Facebook
Fark
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Monday, Feb. 23, 2009 | 2:05 a.m.
Of course a local laborers union is embracing Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman’s elaborate plans for a new City Hall. Why wouldn’t it support a pork-laden project guaranteeing its membership jobs for the next few years? Keeping the members working keeps union dues coming into the local and supporting the staff with guaranteed paychecks.
This is not the time to be spending garish sums of money on a Taj Mahal-like setting to give Oscar Goodman his place in local history. Putting the city in more debt during an economic meltdown is the wrong idea and must be challenged. I support the concept of keeping the masses employed, but unfortunately I can see only another wasteful government project built on bonds and promises that cannot possibly be cashed now or in the next 20 years.
President Barack Obama has put his support behind an obscene bailout sure to keep our great grandchildren paying off our debt. It was unavoidable, the world economy is in a tailspin, but come on, Mr. Mayor, surely, with a little organization and planning, a smart city planner could make the current building workable. Let’s set an example and start getting some work out of your more than adequately paid staff — they’re called urban planners and city managers.
Perhaps, if the unions were to make concessions and be willing to overlook “prevailing wage” considerations and be willing to work within tight guidelines for the completion of this project, myself and other skeptics could go along with this outrageous project. But when was the last time any public project came in under a proposed budget or a labor union agreed to concessions on a job funded with public money?
Not only putting the city into more debt, but the fact stands that the labor union is the main abuser in using illegal aliens to do their work. Say anything on the jobsite and you'll be on unemployment line. The union wages should stay. Once one gives them up, they're hard to get back. I've said it before take the illegals out of the workforce and put Americans back to work and Nevada will be saving millions a week. We might not even need a stimulus package.
I'd be surprised if there are a lot of illegals in the Union. Fact is that Spanish workers don't lean on their shovels all day-they actually try and want to do a decent days work. As opposed to those with the Union label. I was in the laborers Union a while back, and I'll never forget the immortal slogan used by my labor foreman, who was concerned that I was working too hard:
"Don't kill the job, kid."
What a relief to see the paper focus on this audacity. 270 million dollars for 320,000 square feet, this will cost $1,000 per square foot when finished. Have we already forgotten where greed has taken us, and now a duplicate carriage house next to the Clark County Sanctum.
If this goes forward we will have spent 1 billion dollars to replace the existing newly remodeled city hall after interest/principal, (city hall and police hq).
How has our government body not taken any responsibility for our economic catastrophe? The most significant authority in this city is its planning effort. They have allowed the pilferage and degradation of our community by approving zero lot size as one example, therefore exasperating land value. These developments are the hardest hit today and will become this communities highest cost to maintain in the future.
Why are we housing our civic employees into the most expensive office space in the United States of America. How does this reflect on our values? How does this make for a better city? How do we afford this? No one asked these questions before, we had better ask now!
Now is the time to evaluate every overlapping city. We need to ask ourselves which departments within these cities are the most competent and consolidate these efforts. We have invested in all of these cities, now is the time for the bureaucrats and elected officials to make the tough decisions the same as the tax payers.
Sending the message to approve a City Hall like this at anytime, is spiting in the face of the very people working to pay for it.
We need to explore how this city should be led to reflect a new direction of efficiency and civic value. We shouldn't be re-enforcing an ongoing wasteful overlapping mirage of governing.