Vin Suprynowicz

Are any of our current elected officials really “focusing like a laser” on helping local entrepreneurs “create new jobs” in Las Vegas?

Ask Raj Patel.

Raj Patel owns the City Center motel downtown, near the El Cortez. He’d like to create more jobs with an Indian restaurant, there. He’s also developed a two-story strip mall at Craig Road and Tenaya, out in the northwest suburbs, not far from the Santa Fe Station.

Raj Patel has invested more than $4 million in Las Vegas. But if your image of a “millionaire businessman” is some fat guy puffing a cigar, you’d be shocked to walk into the Saffron Restaurant at Craig and Tenaya and ask the bartender for Mr. Patel. Because the young guy tending bar and managing the restaurant IS Raj Patel. The dentist with the offices upstairs? That’s his wife.

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First it was tiny fish. Now anti-development extremists hope to use snails no bigger than your little fingernail as cat’s paws to block the Southern Nevada Water Authority plan to pipe groundwater here from east central Nevada.

In March, state regulators granted the authority permission to pump up to 27 billion gallons of groundwater a year from four valleys in Lincoln and White Pine counties.

Water officials want to tap rural groundwater to insulate the community from shortages on the Colorado River, which supplies about 90 percent of the valley’s drinking water. The multibillion-dollar network of pumps and pipelines would stretch more than 300 miles.

Now, for the record, this pipeline will indeed have some impact on water tables to the north, and should never be needed, anyway. In a sane world, the federal “Law of the River” would be changed, allowing urban users including Las Vegas to buy water rights on the open market from downstream users, including people now using that river water to grow cotton in the deserts of Arizona, and equally water-hungry crops in California. Stop those subsidies. Grow those crops where it rains.

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Derek Thompson, senior editor at The Atlantic, wrote on April 16 (citing an analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation) “Half of American taxpayers owe no federal income tax, and most of those filers actually net tax benefits from federal income taxes.”

In fact, though, Mr. Thompson is at pains to point out “The majority of households who pay no income tax still pay net taxes to the IRS.” That’s because “workers of all income levels” still pay payroll taxes on their first $106,800 in earnings — levies that actually flow right into the General Fund, despite the purposeful illusion that they’re somehow set aside in “personal trust accounts” for each taxpayer.

The number of American households “who really do pay practically zero overall taxes” is actually about 15 million American households, “or 10 percent of all taxpayers,” Mr. Thompson reports. (Note we’re now talking about “workers,” sidestepping the question of how many “non-workers” pay no taxes and still get to vote.)

Thanks to “refundable tax credits” — the negative income tax — these 15 million filing households “receive more cash from the IRS than they contribute in federal income taxes and payroll taxes,” Mr. Thompson writes.

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The federal Bureau of Land Management has suspended plans to seize the 500 to 750 head of cattle run by Clark County rancher Cliven Bundy south of Mesquite — and 80 milers northeast of Las Vegas — for now.

But Bundy, 65, realizes this is just a truce in an ongoing battle. Both the Mesquite City Council and the Clark County Commission have expressed support for a plan to turn the entire Gold Butte region into a “federal conservation area.”

Mark Andrews, a local photographer who’s frequented the area for 35 years, writes in that the “BLM and the Friends of Gold Butte group have removed countless miles of road and open land access from free use. Places I used to go for decades are now blockaded. These are roads that are nearly 100 years old and in steady use. And this activity has become very aggressive and pronounced in the last 24 months. They seem to have a deep agenda regarding it.”

The area south of Mesquite “is really the only public area Clark County has left that’s not designated for some conservation area, or preserve, or monument, or whatever.” Bundy says. “I’m really the only resource user who’s still got any interest use in the land,” he adds, referring to the grazing rights which have come down through his family for more than 100 years, a property right he insists was not granted by and therefore cannot be suspended by the bureaucrats of Washington.

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Sixty-five-year-old Olympia Snowe, who could only be considered a “Republican” in New England, recently announced she won’t run for re-election to her seat in the U.S. Senate this year, cutting short a sadly abbreviated 39-year career in politics — 34 years as a member of Congress, which means she hasn’t had to live under many of the laws she’s helped enact since the middle of the Jimmy Carter administration.

(Other than Rand Paul, who apparently declines to be “waved through” as a matter of principle, when was the last time you heard of a congressman or senator being hassled about airport parking, or saw one being groped by the blue-gloved goons?)

Why is Sen. Snowe pulling on her mukluks and hiking home? She complains there’s too much hidebound ideology in Washington now, members are not as willing as they once were to reach across the aisle, voters are frustrated that their representatives are less willing to “compromise in order to get things done.”

