April 2009 Archives

The state of Nevada is in some serious trouble. The legislature and the notoriously anti-tax Republican governor are in a bind as every possible avenue for a tax increase is a dead-end. Already facing a $2.2 billion budget shortfall, the question of whether to raise taxes in a state that is consistently in the bottom five out of 50 states in tax burden on residents (6.6 percent of total income, versus a 9.7 percent national average) is a burning one.

The Bureau of Land Management currently has over 60 pending applications for proposed solar projects in California.  With vast open land and ample sunlight, combined with recent tax incentives, energy companies are rushing to apply for federal land.  Though the idea of solar farms in the desert seems intuitive, one obstacle is the amount of water solar projects require to operate.  The BLM acknowledges the water needs for each project and considers those requirements before granting the application. 

"We are well aware it's a problem," said Ashley Conrad-Saydan, Renewable Program Manager for the BLM.  "It could be a determining factor," she said of the application process.

For each solar project, the proposal needs to contain a plan to get water to the solar field to wash the panels as well as spray the ground to keep dust from kicking up.  All of this is an effort to make the solar panels work efficiently, Conrad-Saydan explained.

Dave Grubb from the Sierra Club says more people need to be aware of how much water solar projects need to operate. 

"You might need to use local wells which local people are not going to be happy with," Grubb said.

One project that is currently under review at the BLM is the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System.  The 400MW project has applied for 6,720 acres of BLM land in the Ivanpah Valley, located in the Mojave National Preserve. 

According to the application, the project will be installing two new underground wells for both the construction and maintenance. However Conrad-Saydan said this is one project that does not have an acceptable plan to funnel water to the site.

"They will have to completely redo the design. It could stop the project," she said.

The Ivanpah project will use 214,000 heliostats, or mirrors.  Those mirrors must be washed approxiametly every two weeks and use 535,000 gallons each washing. 

"That could really change the flow of water," said Conrad-Saydan of the needed amount.

One of the projects that satisfies the BLM requirements for water usage is Stirling Energy, the solar project connected to the Sunrise Powerlink near San Diego.  Despite the environmental concerns with the placement of transmission lines and solar fields, Conrad-Saydan said the project is a good example of using waste water.

"That is actually a really good project," Conrad-Saydan said.  The project, "can use waste water from a few thousand people locally to fuel the water supply."


 

Meals at the Joy Luck Noodle Bar will certainly come with chopsticks and loose-leaf Chinese tea. (Image from Harrah's Reno Web site)


You should never tap on a Chinese customer's shoulder to get his attention when he is busy gambling. According to superstition, even a light tap will cause his good luck to evaporate.

All drinks servers at Harrah's Reno know this. They also know that Chinese customers prefer to be addressed by their last name, brought chopsticks at meals, and poured loose-leaf Chinese tea. None of the teabag stuff.

That's because the casino's floor staff received a crash course in Asian cultural awareness when they were hired.

"With the Asian customers, you want to be very cautious about what's good for them," said Anne Chen, director of marketing for Harrah's Reno. "You need to understand what to say and what not to say, to make them feel comfortable and welcome."

A Chinese immigrant herself, Chen conceived of the idea for the 30-minute-long course four years ago when she was head of the Asian marketing team. She then sat down and wrote it herself. Since then, the course has been rolled out across Harrah's properties, and adopted as mandatory for all new employees in some locations.

The cultural lessons were based on feedback from Asian customers, as well as little things that she observed.

To be polite, casino hosts should present their business card with both hands, for example.

"It's the little details that go a long way," said Chen.

Harrah's Reno's draws most of its visitors from the nearby Bay Area. According to tracked play, about a fifth of its customers are Asian American.

But don't rely on these numbers too much, cautioned Chen. Some Asian players feel that it's unlucky to use the card.

In contrast to its sister properties in Las Vegas, which attract a very international clientele, Harrah's Reno focuses on the domestic Asian American market. Its typical Asian customers are between the ages of 40 and 60, immigrated from Hong Kong or China many years ago, and make a trip to Harrah's as often as twice a month. They like to attend the casino's special events -- concerts, dinners and giveaways -- with their families. But for those making the trip alone, the casino provides daily VIP bus service from San Francisco.   

