What do you want for Nevada?
Are you ever worried about another pandemic or recession — whatever it is that causes the economy to slump? Because Las Vegas is still mostly a one-industry town — when it goes down, everything goes down.
So do you think it’s money well spent if state lawmakers gave $80 million in tax incentives to the movie industry to create a new line of business here? Or is that a waste of money?
The state of Nevada has saved about $1.3 billion in taxes that it’s saving in a rainy day fund. But is that too much? Should we spend that to build more classrooms in Vegas?
Are you worried about the deportations of friends, relatives or coworkers? How do you feel about the new administration's actions so far?
With guest April Corbin Girnus, deputy editor of Nevada Current, we heard about that and more.
These are some of the comments, questions and answers:
What are the Clark County Education Association’s — the largest teachers union — goals for the current legislative session?
April Corbin Girnus: One of the big things that (it) has in its pocket is that they qualify a ballot initiative to give teachers the right to strike, and so that ballot initiative is scheduled to be on the ballot next year, in the general election. But (the union) is hoping to sort of use that as leverage to get stuff done in the in the next 120 days, as opposed to having to defend it on the ballot next year. They haven't said exactly what that's looking like, but they've made a big emphasis in the past that the negotiation process needs to be fixed with between the district and the union."
From Gordon in Henderson about road markings: I'm kind of curious. What happened to all the road markings that seem to have disappeared. We no longer have them yet. We all pay that extra $2 on registration for road works at the DMV. So I was wondering where this money goes, or is it not for road markings? Some of them are terrible. I mean, at nighttime, you don't even know which lane you're in anymore. So anyway, just curious what happened. We don't seem to have anybody out there maintaining the road markings.
From Jay in Las Vegas about the film tax incentive idea: Is it going to cost us anything, you know, out of money that we have in in our Nevada Treasury, or just a credit on future revenue. In other words, if we didn't give it, we wouldn't see that money anyway, right?
From Shannon in Pahrump about solar: I'm calling about the issue of massive and unjust solar development in our Nevada desert valleys. The Bureau of Land Management has recently approved the Western Solar Plan, which opened 9 million more acres of Nevada wilderness, in addition to the 22 million that existed already for solar development. This equates to a whopping 48,437 square miles now open for solar development in Nevada industrial scale. Solar is really not the solution that we think it is. It's cheap and it's profitable for big corporations, but it's devastating for Mojave ecosystems that are natural carbon sinks, that are storing carbon in their vegetation, root systems and cryptobiotic soil crust. The Yellow Pine solar project in the south Pahrump Valley alone, just one solar project of 3,000 acres, four and a half square miles, destroyed 92,000 Mojave yucca and 500,000 creosote and it created a massive dust hazard. In order to combat the dust, construction crews have to spray 350,000 gallons of water per day, and they're using groundwater from an already over-allocated water basin. So my proposal is that we need to move solar to the city and build solar shade canopies over all of our parking lots, beginning with UNLV Thomas and Max Center parking lot, and then all the Walmart parking lots. I think that we hear a lot about the need to sacrifice land for solar, but I haven't heard anything about big corporations needing to sacrifice some profit in order for a really just transition to renewable energy to take place.
This is our one-hour open mic show. Email son@knpr.org with your thoughts.
Guest: April Corbin Girnus, deputy editor, Nevada Current
