LOOKING IN ON: CLARK COUNTY

By Tony Cook

Monday, June 4, 2007 | 7:06 a.m.

Less jail space and fewer parks in Clark County are some of the potential consequences of the deal state lawmakers and special interests cobbled together late last week to pay for $1 billion in desperately needed highway construction costs.

The deal would divert $20 million a year in room tax money from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, reroute a portion of rental car tax money and redirect Washoe and Clark County property tax money currently used for capital projects.

The latter will cost Clark County $14 million in the first year and an increasing amount every year after that as property values rise, Commissioner Bruce Woodbury said.

The projects county officials had in mind for that money include a new low-level offender facility to house misdemeanor criminals, several new regional parks and a new building for the Southern Nevada Health District.

Those projects might be scrapped or delayed if the county's capital improvement fund - $121 million this fiscal year - takes a $14 million annual hit in future years.

The $1 billion will fund additional lanes to Interstate 15 and U.S. 95 and other highway super projects between now and 2015.

Though they won't oppose the plan, county officials are disappointed that state lawmakers are putting the burden on local governments.

"If it is deemed to be an essential component, we are not going to object to the overall plan," Woodbury said. "Obviously, we wish they would have found another source other than local government, which has stepped up repeatedly."

The county already has spent $1.17 billion to construct the 215 Beltway, the kind of massive highway project state governments elsewhere usually fund.

The Assembly approved the roads bill Friday, with only two legislators voting against it. Assemblyman Garn Mabey of Clark County was one of them.

"In my opinion, we are helping the major corporations of this state at the expense of our families that are already struggling to make it," he said. "Why should the families in Nevada be the only ones to sacrifice their parks, their baseball fields and swimming pools and other projects that improve the qualities of their neighborhoods and no one else does?"

The Senate was still considering the roads proposal Friday.

A local nonprofit group with a controversial history is permanently closing its doors.

Fighting AIDS in our Community Today, FACT, shut down May 14 after years of questions about its operations.

A brief history:

Michael Chambliss, a former Las Vegas city staffer and prominent political player in West Las Vegas, founded the organization in 1999 to reduce new HIV infections in the black community. He is now awaiting trial on murder charges after police say he stabbed a man to death in November 2005.

FACT relied primarily on government grants to operate. In 2003, after state legislators appropriated $250,000 to FACT, it proposed spending a large amount on a gospel concert. State officials shot that down.

Former Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates, now the subject of a police probe, voted three times to allocate $408,000 to the group in 2005 and 2006. She didn't disclose that FACT had paid her son's advertising company $58,000 to register voters. Chambliss also was her former political consultant.

Last year county officials discovered that FACT's executive director, Lionel Starkes, was signing his own paychecks.

At Tuesday's County Commission meeting, the county will terminate a $150,000 grant it gave FACT last October. The unused portion, $116,511.88, will return to the county's general fund.

The county's garbage collection provider, Republic Services, met Thursday and Friday with officials from the Teamsters Local 631 - to agree to meet some more.

Union members, who now earn $24.34 per hour, rejected an $8.39 wage and benefit increase over five years last month. Republic management and the union, which represents about 1,200 of the company's employees, agreed to extend the current contract, due to expire June 9, while negotiations continue.