Once they arrive, they will hopefully find a staff versed in their cultural language -- thanks to Chen -- and feel right at home.

It makes her staff feel good too, Chen said.

"Employees really appreciate it then they know what's good and what's bad," said Chen. "It helps them provide a better service."

"The new second generation holds the key to what will happen to their respective ethnic groups and, to a large extent, to the cities where they cluster."

- Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation by Alejandro Portes and and Ruben G. Rumbaut (University of California Press, 2001) 

Immigration, today, is beginning to look very different than it did a decade or so ago. The flow across the border is slowing and, as authors Portes and Rumbaut emphasised in their 2001 book Legacies, the "immigrant stock" is growing up American.

This presents an entirely new set of challenges for cities, like Los Angeles, that experienced the greatest immigrant influx in the 1990s and are now home to a swelling second generation population. Unlike their parents, these U.S.-born children have both the security of legal citizenship and the natural assimilation of the English language. But, the authors explain, social upward mobility -- the movement toward higher levels of educational attainment and financial status -- is not necessarily guaranteed. 

"Some of the ethnic groups being created by the new immigration are in a clearly upward path, moving into society's mainstream in record time and enriching it in the process with their culture and energies. Others, on the contrary, seem poised for a path of blocked aspirations and downward mobility, reproducing the plight of today's impoverished domestic minorities. The size of the problems of American cities may increase concomitantly, the only difference being that the participants may come from new ethnic quarters. Were this outcome to become dominant among the second generation, a new rainbow underclass would be the prospect facing urban America by the middle of the next century."

Portes and Rumbaut present 12 stories that illustrate the varying experiences of second generation immigrants in America, arguing that, in some cases, a "peculiar paradox" occurs. While a first generation immigrant is driven to seek a better life by escaping the hardship and struggle of his or her homeland, the incentive to succeed differs for the U.S.-born, second generation immigrant. In some cases, the authors state, "greater family economic achievement and security sometimes lead to lower aspirations among secure and acculturated children." By comparison, "legal insecurity and a precarious economic situation spur their ambition."

While comfort is not always necessarily an impediment to aspiration, and struggle not always an incentive for success, the second generation undoubtedly carries the burden of their parents' struggle to find a better life for themselves and their children.

In some cases, this added pressure can be overwhelming. At Crenshaw High School in South Los Angeles, one ninth-grade student with Mexican parents says that his own goals are disputed by his parents who want him to aim higher and work harder in school. He is pushed to achieve high grades, he says, often suffering harsh penalties including physical beatings from his father. Portes and Rumbaut describe the pressure exerted by immigrant parents as a form of "psychological leverage." The children of immigrants are pushed to feel a "sense of obligation" to their parents for the struggles that were overcome in order to afford them life in the United States.

Yet, at the same time, these children also have their own struggles to contend with. In the case of this particular ninth-grader, he is not only a child of the second generation immigrant stock, but he is also trapped in a school system affected by poverty, crime and minimal resources. The opportunity to experience one-on-one learning in classes where his grades continue to slide, such as algebra, is nonexistent. Although his parents dealt with the struggles of traversing across the border, making a new life in a different country in the hope of ensuring security for their child, he now faces his own forms of confinement.

The barriers to social upward mobility still exist, but in a different form.   

In the worst case scenario, parental pressure mingled with the personal stresses of acculturation can lead to embarrassment and rebellion. Self-esteem may plummet, encouraging children to find solace in unsavory social locations, such as gangs, crime or drugs. The opportunities for generational discord are also widened, since the children of immigrants are essentially growing up in an entirely different culture from their parents.

Additionally, social upward mobility for the second generation and their immigrant parents is greatly impacted by political and cultural resistance from outside. As Portes and Rumbaut stress in their concluding chapter, "hostile governmental and societal reception" of immigrants and their children only serves to widen cultural divides, increasing the fear of and from the immigrant stock and their surroundings and impeding academic achievements and aspirations. The immigrant stock then becomes "more pre-occupied with issues of ethnic identity and reassertiveness than with the achievement of high goals through individual effort."

Negative stereotyping then becomes a form of "self-fulfilling prophesy." The new immigrant stock is kept at the bottom of the social ladder, and the progression of social upward mobility is significantly slowed, and perhaps even stunted. 

 

Granted, it's always important to remember who's telling me what, where.

