Geoffrey Lawrence
LVRDA tries to scam the public
Officials trot out same old indefensible claims
The Las Vegas Redevelopment Agency currently finds itself locked in a court battle with the Culinary Union. The lawsuit is the result of a recent vote by Las Vegas city officials to exclude two referenda items proposed by Culinary from the June ballot.
Clark County irritated at LVRDA
The Las Vegas Redevelopment Agency (LVRDA) is trying to create a tourism improvement district within the city's redevelopment zone. That would allow the LVRDA to issue sales tax anticipated revenue bonds in order to provide corporate welfare subsidies to private developers.
Greenspan and Bernanke’s war on Nevada
The Fed bears primary responsibility for the housing market collapse
According to the most recent reports, Nevada leads the nation in the rate of homes that are in negative equity, at 55 percent. Nationally, the rate is about 20 percent. The primary reason for this disparity is that growth in Nevada—and in Las Vegas in particular—outpaced growth in the rest of the nation during the peak of the real estate bubble when land values were artificially high.
Having his cake and eating it too
Governor Gibbons created a budget that included a $292 million tax increase in the form of a room tax hike in Clark and Washoe Counties. The value of that tax has since been downgraded to $233 million. However, the governor, after including the tax hike in his budget will now refuse to sign the bill implementing the tax hike.
Rothbard on Bush, Obama
I've been reading Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression recently to see what kind of insights into the current recession might be gleaned, given all of the noteworthy similarities. As he lays the theoretical underpinning of his argument, he offers the following passage, which I thought was pretty telling:
Surprise, surprise
Members of the Las Vegas City Council voted Wednesday to keep two ballot initiatives proposed by the Culinary Union off of the July ballot.
We should all be so lucky
This recent article in the Reno Gazette-Journal details how Reno City Manager Charles McNeely is the highest paid city manager in Nevada. Among other things, his contract allows him to take up to 79 days of paid time off...
Speaker scrutinizing subsidies
Buckley takes aim at tax abatements and incentives
Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley and her colleagues in the Nevada Legislature recently began to consider curtailing or eliminating targeted tax abatements and other incentives within the state as a way of generating additional tax revenue.
