$1.5 billion worth of ideas at Mandalay Bay event

By Timothy Pratt

Friday, April 17, 2009 | 2 a.m.

It looked like the line to see Macy’s Santa Claus three days before Christmas, except this was an all-grown-up crowd.

Thursday morning, about 1,300 people converged on the Mandalay Bay conference center to learn about the $1.5 billion in federal stimulus money that is to trickle down to Nevadans. The event organizers, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s staff, cut registration off early in the week because so many people had signed up to attend.

At the Strip resort, they settled into four 400-seat rooms, each dedicated to a subject — infrastructure and public works; workers and businesses; energy, environment and broadband; and service providers. The room for the last topic appeared to be the most crowded. But no matter the room, everyone had come with a wish list, a personal version of how to stimulate Nevada’s economy. The crowd included:

Douglas Unger, interim chairman of UNLV’s English department

Taking a professorial approach, he pointed to page 11 of the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 Resource Guide,” a book made available at the event. Under “education,” the page says money is available for “higher education modernization, renovation and repair.”

Unger hopes the phrase means there will be support for a plan to fix the department’s graduate student offices, which are out of compliance with federal laws on access for handicapped people.

Space for the 20-year-old program has always been somewhat jury-rigged, Unger said, but it took Ph.D. candidate James Altman, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, to get the department to draw up plans for changes.

For a year now, Unger has been shopping around a $116,000 proposal that would not only make the space better for handicapped students, but fix problems such as cables snaking up and down walls.

Neither private foundations nor federal agencies have stepped up, however.

This is the same graduate program that the Atlantic magazine called one of the country’s five best.

Still, why should “economic stimulus” money go to the project?

“It would be a big improvement in the quality of life of the students, it would provide jobs to construction workers and the materials would be bought locally,” Unger said.

Tony DeMeo, Nye County sheriff

The white-haired lawman said the 47,000 residents of his far-flung rural jurisdiction have fewer than one officer to protect and serve every 1,000 of them, far below the West’s average ratio of 1.7 per 1,000. He hopes he can get stimulus money to hire 12 deputies and a civilian to do crime analysis — and to pay for some training. The price tag: $4 million.

A friend spotted him in line and came over to shake his hand.

“What are you here for?” DeMeo said.

“The same thing you are,” his friend answered.

Pierre D’Anjou and Michael Brooks, owners of Big Money Productions

D’Anjou said he hopes the name of his business “helps a little bit.” The company consists of two tankers that spray water on dust, a federal requirement at construction sites. The duo figures the stimulus money will pay for work on highways and roads, in turn ratcheting up the need for their services. D’Anjou and Brooks have been dealers at casinos for 50 years between them. Big Money is a 3-year-old second job and a dream they hope makes retirement easier for themselves and their families. But business is now one-fourth what it was in 2006.

As the line they were in inched forward, Brooks looked down and picked out a quarter among the swirling patterns on the carpet. Snatching it, he said, “Gonna be our lucky day.”

Danuelle Shiflet, lead admissions director, Solutions Recovery Inc.

She said her residential and outpatient center for addicts is seeing more people turning to drugs and alcohol:

“More and more people are stressed about losing their homes or their jobs. Some are relapsing.”

The center is seeking a grant to get the word out to people about help available for kicking such habits.

Cheyenne Holcomb and Reggie Bennett, Rebuilding all Goals Efficiently

Their 4-year-old nonprofit organization offers various kinds of help to handicapped people. Its staff of six sees about 500 clients a year, with 150 more waiting six months to a year for help at any one time, Bennett said. As Medicaid keeps getting cut, his group is seeing more people “fall through the cracks.”

He hopes they can obtain a grant to hire more staff and to fix more homes of the disabled.

Donna Bath, retired White Pine County clerk

She was at the event as a volunteer because, she said, she cares about her county.

She had marked up the resource guide with pink Post-It notes and had a typed list of White Pine’s needs, from new firefighting equipment to replacement of a 100-year-old courthouse where “judges use the same bathrooms as inmates.”

Gwen Braimoh, owner of the Expertise Cosmetology Institute

She hopes money will be available for shoring up the tutoring she offers to high school students who come to her institute for training. She provides the tutoring to ensure that the 130 teenagers at her two centers obtain at least two important pieces of paper: a certificate of study from Expertise and a high school diploma.

She also wants to hire people to teach her students about opening businesses.

How much would all that cost? “A couple of hundred thousand would be nice.”

Roxann McCoy, owner of ProServe Mortgage Corp.

McCoy attended to gather information so she has something to tell the hundreds of clients she has seen as a mortgage broker during the past nine years. Many of those clients are in dire financial straits now, so McCoy wants to keep up with the federal response to the crisis.

Perhaps she spoke for many at the event who were not among the friends of the government officials speaking in the four rooms.

“I only hope this isn’t all going to the same good ol’ boy network as always, and some new people get a chance to get the money.”