But when the deacon told me the majority of congregants was now Guatemalan, I was all ears (of course, seeing as I had sought him out, I was all ears already, but well).

Little by little, folks ambled in, some older, others with very young children, taking a seat on the pews and listening to the enthusiastic (heartfelt) sounds of a religious crooner.

I hadn't expected the central Seven Day Adventist church on Pico and Hoover to be semi-bustling on a Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m. Shows how much I know about Seven Day Adventists.

When I flagged down a tiny, ancient woman, asking her what the make-up of the congregation seemed to be, she explained the church attracted a predominantly Central American group and if I wanted to know more details, I'd be better served speaking to a deacon.

She introduced me to her son-in-law, Monico, who had been a deacon at the church for years. A Mexican himself, he clarified that the church was changing.

"In the last year alone," he said. "Our congregation has grown to about 1700 people. I would say 70 percent of that number is Guatemalan."

I asked him "why so many Guatemalans in particular," knowing that an answer would likely be couched in terms most favorable to the church.

"They have a curiosity," he said. "They are smart and are willing to see other ways."

He explained those from El Salvador made up the second largest majority in the church as well as that Central American exodus to his congregation and to the other Adventist churches within the county had been at their height this past year.

The deacon emphasized the open nature of the church and its tolerance toward everyone--Catholics, Jews and others. He invited me to return that Saturday in order to meet other congregants and deacons on their holiest of worshipping days (a la Judaism) and on the afternoon before their day of rest.

I agreed and prepared to come back a week and a half later.

Anyone under the age of 18 who is induced by force, fraud, or coercion to engage in a commercial sex act is a victim of sex trafficking.  Such prostitution comes in various forms, such as escort and massage services and erotic dancing.  The U.S. Department of Justice has few figures on the presence of the sex trafficking of minors in the country, but offers the rather loose estimate that some 300,000 youth are "at-risk" of being victims of child prostitution. 

In Las Vegas alone, however, more than 400 prostituted children were identified in a May 2007 street count by Shared Hope International (SHI).  Further, from January 1994 to July 2007, 1,496 DMST victims from 40 states were identified in Las Vegas.  

"Vegas is obviously a hub," said Melissa Mayor, who works at SHI, a non-profit anti-sex-trafficking organization. 

According to SHI, easy access to alcohol and drugs, 24/7 gaming and the hyper-sexualized entertainment industry combined with the large, growing juvenile population contribute to the occurrence of Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking (DMST) in Las Vegas. 

But to Mayor, it's not just the culture of Sin City that make the location ripe for the existence of child prostitution.

"It's so much more than that.  It's built into the cab drivers, the hotel concierges," she said.  It is widely accepted, for example, that cab drivers collect money -- a "referral fee" -- from strip clubs for diverting customers to the establishments.

The U.S. Department of Justice reports that the majority of sex-trafficked youth in America are female, with the average age of entry into prostitution occurring when the victim is 12-to-14 years old.  Further, the department estimates that 75 percent of minors exploited through prostitution are controlled by a pimp. 

In June 2008, hundreds of people were arrested and 21 children rescued during a five-day roundup of networks of pimps who forced children into prostitution.  The 16-city sting -- which included Las Vegas -- was part of "Operation Cross Country" (perhaps an ode to the infamous viral video that documents the exploits of modern-day pimps, "Cross Country Pimping").  Of the 345 people who were arrested, 290 were adult prostitutes. 

During a news conference at the FBI headquarters in Washington after the nation-wide raid, FBI Director Robert Mueller said that 308 pimps and adult prostitutes had been convicted in state and federal courts of forcing youngsters into prostitution.  He also said that 433 child victims had been rescued.

Yet with all the recent attention paid to child sex trafficking and its perpetrators, it's still  incredibly easy to locate a pimp who prostitutes women, and adults seeking sexual relationships with minors.

The second hit after googling "pimpin cross country" (I was looking up "Cross Country Pimping" and had the title wrong...) is the publicly-listed MySpace page for Pimpin' Snooky.  Donning a blue suit and toothy grin in his profile picture, Pimpin' Snooky, 42, writes that he is  a "pimp, street hustler, motivational speaker, and black community leader."  He lists his location as Las Vegas, proclaims to work his "hoes" on the Strip, posts pictures of women he prostitutes, and discuses his illegal activities openly in a video on the site.  His last login date is 4/8/2009.
 

