A woman embraces Greg Zanis, who has placed 58 crosses near the Welcome to Las Vegas sign Tues. Oct. 1, 2019, in honor of those that lost their lives on this day, two years ago, during the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting.
Wednesday, April 28, 2021 | 7:40 p.m.
Clark County is moving toward establishing a fund for the creation and maintenance of a permanent memorial for the Oct. 1, 2017, mass shooting.
The 1 October Memorial Committee stopped short Wednesday of establishing the fund or a nonprofit organization to accept or solicit donations honoring the lives lost and changed in the 2017 shooting at a country music festival on the Strip.
But it did direct Clark County staff to draft parameters for a county-managed donation account for the committee to fine-tune before proposing the account to the Board of County Commissioners for ultimate approval.
County parks and recreation manager Lonny Zimmerman said that as an advisory committee to the commissioners, and therefore a government entity, the memorial committee can’t ask for or raise funds. It shouldn’t even bring up the topic in conversation.
But the committee can accept offered money, and county staff can earmark and hold any funds collected for a memorial pending the establishment of a community partnership or a separate nonprofit.
“I know we’ve been receiving questions about donations,” said committee chair Tennille Pereira. “But right now we don’t have any mechanism to accept those donations.”
Creating a nonprofit is a long and detailed process and fundraising can be tricky, especially if the public doesn’t feel it’s being handled appropriately, Pereira said. But she said she doesn’t want to turn away donations, nor be stalled if the committee forges ahead with planning without concurrently setting up and operating proper fundraising infrastructure.
“We want to make sure we do this right,” Pereira said.
More than 65% of the roughly 6,000 respondents to an online survey said they strongly favored putting a permanent memorial at the outdoor concert site near Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue where a lone gunman sprayed bullets on a crowd of 22,000 people, killing 58 and injuring more than 850 in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. The 15-acre concert site is owned by MGM Resorts International, which also owns the Mandalay Bay.
The memorial would be separate from the existing Community Healing Garden in downtown Las Vegas.
The county memorial committee will revisit the account discussion when it meets again next month. If the committee approves of staff’s presentation, it will forward a recommendation to commissioners.
“Assuming they approve it, we now have a catcher’s mitt and there’s clarity and transparency that all of us can pledge to the public, which is a common goal that I think everyone values immensely,” said parks and recreation staffer Punam Mathur, a veteran local philanthropist who is helping the county establish the memorial.
