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Black Elected Officials: It’s Time To Bring Home Some Bacon

April 16, 2019 by  
Filed under Community

Black Elected Officials: It’s Time To Bring Home Some Bacon

BY LOUIE OVERSTREET

Louie Overstreet

Westside voters should demand that their elected city, county, and state officials bring home some bacon — like I remember Gates, Williams, and Arberry (with Neal leading the amen choir) used to do, shortly after I arrived in Las Vegas.

The excuse that Vegas is still recovering from the economic downturn of 2008 is no longer true. Politicians should not be given your vote by merely throwing a picnic in the parking lot of a strip mall on Owens Avenue; this is an insult!

The city, county, and state budgets are huge. In fact, these three pork barrels are so large, they remind me of a quote attributed to the long deceased senator from Illinois, Everett Dirksen about federal spending: “A billion dollars here and a billion dollars there, pretty soon you are talking about real money.”

Listed are the annual budgets for Las Vegas and Clark County. The budget for the State of Nevada is a biennial amount; all are rounded up.

Las Vegas — $1,700,000,000,000

Clark County — $1,500,000,000,000

Nevada — $26,000,000,000,000

It is reasonable to assume that there has got to be some extra money in these hog-size budgets, some pork can be sliced off and earmarked for the Westside. Hell, the state budget alone uses 28 pages to list all of the tax abatement and tax incentives it doles out.

So it’s a mystery to me why Crear, Weekly, and McCurdy can’t get together to bring some bacon slices home to the area that is the residential, civic, religious, and cultural hub for folks that look like them?

I would even suggest that funding for Lou Ragland’s concept of an American Museum of Music and Entertainment would be a token project to fund, so they can eat some bacon, instead of the bologna they are always fed.

How you ask? Crear can come up with a location from the city’s land bank, Weekly can come up with design funds from 235 monies, and McCurdy can come up with funds for a demonstration grant.

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