At City Hall, new excuses to spend

When Las Vegas leaders are happy to throw away a quarter of a billion dollars on a new City Hall, $400,000 for a useless legal fight over a commercial flight path is basically just petty cash.

While city officials have been outspoken in their concern about rising Metro police costs and prefer to place the burden of finding new money for fire safety on the backs of voters, when it comes to keeping up with the Joneses, either aesthetically or politically, no expense is too great to shoulder.

The average person toiling through workaday life on a fixed budget makes do with what he or she has. If the air conditioner and water heater are both on the fritz, it’s time to call in repairmen, not Realtors.

City Councilman Larry Brown questions the efficiency of the existing City Hall and believes the city should expand it or replace it. “How much money do you reinvest in a building closing in on 40 years old?” Brown said last week.

I’m no expert, but I think renovating the existing building would take a lot less than $225 million, the estimated cost of a brand new City Hall. Oh, and while we’re discussing numbers, the Harvard-educated Brown should note that a building that opened in 1973 is 34 years old, hardly pushing 40.

Other cities don’t have this constant need to tear down and start over the way we do, even when there is growth.

New York City Hall opened in 1812 when about 96,000 people lived in the city. Have 8 million residents rendered it useless? Hardly.

Philadelphia City Hall was completed in 1901 and still serves the current mayor and council. But the only calls for replacing that building, which is a national historical landmark, come from disgruntled Philly sports fans who believe the statue of William Penn atop the building is a real curse. None of the pro teams in Philly has won a championship since the city in 1984 permitted construction of buildings higher than Billy Penn’s hat.

Los Angeles City Hall is pushing 80 years old, but no one’s rushing for a major do-over there. Maybe it’s because they don’t want the extra expense of redoing the LAPD badges.

But here, it isn’t really time, but pride, that’s the big factor.

Philadelphia’s building has an Alexander Calder statue. New York’s was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Meanwhile, my Review-Journal colleague David McGrath Schwartz softly described Las Vegas City Hall as resembling a “10-story Trivial Pursuit wedge with a three-story ring around its base.”

Basically it’s the architectural equivalent of a toilet and, despite some recent renovations, is still a toilet. And, as this City Council proves time and again, function has followed form.

The city has been trying to tear down its eponymous hall for years, almost ever since Clark County opened its new Government Center on Grand Central Parkway.

But building a new City Hall in Las Vegas makes about as much sense as continuing to fight the Federal Aviation Administration on the “right-turn” departure path from McCarran International Airport over some particularly chatty city neighborhoods.

The city-hired attorney, Barbara Lichman, had previously told the council she thought the city had a 20 percent chance to win a legal fight. Now she says the city has a 45 to 60 percent chance of success. It’s amazing how the odds have gotten better as she adds billable hours.

Lichman also believes the improved odds relate to the air pollution created by idling planes. Forget for a moment that planes turning right over the city aren’t idling. What she’s really saying is that the people complaining about noise have no legal grounds to complain about noise.

And while the generally wealthy, generally white residents of the west and northwest valley don’t want to hear jetliners while they sit on the porch and drink their morning coffee, the decibel level in Summerlin isn’t even close to contestable.

County commissioners and the state’s congressional delegation aren’t complaining about the right turn because they understand it’s the people on those planes who help fill local government coffers.

The city has issued three news releases since the jets officially began making the right turn on March 20. The latest release, dated Friday, encourages residents to drum up opposition to the decision.

“As with the McCarran noise complaint hotline, the city’s consultants say the FAA is obliged to log the complaints despite what the FAA message prompt may indicate,” the release says. Each of the releases tells citizens how to report complaints so the city has some way to sanction its continued fight.

Where else but in government can a taxpayer-supported employee churn out news release after news release on taxpayer-funded equipment to justify the spending of more taxpayer money?

Erin Neff’s column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at (702) 387-2906, or by e-mail at eneff@reviewjournal.com.