Letter: Boulder City well aware of bypass issue

Mary D. Wammack

Friday, Feb. 2, 2007 | 7:09 a.m.

While the article in Monday's Sun, "Slow traffic ahead," demonstrates that the Boulder City Council's plan to market Boulder City as a sleepy little hamlet lost in yesteryear is paying off, it misconstrues the bypass issue. Bob Sears notwithstanding, the new bridge, bypass and traffic problems have been topics of conversation throughout the community for years. Past councils have, like the present one, struggled with the political predicaments of the bypass issue.

As a resident since 1965, I would like to note that the problem is not one of ignorance, or even indifference - instead it is rooted in the inability of anyone to come up with a solution that would please the town's business owners and residents alike.

No one has yet figured out how to divert the tens of thousands of street-clogging and pollution-emitting trucks from the city without simultaneously steering thousands of carloads of people who, for whatever reason, would be likely to spend money in town and thus help to keep struggling businesses open.

Boulder City is, indeed, a small town - and the only one in Nevada that prohibits gambling. It is not, however, trapped in some mid-20th-century nostalgic loop. If modern franchised commercialism is any demonstration of that, the town not only has a Starbucks, but it does, indeed, have a McDonald's. If nostalgia doesn't blind passers-through, they'll also find a Jack in the Box, Pizza Hut, Dairy Queen, Burger King, Vons, Albertsons and CVS pharmacy.

Mary D. Wammack, Boulder City