Editorial: Goodman’s plan a farce

Tuesday, June 27, 2006 | 8:35 a.m.

One of the major problems in Las Vegas is the dearth of overnight shelters, day service centers and long-term housing opportunities for homeless men, women and children. Naturally, with their options so limited, and with their numbers swelling in proportion to the city's growth, homeless people are becoming more visible in all public areas.

If Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman had devoted more of his time over the six years he's been in office to serious contemplation of this issue, he would not now have to be sputtering impromptu nonsense whenever he's asked for some leadership in this area of city governance.

At the Las Vegas City Council meeting last week, Goodman's years of simply badgering and criticizing the homeless - while offering no lasting solutions - came back to haunt him when he was confronted with citizens' complaints about public parks that have turned into refuges for people who have no other place to go.

He had no answer, except to talk about having city marshals take some homeless person to a mental health treatment center against his will, apparently in hopes that a legal decision will arise from the action that would allow him to use the tactic against thousands of other homeless people.

The chances of such a legal decision are nil. Even if such a decision were made, owing to Goodman's lack of leadership there are nowhere near enough publicly supported treatment centers or beds to take in or contain those he would round up.

Goodman should all along have been focusing on a real solution, perhaps patterned after the one his hometown city of Philadelphia adopted in the late 1990s. There, the city found the money to establish a homeless hotline , build numerous and integrated apartments for the homeless, expand the shelter system, hire advocates to ask homeless people to come in off the street and develop coordinated counseling and treatment programs. The initiative is serving both the homeless population and the city's redevelopment goals.

Earlier this month Las Vegas hosted the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Goodman managed to put together a $1.8 million budget just for the mayors' entertainment, with corporate donors forking over $1.3 million and city taxpayers picking up the remaining $500,000.

Something is wrong when a mayors' conference gets that kind of money just for shows, golf, poker lessons, gourmet meals and bar tabs, while people desperately in need of city help go wanting.