Why, the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, last month staged a seminar on the Las Vegas Strip, at which it posed to a panel including columnist Kathleen Parker, Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Fox News’s Juan Williams the question: “Is moderation possible in American politics?”

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Authorizing robot cameras to photograph red-light runners and mail out traffic tickets to vehicle owners — sometimes months after the event — is a proposal that regularly resurfaces at the Nevada Legislature. Proponents wave the prospect of millions of dollars in new revenues, as well a promise that the cameras can reduce accidents.

There’s no doubt municipalities that have contracted to install the systems have profited — Chicago alone makes $60 million per year from such robot tickets.

But there’s now evidence that, by refusing to make Nevadans guinea pigs in this experiment, Nevada lawmakers may have dodged a bullet.

While USA Today reports that 555 communities around the country now employ the cameras, nine states — including Arkansas, Montana, Nevada, and New Hampshire — ban them.
Meantime, numerous municipalities that gave the devices a try (including Los Angeles) have recently pulled the plug, and of two dozen referendums on installing the cameras, all but one have failed.

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A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security confirms via email (they don’t like to talk on the phone) that a five-year department-wide contract was awarded this spring to Federal Cartridge, a wholly owned subsidiary of ATK, for the purchase of up to 450 million rounds of .40-caliber S&W 180-grain pistol ammunition, “the quantity projected to be used over the next five years” by DHS, excluding the Coast Guard, which gets its ammunition through the Department of Defense.

It’s “the primary vehicle” for the .40-caliber duty ammo, adds spokesman Matt Chandler.

(For a scale comparison, the Army in 2010 ordered 200 million rounds of its improved M855A1 5.56 round for use in Afghanistan, where they are fighting a war of occupation, describing that amount as a 12- to 15-month supply.)

The department was also soliciting April bids for a new supply of .233 Remington rifle ammunition — the stuff the Army uses in its M-16s. Various Internet reports — including one from Business Insider — contend that order could be in the range of 125 million to 175 million rounds, though in response to repeated email inquiries, a DHS spokesman in late March would confirm only that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be seeking bids by April 12 for 90,000 rounds.

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A year ago, hundreds of Chaparral students gathered outside the local Las Vegas high school, chanting “Let’s go, Cowboys!” and “We are Chap!” — expressing support for teachers and staff who’d just been told they faced being replaced this year for their utter academic failure.

Add one more charge to the indictment: Outside of cheerleading, pep rallies, and “Be True to Your school” cliches, they’d apparently managed to keep these kids unaware of just how badly their teachers and administrators had failed them.

Chaparral was one of five “persistently low-performing” schools identified by incoming Clark County School District Superintendent Dwight Jones last March as eligible for federal School Improvement Grants that could bring the district millions of dollars in funds. The others included Mojave and Western high schools.

Under the rules of the grant program, though, the five schools had to be reorganized. Staff members had to reapply to keep their jobs this year; schools were limited to rehiring 50 percent of the original staff. Principals who’d been in place at those schools for three or more years had to be reassigned. Employees who were not hired back were free to apply for other district vacancies.

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In 1988, hunters bought 51,011 deer hunting licenses (“tags”) in Nevada, and harvested 26,784 mule deer.

In 2008, the Nevada Department of Wildlife sold 16,997 tags. Hunters bagged only 7,025 deer.

That’s a huge decline. Where are the deer?

And oddly enough, whatever the problem is, it seems to affect ONLY mule deer — the species that generates most of the Department of Wildlife’s revenue, when you consider that Uncle Sam matches deer tag revenue three-to-one.

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Visiting with the Review-Journal editorial board a few weeks back to discuss his run for the open Ward Two Las Vegas City Council seat, former state Sen. and local businessman Bob Beers declared one of his goals if elected would be to “take down the city’s ‘Not Open for Business’ sign.”

Anyone who’s ever tried to negotiate the codes and regulations necessary to set up shop within the city limits knows what Mr. Beers means.

Even if you’re re-opening a premises considered “okey-dokey” for its former tenant, suddenly city inspectors want you to spend tens of thousands of dollars to re-do lighting, plumbing, lavatories, handicapped access.

Restaurateur Andre Rochat, who has since opened upscale eateries within county jurisdiction on The Strip and no longer attempts to do business downtown, was famously required by city “inspectors” to build a $100,000 steel superstructure over a couple of sidewalk tables at his short-lived Frogeez on Fourth Street, “sturdy enough to hold up a city bus if one should fall on it.”

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