County plans Oct. 1 memorial for and by the community

By Grace Da Rocha (contact)

Wednesday, July 13, 2022 | 2 a.m.

The 1 October Memorial Committee is going public with its process toward developing a permanent “world-class” memorial that will honor victims, survivors and first responders involved with the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting.

As of July 1, interested individuals can send in “drawings, short videos, or any other digital form of (a) design along with a letter of intent” explaining the design’s details or what feelings it should convey to visitors.

“One of the things that we felt were important was the ability to participate,” said Tennille Pereira, director of the Vegas Strong Resiliency Center and chairperson of the committee, which was formed in 2019 by Gov. Steve Sisolak and the Clark County Commission to recommend a memorial design. “How can we make sure that just the regular, average person has an opportunity to participate that could end up being incorporated into the eventual design? So that’s how we came up with this pathway.”

Commission Chairman Jim Gibson said the memorial’s goal was to pay tribute to the victims and honor the survivors as well as recognize the first responders, bystanders who helped, and “neighbors all across this valley that were affected in ways that (Las Vegas will) never forget.”

Gibson also believes the memorial will be a testament to Las Vegas’ community-focused response to the 2017 shooting. The death toll from the night of the shooting was officially placed at 58, and two people later died from their injuries to increase the toll to 60.

“The way that we responded in this tragedy helped the world understand what we knew, which is we are a community,” Gibson said. “We are a community of neighbors that will do whatever we must and will park and put to the side our differences when pressed.”

The October 1 memorial is set to be built on the location where the Route 91 Harvest Festival used to take place, near the corner of East Reno Avenue and Giles Street. MGM Resorts International donated two acres of the Luxor Festival Grounds’ land for the site.

Deadline for the design proposals, the committee’s Call for Creative Expressions, is Sept. 30.

Submitting design proposals is merely one route that community members — and anyone who is interested in helping actualize this memorial — can take to contribute. The committee has organized two other ways for anyone, even those outside of the United States, to participate: via Request for Qualifications (RFQ) and a Call for Evaluators.

The Request for Qualifications asks for professional teams, with at least one architect licensed in Nevada, to submit their qualifications for constructing the memorial. The first part of the two-stage selection process will narrow the teams to no more than five finalists, each of which will be given $50,000 compensation. One team will be selected during a second phase to construct the memorial.

Deadline for the Call for Qualifications is Oct. 31.

A seven-member jury will also be created through the Call for Evaluators. Jury members will examine the RFQ submissions, determine which are most qualified, and recommend finalists to the 1 October Memorial Committee. Three spots on the jury are reserved for a family member of a person who died during the shooting, a survivor, and a first responder involved during or after the shooting. Three other spots will go to people with “subject matter expertise in a professional discipline relevant to developing a permanent memorial,” such as an artist or engineer, while a member of the 1 October Memorial Committee will chair the board as a nonvoting member.

The application deadline for the Call for Evaluators is July 31.

Punam Mathur, a consultant to the 1 October Memorial Committee, said that “what sets this effort led by this committee apart from every other effort led by any other committee in the country thus far” is the three participation pathways.

“There is nothing that has captured the attention of this valley — ever in the history of the valley — like what happened to us then, and the people who have worked to gather together what is needed in order to really fulfill the responsibility we gave (the committee) have put so much into it,” Gibson said.

The effort is the culmination of work that began nearly three years ago. The coronavirus pandemic stalled the panel’s work, and many of the committee members had to familiarize themselves with the process of building a memorial. To do this, Pereira and her team reached out to other communities that had been affected by tragedies — Newtown, Conn., site of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting;Stoystown, Pa., home to the Flight 93 National Memorial, and Orlando, Fla., where the Pulse Nightclub massacre occurred — to get information on how they created their memorials. They also conducted community surveys in March, June and August of 2021 that received a total of over 10,000 responses, according to Mathur.

The process of accepting proposals, creating and narrowing the professional teams, and selecting a final design will be finished in October 2023. Pereira said that once the design has been selected, an expected completion date for the memorial will be set.