Baccarat rules in Chinese.  Photo used with permission via smartbaccarat's Flickr.


Source: Nevada Gaming Revenue Report.

Baccarat, which draws almost exclusively Asian players, is the second highest grossing table game in Nevada after Blackjack for the fifth year in a row, according to the Nevada State Gaming Control Board.

Nevada casinos rake in more and more revenues from baccarat every year. In 2008, the casinos won $773 million from baccarat tables, compared to $497 million in 2004. By comparison, blackjack tables collected $1.3 billion in 2008, a slight increase from $1.2 billion in 2004.

The state's casinos nearly doubled their baccarat tables in the last five years, from 104 to 194, while the number of blackjack tables declined slightly from 3,260 to 3,044.

Although there is a lack of hospitality and gaming data by ethnicity available to the public, rapidly increasing baccarat play can be viewed as a general indicator of a growing population of Asian gamblers in Nevada, according to William R. Eadington, director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling & Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Casinos are tight-lipped about their marketing stats, especially in this extremely competitive economic environment.

On the hotel side, most casinos have established units dedicated to marketing to Asians and taking care of high rollers and tour groups alike.

"Their casino hosts are staffed by Asians who may not speak English at all," said hospitality marketing professor Billy Bai of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Casinos often look to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas to hire Asian language translators, according to Bobbie Barnes, director of career services at the university's Harrah Hotel College. 

"Especially around Chinese New Year, they look for temporary help with translation," said Barnes.

But Barnes hasn't yet seen very aggressive recruiting of the Asian student population and said that the school's large international student population have many immigration issues to deal with before they can be hired full-time.

The college is the country's largest hospitality program, with a student body numbering approximately 3,000, a quarter of whom are international students mostly from Asian countries.

"The Asian economy is very promising," said Bai. "More disposable income that can be spent freely -- coupled with a benign political environment -- has led to people traveling overseas more freely of their own leisure, which all contributed to booming market."

Marta* didn't go to pre-school. She says that her mother, a native Mexican, didn't speak enough English to arrange it. She says that, in fact, her mother didn't speak any English at all. She didn't complete high school, and no-one in her family has ever attended college. Because of the lack of education in her family, Marta, a ninth-grade honor-roll student at Crenshaw High School, says that she had more catching up to do than most kids. "When I started Kindergarten, I couldn't even write my own name," she says. "I didn't know a lot of stuff. I was just blank."

Now, Marta plans to be a first-generation college student and become a social worker. "I want to help students understand that education is important to make their future better than their parents," she said. "I'm really proud of myself for being on the honor roll. I thought that I would never come this far, to high school. I was thinking that I would be a failure."

Luis*, who sits opposite Marta in class, doesn't think that his education will continue beyond the high school exit exam. "My dad says that I'm not allowed to go to college," he says. "We can't afford it." Instead, Luis hopes to follow in his father's footsteps and become a custom car mechanic. Eventually, he'd also like to be a NASCAR driver. "I'd like to be able to go fast, without the cops chasing me," he says. During the summer, Luis works at his dad's shop, learning the custom car trade. But he has yet to get behind the wheel. First, his dad says, he's got to improve his grades. College may be out of the question, but graduating high school is essential.

How far does the apple fall from the tree?  

Children of immigrants, like Marta and Luis, are a growing population in California. Rather than being newcomers to the state, like their parents were, they are a "homegrown population." They are U.S.-born, and California-bred. Their lives and experiences differ from that of the traditional "immigrant."

"Immigration experts have a special term for homegrown children, calling them second generation residents," reads a report released this week by USC's School of Policy, Planning and Development. "Born in California, or the U.S., these children are U.S. citizens, fluent English speakers, and beneficiaries of California schools."

That being so, the report continues, "recent evidence suggests they are poised for much greater economic success than their parents."

But "economic success" inevitably depends on adequate education levels, and both Marta and Luis attend a school with a drop-out rate of 50 percent. The Los Angeles Unified School District at large, which has a student population made up of more than 75 percent Hispanic children, has been battling severe drop-out rates and low test scores for decades. District-wide, 32 percent of Hispanic children drop out of LAUSD high schools every year, compared to 21 percent across the entire state. And as these children move through the school system, their educational levels actually fall. In second grade, just 18 percent of Hispanic children are considered "below basic" in their English language skills. By tenth grade, that figure has jumped to 66 percent.

