900 — at once — had words for council

By Mike Trask

Friday, Aug. 8, 2008 | 2 a.m.

At North Las Vegas City Hall, where a dozen people typically show up for a City Council meeting, no one saw this coming.

About 900 people showed up for Wednesday night’s meeting.

The council chambers were filled with 211 people.

Another 300 crammed into the lobby, listening to the meeting on a TV with the sound turned all the way up.

And the other 400 milled about the front steps of the building, craning their necks to peek past three city marshals blocking the glass doors.

Councilman William Robinson said he’s never seen more people attend a council meeting, and he’s been around for 26 years.

A meeting this year about proposed apartment buildings brought out about 300 people, which, at the time, was considered an enormous turnout.

Maybe this week’s attendance, then, was consistent with having hot-button issues on the agenda, because Wednesday night there were three: a proposed casino north of the Las Vegas Beltway, improvements affecting the future of the Broadacres Swap Meet on Las Vegas Boulevard North and a request for a use permit for a private elementary school.

Residents didn’t have the option of watching the proceedings from home. North Las Vegas does not televise its twice-a-month meetings, or offer video streaming on its Web site. A closed circuit feed was provided in the City Hall lobby.

Marshals had stopped letting people into the meeting room by 5:20 p.m., 10 minutes before the start of a redevelopment agency meeting.

By 6 p.m., when the regular City Council meeting was set to begin, Marshals had blocked the doors to City Hall itself.

“We don’t have a larger facility,” city spokeswoman Brenda Fischer said. “We never know how many people are going to show up.”

City officials said no consideration was given to postponing any of the items or to moving the meeting to a bigger building.

“When people make the effort to come down, we try to accommodate them,” Councilwoman Shari Buck said. “People have taken off from work and they might not be able to do that again.”

State law says “public meetings should be held in facilities that are reasonably large enough to accommodate attendance by members of the public.” It states that efforts must be made to accommodate an overflow crowd and “even if reasonable efforts such as these (broadcasting the meeting in an adjoining room) prove inadequate to accommodate everyone, the meeting will still qualify as a public meeting for purposes of the Open Meeting Law.”

“The law would tend to say if it’s a forum that’s generally adequate and then a flood of people comes in, it would not violate the law,” said Allen Lichtenstein, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada.

But he noted it might have been prudent to postpone the items until a larger facility could be found.

Fischer said the city had not received any complaints from residents who did not have the chance to speak at the meeting.

There was no disorderly behavior in the crowd, although one young girl passed out in the stuffy City Hall lobby.

“They should have known better than to schedule all these hot items on the same night,” said Richard Cherchio, leader of the North Las Vegas Alliance of Homeowners Associations and Concerned Citizens and a regular attendee at the meetings.

Cherchio was kept out of the building in the 107-degree heat during discussions of the swap meet and the school.

So was Walter Stoklosa, who wanted to speak about the school.

“This is wrong,” he said. “They won’t let the citizens get in there and talk.”

However, after the council decided to grant a variance to the swap meet — allowing improvements to the site without requiring it to reduce the number of vendors — the chambers emptied.

They were quickly refilled with people interested in the permits needed for a school run by the First Spanish Baptist Church on West Washburn Road.

Stoklosa finally got a chance to speak after being called in from the lobby.

After the school was allowed to continue operations and people concerned about that went home, those interested in the proposed Boyd casino at Losee Road and the Las Vegas Beltway entered. By then nobody was left outside.

For all of their waiting, the casino item was continued until November.

Overshadowed on the agenda: discussion of the design for a new City Hall.

Plans call for a 300-seat meeting room.