looking in on: City hall Employees’ personal calls getting pricier

saxo-archive

Monday, Dec. 31, 2007 | midnight

Year's end is accounting time -- time to tally the bills and receipts, make restitution or extend payment plans.

At City Hall a new dawn will break for employees with taxpayer-funded cell phones and personal digital assistants, also known as PDAs, or more commonly BlackBerrys.

By implementing a 150 percent increase in the per-minute cost of personal calls made by city workers, the city stands to reap roughly an additional $13,000 per year.

City workers with cell phones log into accounts that list their phone calls every month, marking their personal calls so the cost can be deducted from future paychecks. Current policy sets employees' reimbursement rate for their personal calls at 6 cents per minute. But after an audit, the city Audit Oversight Committee agreed with recommendations to increase the per-minute cost to 15 cents, a figure more in line with standards across the country.

The number of personal calls by city employees is a small percentage of the total number of minutes logged on their city-provided cell phones. In 2006 city employees logged 2,615,702 minutes. In 2007 that number dipped slightly to 2,561,892 minutes. The total cost to the city for cell phones in 2006 was $458,503. This year it fell to $305,856.

Of those minutes, about 17 percent were logged as personal calls. In 2006 minutes attributed to personal calls totaled 441,921. In 2007 they totaled 424,228. Employees reimbursed the city $26,515.26 in 2006 and $25,453.68 this year.

If the average minutes of personal calls holds steady, employees will reimburse the city roughly $39,000 in 2008.

As of Nov. 1, 686 cell phones and 312 combo cell phone/PDAs were assigned to city employees.

@Dots:• • •

The “Mob Museum” is moving forward with funding to retrofit the downtown building to meet earthquake code requirements.

In mid-December the City Council approved the allocation of $1.7 million to the project from the Las Vegas Centennial Commission. The commission receives money to fund various projects from money the state makes on the sale of centennial license plates.

Total cost for the Mob Museum at 301 Stewart Ave., a block east of City Hall, is estimated at about $48 million, including $39 million for construction rehabilitation and $9 million for exhibits.

As of mid-December roughly $15 million had been raised. Of that, about $6 million has come through a variety of grants, with city funds covering another $8.8 million.

@Dots:• • •

John S. Park is the only city-stamped historic district in Las Vegas.

Many homes in the area, very roughly bordered by Charleston Boulevard on the north, Las Vegas Boulevard on the west, Maryland Parkway on the east and Oakey Avenue on the south, were built in the 1930s -- a rarity in a city that mostly looks like it was built two weeks ago.

After a hard-fought and drawn-out move to get the designation, the neighborhood received it in 2003. It also is on Nevada and U.S. historic registers.

Now the city is moving to collect oral histories from some of the people who lived or worked in the area.

The Voices of the Historic John S. Park Neighborhood Association will ask the city's Centennial Commission next month for $75,000 to fund an oral history project.

A decision on an initial request for the funding at the commission's November meeting was postponed until the meeting in late January.

Claytee White, director of the Oral Research Center at UNLV, told the commission that 13 oral histories in the area already had been recorded.

The neighborhood was named for John S. Park, who moved to Las Vegas in 1905 and became the owner of First State Bank as well as the Consolidated Power and Telephone Co., which became Southern Nevada Power Co. He lived at Charleston and Seventh Street.

Joe Schoenmann can be reached at 229-6436 or at joe.schoenmann@lasvegassun.com.