing continuity."

But Schaefer argued that there would be no confusion for anyone because the east side of Dorothy is misaligned by more than 80 feet from the west side and that the west side of the street has never even had a sign posted telling the fire department or anyone it was Dorothy Avenue.

Then there were the 129 residents of Dorothy Avenue, which was established in the 1960s -- named, as the legend goes, after a daughter of the developer. Schaefer told the commission none of those residents will be affected because they live on the east side of the street, which will remain Dorothy Avenue.

Schaefer said there are only two buildings on the west side of the street that empties into a parking lot, and they are unaffected because they have Maryland Parkway addresses.

Schaefer, who paid $300 to petition the name change, says he will have to pay another $300 to have an official county street sign erected on the corner of the newly named street, which he says he plans to do.