LOOKING IN ON: TOURISM

Monday, July 3, 2006 | 7:32 a.m.

In the Alice-in-Taxiland world of the Clark County cab business, prospective cab companies must clear a number of hurdles before their cars can hit the streets.

One example of the curiouser-and-curiouser process confronted City Cab, which in February applied to the Nevada Taxicab Authority for certification.

The Taxicab Authority, the five-member state board that oversees the 16 cab companies operating in the county, scheduled a prehearing conference to schedule testimony on the proposed new company.

Under the authority's rules, interested parties are invited to intervene. Interveners - usually taxi companies and drivers - often try to convince the board why a new competitor should not be permitted.

Rival companies try to prove that a new company would poach their business while unions representing drivers plead that the new vehicles will cut cabbies' take-home pay.

On the day of the prehearing , a lawyer representing Whittlesea Transportation, the second-largest cab operator in the county, filed a motion to dismiss the City Cab application, saying it did not state why City Cab should be allowed to do business.

With just that little wrench, and given the authority's schedule, City Cab's bid has been delayed by at least two months.

That's life in Taxiland.

In a bid to make the Las Vegas Convention Center even more attractive to meeting planners , representatives of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority may offer free wireless service at the massive exhibit hall.

In a recent crystal-ball session on the future of the convention industry at UNLV, Mark Haley of the LVCVA said free wireless service may be in his center's future as meeting planners look for more reasons to book a convention center over another.

Las Vegas-based Smart City is the wireless network provider at the Convention Center. The company recently made itself more attractive to consumers by cutting rates at the center almost in half, from $25 to $13 a day.

Wynn Macau hasn't even opened its doors, and it has already been called "a lifesaver" by a local tourism industry executive.

Terry Jicinsky, senior vice president of marketing for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, took a side trip to Macau during a recent trade mission to Asia and tells of how he got turned around while walking on some of the less-traveled maze of streets in old Macau.

"I found a little clearing and looked out on the horizon, and there it was," Jicinsky said. "It looks just like the one in Las Vegas, nothing like the Asian architecture around it, and I got my bearings."

Wynn Las Vegas' Asian cousin bears the same shape and color of the local property, but it's considerably smaller with 600 rooms, compared with nearly 3,000 in Las Vegas.

But big enough to be Jicinsky's lifesaver.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., has ducked out of the fight to repeal the Wright Amendment, a federal law that prevents airlines from flying nonstop to and from Dallas' Love Field from outside of nine states.

Ensign had earlier introduced a bill repealing Wright, which he considers anti-free market.

But in a "Dear Colleague" letter, Ensign encouraged co-sponsors of his bill to support compromise legislation hammered out by the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth and backed by executives from Southwest and American airlines, two companies most dramatically affected by the Wright Amendment.

He also writes a tourism column for In Business Las Vegas.