The lack of proficiency in vital subject areas like English and math is also significantly higher for students coming from economically disadvantaged households. Although the poverty rate for U.S.-born children and those with legal immigrant parents is practically the same, children of unauthorized immigrant parents are twice as likely to be living in poverty.      

 

*Names have been changed to protect the students and their families.

Roy Shackleton* was fired from his trucking job ostensibly for not having the proper labels on cargo leaving the Los Angeles and Long Beach port complex. The cargo never reached the buyer.

"I said I had nothing to do with placing the place cards," he said. "If the ports release the container, that means the place cards were properly placed. All three checkpoints I went through were checked out."

For a long time, Shackleton said, drivers worked overtime without pay and driven overweight trucks with hazardous materials. They were at-will employees, but they couldn't continue to operate under these conditions, he said. The trucking company solicited employee input into operations, but the practices went unchanged.

Employees began to speak amongst themselves about bringing in the Teamsters. Management caught wind soon after.

"When they got word we were talking to the Teamsters, they [employers] wanted information 'who was the leaders, who's creating this,'" Shackleton said. "Being the type of person I am, they know I was involved."

Employers held one-on-one meetings with employees to disabuse them of unionization, which labor leaders say is typical before an election. Union leaders typically cite this as a major advantage employers hold in that when face with union efforts. Employers can threaten layoffs, plant closings or peer-pressure-packed meetings.

Under current labor law, employers enjoy tremendous advantage controlling the workplace. They have unlimited access to employees and wield tremendous sway should employees trigger an effort to unionize. An election takes place when enough employees decide they want a union, and like in any election, the run up to voting is marked by hostility and retaliation.

What's the solution?

"I think it [EFCA] is something that should've been implemented years ago because of the way employers treat their employees and just out of the fear tactics and the repercussions and the appraisals," he said. "They'll have be responsible for what they're doing. In these companies, they're not trying to be responsible for these issues. The union is actually the body of these franchise of employees who are being treated wrong, or unfair wages, all these issues is what unions are for."

Yet EFCA as it stands faces large obstacles. SEIU chief Andy Stern may have opened the door to compromise with remarks to the Washington Post editorial board. Stern noted additional ways to level the playing field without circumventing the election process., such as shortening the time between elections and stiffer penalties for employer violations.

"No matter what you do, you have to change the election process," Stern said. "Whether it's majority sign up or not, workers have to have a choice about having an election. The bill has to address ... fast elections, eliminating employer behavior and what happens if there are employer violations."

Advocates of labor law reform, be they officials or labor rank-and-file agree that situations like Shackleton's, in his words, "could've been avoided."

Shackleton is working with a labor lawyer seeking putative damages and representatives from Councilwoman's Janice Hahn's office for reinstatement.

*Name was changed. Interview originally conducted by this reporter on assignment with the Daily Breeze.   

Last week Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that the federal government would provide California with $260 million to help update its antiquated water system and finance projects to relieve the state's water woes. And California stands to receive a substantial portion of the $135 million in grants allocated for state water recycling and reuse programs. In essence, California is getting a water bailout.

There's no questioning the fact that California's water system needs the money. And with the recent placement of the Sacramento - San Joaquin Delta as the most endangered river system in the nation by American Rivers, it's apparent that the state needs all the help it can get.

California's massive system of reservoirs, pumps and canals, built a half century ago, was designed for a population half the size of the state's 37.7 million, Salazar said after a helicopter tour of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the Associated Press.

However, the question that begs asking is - will the federal stimulus funds fix the Delta problems?

A 50-year-old jail in downtown Los Angeles may be nearing closing time. The American Civil Liberties Union released a report earlier this month calling the Men's Central Jail "grossly overcrowded," "nightmarish" and "dungeon-like".

According to the Los Angeles Sheriff's department, Men's Central Jail is the largest in the world. It houses 5,000 temporary inmates - and roughly half, the ACLU says, are suffering from mental illness.

