Las Vegas: Where Streets Are Paved With Gold?

The governor’s proposed budget cuts

At right is a spreadsheet from this week showing how the administration gets to within $237 million of balancing the budget. Lawmakers find about $160 million of these unacceptable.


State employees asked to choose lesser of three evils

That's what the state personnel department asked of state employees today in a confidential survey requested by lawmakers. Here's the key question with the three choices:

In the face of the current and projected State budget shortfall, emergency measures must be taken to swiftly address State employee payroll costs. The options listed below are under consideration and would be in addition to the current furlough.

Please rank these options in order of your preference:

(1 = most preferred, 3 = least preferred)

4/10's work week with additional 2 hour furlough

6% salary reduction

Eliminate holiday pay



Letter to the Editor:

Lower taxes vs. our children’s future
Paul Feldman, Las Vegas


Once again, Gov. Jim Gibbons has abdicated leadership in favor of spouting sound bites from the GOP playlist. “It’s time to stop whining that education in Nevada doesn’t work because of a lack of funding,” he said Monday. How could he possibly reach this conclusion when this state has never adequately funded education? “We need to quit throwing money at programs that ... don’t work,” he said. This state has never thrown money at education programs.

If not for the children who bear the brunt of this state’s broken education system, these statements would be comical. Yet comments like these are made year after year by GOP politicians. And people in Nevada choose to believe them rather than accepting that more money is needed to get us off the bottom of almost every list that measures achievement in education.

How many years or decades have to go by before we Nevadans realize it’s not a coincidence that our schools are both consistently underfunded — and consistently underachieving? We want the same services that citizens of other states take for granted. The only difference is that we think we can get them without paying for them. And nothing will change as long as voters continue to put lower taxes ahead of their own children’s futures.