Moving heaven and Earth for the Las Vegas Centennial

Tuesday, March 15, 2005 | 8:38 a.m.

The Las Vegas Centennial Committee has reached to the stars for an asteroid named in the city's honor and is reaching a little deeper into its pockets to pay for its 100th birthday party.

The committee on Monday accepted a report that the International Astronomical Union has named an asteroid located about 149 million miles from Earth after Las Vegas in honor of the city's centennial.

Closer to home, the committee voted unanimously to augment its budget by about $289,000 -- but not at the expense of taxpayers -- to pay for the May 12-15 celebration in downtown Las Vegas.

Centennial Director Stacy Allsbrook told the committee at its monthly meeting at Cashman Field that the money is on hand in its reserve funds. She said the augmentation would reduce cash reserves from 20 percent to 8 percent.

Allsbrook said initial estimates were that the four-day festival would cost $510,000. However, the projected price tag has grown to $895,204, a difference of $349,204.

She said her office received $35,000 from the Fremont Street Experience and $25,000 from Las Vegas Events to reduce the shortfall to $289,204.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, chairman of the committee, said before recommending approval of the budget augmentation that other cities and states have had to "spend millions of dollars in taxpayer money" to fund 100 birthday celebrations, but that is not the case in Las Vegas.

Centennial funds have been raised from the sale of Centennial license plates and the sale of 400 centennial-related souvenir items.

The augmentation was needed to pay for costs related to the May 14 Helldorado parade, the world's largest birthday cake to be constructed at Cashman Field, to bring Daniel Markoff's vintage steam locomotive train to Fremont Street and to pay for big-name entertainers who will perform three nights, Allsbrook said.

The headline entertainers scheduled to appear at the Fremont Street Experience will be 1960s rock band Paul Revere and the Raiders on May 13; twist king Chubby Checker and country star Pam Tillis on May 14; and 1970s rhythm and blues band Kool and the Gang on May 15.

May 15 is recognized as the city's birthday because on that date in 1905 the railroad auctioned off parcels of what would become downtown Las Vegas. A recreation of the auction is scheduled for May 15.

As for the naming of the asteroid after the city, David Batchelor, astronomy professor at Community College of Southern Nevada, told the committee that because the international agency named the celestial body the asteroid will still be called Las Vegas "hundreds of years from now."

Discovered in June 2001 by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., asteroid Las Vegas orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter. It cannot be seen with the naked eye.

Asteroid Las Vegas is one of about 12,000 asteroids that have been named by the International Astronomical Union, which named another asteroid after Las Vegas mainstay Elvis Presley.