The ACLU's report comes after an LA County investigation into the hanging death of 22-year-old John Horton. Horton was found dead in a noose in his cell of Men's Central Jail on March 30. Horton spent more than month in solitary confinement in a dim windowless cell following his drug arrest.

Margaret Winter, Associate Director of the ACLU National Prison Project, said the county must "stop denying basic mental health treatment to those who need it." More than two-thirds of prisoners released end up back in jail, often because of inadequate mental health care or rehabilitation.

The troubles plaguing Men's Central Jail are not uncommon. Prisons are quickly becoming the largest mental health providers in the nation. A 2003 study by Human Rights Watch estimates that somewhere between two and three hundred thousand men and women in U.S. prisons suffer from serious mental disorders. "Many prison mental health services are woefully deficient, crippled by understaffing, insufficient facilities, and limited programs. All too often seriously ill prisoners receive little or no meaningful treatment. They are neglected, accused of malingering, treated as disciplinary problems."1

The PBS program FRONTLINE is turning the spotlight onto mental illness in the prison population with its new film 'The Released' following the lives of mentally ill prisoners as they step foot outside of jail and back into the real world.

Watch a clip from PBS' 'The Released'

PBS says that typically, mentally ill offenders are released from prison with only a bus ticket, $75 and two weeks worth of medication. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression are all common among the prison population and not easily treated without extensive therapy and rehabilitation.

But prisons are being used more and more as nets to catch society's mentally ill who cannot get mental health treatment before they commit a crime. According to Human Rights Watch, "prisoners have rates of mental illness that are two to four times greater than the rates of members of the general public." Prisons are "inadequate" to treat the growing population of the mentally ill.

The documentary tracks the progress of several mentally ill prisoners as they try to live life outside of prison walls.  

California has a troubled history with its mentally ill prisoners. In 1990, mentally ill inmates filed a class action lawsuit alleging that the quality of mental health care provided at most California prisons violated their constitutional rights. In 1995, a California court found that state prisons had been "deliberately indifferent" to the substandard care including "inadequate screenings, understaffing, delays in access to care, deficiencies in medication management and involuntary medication, inadequacy of medical records, inadequately trained staff, improper housing of mentally ill inmates in administrative segregation, and the deliberately indifferent use of tasers and 37mm guns on inmates with serious mental disorders."

The future of California's mentally ill prisoners is still far from decided. The same court case brought in 1990 is still being debated and in February, the three-judge panel tentatively ruled that California must reduce its population by roughly 40 percent.

With the average California prison operating at 190% of what it was designed for - and the majority of its inmates being repeat offenders - providing more mental health care could mean fewer people to treat in the first place. 


1 (Human Rights Watch, Ill Equipped: U.S. Prisons and Offenders with Mental Illness 17 (2003), available at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1003/usa1003.pdf)

  

Utility company MMC wants to transform the existing 44.5-Megawatt power plant, in Chula Vista just outside of San Diego, into a 100-Megawatt peaker plant--meaning the plant will run only during the greatest usage hours.  But the Environmental Health Coalition and others say even if the plant runs during the highest consumption hours, the upgrade will make it more active year round.

California Energy Commissioner James Boyd had formally rejected the plans for the upgrade in the presiding members proposed decision (PMPD)--a viewpoint most residents supported.  Conflict arose since Boyd says the upgrade would not abide by the city of Chula Vista's zoning laws stating that industrial and residential uses need to be separate.

The PMPD says the project is a problem because, "the city's new general plan adopted after the existing power plant was built requires that the siting of power plants and other major toxic emitters be avoided within 1,000 feet of 'sensitive receptors' such as schools and homes," according to the CEC.

But the utility company and other CEC members say those zoning laws were created after the plant was constructed in 2000 and therefore do not apply now--so the upgrade should move forward.

The CEC traveled to Chula Vista to give residents the opportunity to speak before taking the PMPD back for further review. 

The city of Chula Vista was originally opposed to the upgrade project, yet they changed their position the day after this special CEC hearing.

However, given the size of the proposed upgrade, the CEC is the sole authority in the matter. The CEC will take the public comments from the meeting and take them to a future hearing that has not yet been announced.

How does a region adapt when nation-leading population growth for an entire decade comes to a screeching halt in a matter of one year? How does public infrastructure make the adjustment to abrupt drop-offs in property and sales tax revenue base in a state adamantly opposed to taxing income? How does an education system once from opening one new school a month to accommodate the influx of families to massive teacher layoffs and funding cuts across the board?

