John Locher / AP
In this Feb. 10, 2021, photo, people prepare doses of a COVID-19 vaccine at the Martin Luther King Senior Center in North Las Vegas.
Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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Editor’s note: As he traditionally does every August, Brian Greenspun is turning over his Where I Stand column to others this month. In presenting this year’s series of columns from community leaders, we feel it is important that our readers, trying to emerge from the ravages of the pandemic, hear from some of the people who can help guide us to better tomorrows. Today’s guest is Isaac Barron, a lifelong resident of North Las Vegas who in 2013 became the first Latino elected to the North Las Vegas City Council. Besides his council duties, he is starting his 27th year as a teacher, and has taught at his alma mater, Rancho High, since 1997.
It was 2013, and I was a new candidate running for North Las Vegas City Council. As I canvassed the streets I grew up on, I noticed a troubling trend: Most of the homes I tried to visit were empty. The Great Recession had left almost a third of my community in foreclosure — my friends, family and neighbors.
I won election that year as North Las Vegas’ first Latino City Council member and have been proud ever since to represent the constituents of Ward 1, home to the largest Hispanic population in North Las Vegas.
North Las Vegas Councilman Isaac Barron
With lots of work, vision and focus, we’ve made light-years of progress from 2013.
Once-shuttered neighborhoods are bustling with families and businesses, and we have built an innovative and sustainable city government that delivers constituent service first.
When COVID-19 hit, North Las Vegas, and particularly Ward 1, again became ground zero for hardship. North Las Vegas’ Latino and African American populations suffered some of the worst impacts of COVID in the country in terms of sickness, hospitalizations and deaths. Our hardworking residents were hit with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country and continue to struggle with the highest unemployment rate in Nevada.
When Congress jumped into action to allocate much-needed relief dollars for the community, it was never a question of if the city was going to use the money to support constituents but how best to help the most constituents in the most impactful and critical ways.
On the public health front, North Las Vegas has been a leader in the regional and statewide effort to test and vaccinate residents to keep people healthy and safe, and to keep businesses open.
To date, our incredible North Las Vegas Fire Department has administered over 100,000 doses of the vaccine. While we are not out of the woods yet, we have seen success from our efforts of bilingual community events, community and business partnerships, and targeted messaging.
After focusing on our communities of color in the 89030, 89031 and 89032 ZIP codes that were showing some of the lowest vaccination rates and highest case counts in Clark County, we saw that COVID spread rates were much lower per 100,000 residents in those ZIP codes than in other areas. Our efforts to get our residents vaccinated worked, and continue as case counts continue to rise countywide.
As residents experienced furloughs and layoffs, we launched programs providing relief for displaced workers and struggling community members. For example, over the past three months, the city has provided $4 million in rental assistance for residents. We also worked with NV Energy and Southwest Gas to pay off $2.7 million in delinquent electric and gas bills for residents affected by COVID-19, helping more than 5,000 families.
For seniors and those medically fragile, the city provided a hot meal delivery program, and city staff were assigned to Three Square to help with food and supply distributions when shipments were scarce.
For our business community, and our small businesses that have been especially hard hit, we created the NLVCares Small Business Stabilization Forgivable Loan Program. North Las Vegas businesses with 20 or fewer employees were eligible for forgivable loans of up to $25,000 at zero interest to keep people employed, cover rent and utilities, and pay for COVID-related expenses such as personal protective equipment. Businesses with up to 100 employees that were affected by winter shutdowns were eligible for up to $50,000 in assistance through the NLVCares Economic Aid Supporting Establishments Fund.
To enable parents to work and to keep kids learning and engaged during public school campus closures, the city opened the Southern Nevada Urban Micro Academy (SNUMA) in August 2020 to provide free, high-quality, in-person schooling for North Las Vegas children. The program has been even more successful than we imagined; SNUMA has tripled in size from 50 to 150 students, and the kids made great academic strides last year. We just started our second year, and had to open a wait list in a matter of days.
We continue to look for additional ways to help the community. Through the American Recovery Plan Act, we are asking all stakeholders to provide input on community needs that have developed as a result of the pandemic. We’ve hosted numerous town hall meetings across the city in English and in Spanish, and have solicited hundreds of surveys through a bilingual process to gather feedback and ideas.
Throughout the pandemic, my fellow North Las Vegas city leaders and I have put our stakeholders first as we respond to the COVID-19 health crisis and work together to restore the economy.
As we look ahead and shape the new post-pandemic world, our commitment to serving the residents and business of North Las Vegas grows only stronger. We are excited about the future of our community, and we look forward to building it with you.
