To collar costs, Las Vegas will put its eight dogs out of work

By Sam Skolnik (contact)

Saturday, May 31, 2008 | 2 a.m.

It started in 1998 when the city’s detention and enforcement agency decided to hire Benny, a human-detecting German shepherd that became the first dog in the department’s canine program.

Over the years, the canine program grew to include eight dogs, plus their handlers and administrators, with a $400,000 annual budget.

But as part of a cost-saving program all city departments have implemented called Performance Plus, the canine program has been scrapped.

According to agency chief Karen Coyne, the dogs did a variety of work. They sniffed for drugs in the city jail and checked out suspicious packages in city offices to make sure they weren’t bombs. They also aided officers as “human-sniffing” dogs, sometimes helping find children lost in city parks.

The program was popular among both the public and the deputy city marshals and detention officers who served as their handlers, Coyne said.

“The decision to eliminate this program was one of the toughest I’ve faced,” Coyne said.

But with the city’s budget shortfall, Coyne said, she determined that although the canine program was working, the work could be performed more cost-effectively by two-legged officers.

Coyne said half the dogs have been adopted by their handlers. If the remaining four dogs, the drug-sniffers in the city jail, are not adopted, she said, Metro Police may want to take them.

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Notice filmmaking crews out and about on area streets this weekend? They likely weren’t shooting “Ocean’s 14” or the sequel to that Vegas movie classic “Showgirls.”

They were part of the 48 Hour Film Project, an annual contest designed to give local filmmakers, pros and novices alike, the chance to write, film and edit their own movies over a two-day period.

This year, about 40 teams hit the streets, shooting four- to seven-minute movies. Although the teams were in place at 7 p.m. Friday at Jillian’s, a bar downtown, they didn’t know exactly what type of film they would be shooting until then.

It was then the local woman who produces the project, Angela Abshier, gave the teams a character, prop and line of dialogue that must be included in each short film. Then each team chose one of 12 movie genres — comedy, romance, detective and so on — out of a hat.

The rest was up to them. The only condition was that the teams — composed of two to 75 people — finish their films by 7:30 p.m. Sunday.

“You learn in that 48 hours (that) what can go wrong will go wrong,” said Abshier, who has run the Vegas project for four years. “You see if you can really do this.”

The films will be shown at the Galaxy Neonopolis theater downtown at

7 and 9 p.m. Thursday and Friday. One film from each of the 55 cities around the world that were involved will be chosen as the winner, and of those, one will be picked for the grand prize.

The grand prize winner will receive a trophy and $5,000 — and, much more important, will get to see his film screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

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Some questions may soon be answered regarding one of the most important of the city’s ongoing downtown development projects: the Lady Luck, which has been shuttered since February 2006.

Although CIM Group, a Los Angeles developer, bought the property in mid-2007, plans have not been firmed up.

But officials from CIM will appear before the City Council in June, according to the city’s business development director, Scott Adams.

In a recent interview with the Sun’s sister publication In Business Las Vegas, Adams said he hopes to come to a development agreement with CIM during that meeting. Once that occurs, Adams anticipates a “flurry of activity.”