Now here is the really good news folks, the Las Vegas Police Protective Association is asking for a 14% raise plus a 4.5% cost of living plus increased benefit costs, doubling to at least 28%. How do you like them apples? It sure looks like someone has heard about the hundreds of millions possible with any new sales tax burden on the populous they are supposed to protect. As retirees you can look forward to a whole 1%+ sometimes with just one item, Medicare cost eats that up while they have not had a paycheck in 20+years.

The revenue on a ¼% sales tax will start out at no less than $75,000,000 per year and increasing at least another $10,000,000 per year with no less than $175,000,000 per year in ten years. Tell me, where can the cops legally spend all of this money when the entire Metro budget now is $429,000,000? Folks remember also that the sales tax is expected to go up another ¼% and doubling all of the above ten year numbers. These numbers prove how badly this thing was thought out and should be stopped for good at the next C.C.C. meeting. With our economy continuing to grow in such a healthy fashion there just is no justification for a third method of funding Metro. The right thing to do is kill the ¼% sales tax and leave Metros budgeting alone letting the Clark County Commission and the Las Vegas City budgets take care of any needed increase in police hiring. Remember that their revenue is increasing just as fast as this sales tax would and just as fast as the revenue is growing at the state level. Remember they were so ashamed at the state level they decided to give us back on average $75 to $275. Let’s stop this nonsense.

PLEASE GET YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS TO GO TO THE CLARK COUNTY COMMISSION MEETING THE 2nd OF AUGUST AT 9:00 am AND FILL THE CHAMBERS WITH PEOPLE WHO WANT THE ¼% TAX KILLED.

Fortunately for us, the tax-payers, we are seeing the demise of what I called the Broadbent Monkey Rail because there was so much monkey business in putting the 4 mile strip monorail together. In a way it is too bad but this is the second venture into the monorail business that has failed. The first one got no further than a few columns at the Las Vegas Library and a head building that all had to be torn down when the Germans didn’t or couldn’t finish the job. Now we have the 4 mile strip monorail costing $600,000,000+ with a lot of concrete columns and beams laid on their sides and a bunch of cars that lost enough parts that it took an extra year just to get a ride on it more than one or two days in a row. Unfortunately the feasibility study once again has not been able to be proven and a lot of very hard working unhappy people have lost their jobs and because of their trouble Uncle Sam the money bags as Mr. Snow like to show it is no longer available to extend the system to down town, Cashman Field and the airport. That is good because that extension somehow was going to end up in the so called seamless system between private and government that was supposed to be the example in the country of private and government working together. Fortunately it has not at this time gotten to the point of the “Fleecing of America” and let’s hope it never gets to that point.

Now the same people the RTC, the Clark County Commission and the Sierra Club think we should run light rail from Henderson to some place downtown Las Vegas just because there is an old railroad right of way that use to have wood ties and steel rails for a freight hauling railroad that they now want to make a modern version of the street car called light rail “costing billions of course”. Why haven’t they learned that for about the last 60 years we the taxpaying public have switched over to personal rapid transit called the automobile, the bicycle, moped or any other vehicle which you and I can use to transport us from point A to point B at the time and place we want to with out waiting for anyone else. Why haven’t these people been able to figure this out? Please do not tell us you can force us into this light rail mode and it will succeed? We do not want a fixed rail system where we need transportation and a parking lot once we get to the rail system and then on the end of the trip we need more transportation to take us from the end of the railroad to our destination. Now is that hard to understand? I do not think so nor do hundreds of millions of people in the United States think so either even if our government builds it with our money and wants to force us somehow to use it. Let’s face it one of the oldest the Bart in San Francisco was never used to capacity until about 50 years after its completion was it used to capacity and that took an earthquake. In Oregon they extended their rail system like 10 miles for a billion bucks and agreed after completion it only took 400 cars a day off of the existing highway. Wow we could have given all of them a chauffer driven vehicle of their choice and it would have never cost that much. We can go on and on, oh I almost forgot in my town of Minneapolis they extended a surface rail from downtown to the airport and now at every intersection the automobiles must stop for the rail line when they come chugging along and don’t need to stop because some government type gave them the right of way at the taxpaying publics expense.

There is this very simple prefabricated off the shelf transport 2000 that has been shown to the Governor, CCC and now RTC head Jacob Snow with none of them spending more than a short time to give out a no thank you. Why is the government people do not want us to have a very simple at 1/10th the cost off the shelf system where we could have both vehicles of 4 passenger on the monorail plus the option of a drive on platform for your own Smart Car made by Mercedes that you can own, drive to the neighborhood station, drive it onto the platform, go by computer driven guide-way to the station closest to your destination where you drive off and drive directly to your destination without ever getting out of your vehicle and for 10% the cost of what RTC, CCC and the Sierra Club want?