Opponents of the Sunrise Powerlink are currently waiting to see if their cries to halt the project will be heard.

But the battle is far from over, says the Sierra Club's San Diego Chapter.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is presently deciding whether or not it will re-address its approval of the project, at the behest of organizations like Sierra Club. However, Dave Grubb, a volunteer at the Sierra Club is already anticipating the next step assuming the CPUC rejects their request.

"We have been working so hard for 3 years that we love hearing no," Grubb said sarcastically. "The main event is the lawsuit."

Though Grubb will not confirm whether the Sierra Club will be part of a lawsuit, other organizations like Utility Consumers Action Network (UCAN) said they intend to file against SDG&E.

UCAN, already an intervener in the case, must wait until the rehearing is rejected until they can proceed.

"We have 90 days from the date that the CPUC rejects our application for a hearing," said Michael Shames, executive director of Utility Consumers Action Network.

            The Sierra Club is firm in its belief that the solution to energy concerns lies in more localized production and more modernization. According to Grubb, they also believe the Sunrise Powerlink is merely a way for Sempra Energy to make more money--not a necessity for the people of San Diego. Grubb and the Sierra Club allege the project is a front for the utility to pump energy from Mexico to the LA basin and that the promise to carry renewables was a way to gain public support.

Though the Sierra Club is opposed to the transmission project as a whole, it did have a victory over the routing of the power line. The original, proposed route SDG&E offered up was from the Imperial Valley to San Diego through the Anza Borrego desert. The Sierra Club fought to have Sunrise take a southern route through more populated regions near Interstate 8 avoiding what Grubb calls "sensitive land."

Grubb said it was curious SDG&E proposed a northern route through the desert to begin with and suspected it was a strategic move to funnel energy toward Los Angeles.

"You can see why they want the Northern Route. They're not trying to get to San Diego. They're trying to get to LA," he said. 

Grubb also speculated the northern route was a distraction from the beginning, so that opponents would be grateful for the compromised path. 

            The large renewable project that is affiliated with the Sunrise Powerlink is a Stirling Energy solar farm that is to be built in the Imperial Valley.

"It's total B.S., a sham. Unlikely to ever be consummated at least on scale they're currently pretending," Grubb said of the solar facility.

The Sierra Club fundamentally opposes projects like Sunrise that will disrupt the environment whether it's because of new transmission lines or large scale renewable production sites. Though when asked Grubb had no specific solutions, other than solar panels in urban areas--an idea that has been called not sufficient enough to support the energy needs of a county like San Diego.

"We have enough transmission, but there is a reliability issue," for San Diego said Grubb.

The two lines that feed San Diego are Southwest Powerlink and Path 44, which is a north-south transmission line through California. The pair is a far cry from the seven lines that feed Los Angeles. Grubb conceded that two lines were not enough.  In a situation like the 2007 wildfires that raged through San Diego, both lines that power San Diego were threatened, and additional lines would have added stability to the regions energy needs.

 "So it's a reliability issue that potentially there could be some benefit in additional connections," Grubb said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When representatives from state agency The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority went to China to promote Las Vegas last year, they brought Elvis with them.

They would go to a trade show and make the front page of that city's paper.

"We got more media coverage in China than anywhere else in the world," said agency rep Jesse Davis.

The LVCVA, which is funded by hotel room taxes and public funds, is responsible for marketing Southern Nevada nationally and internationally. It embarked upon its first formal efforts to market to China last July. The agency hired Shanghai-based partner Brand Story to get the word out about Vegas. It hopes that with the country's newly lifted travel restrictions, wealthy travelers will start to view Vegas as an attractive destination.

"We do view China as being among the emerging markets with the most potential business and leisure travel," said Davis.

Tourists and business travelers from China and Hong Kong numbered about 105,000 in 2007, about 6.1% of all international visitors to Las Vegas, according to the LVCVA. The figure puts China at seventh place, tied with France. The figure is a 21% increase over the previous year.
 


By contrast, the LVCVA has had a decade-long presence in the Asian economic capitals Tokyo and Seoul, though its marketing efforts have historically focused on bringing convention business to the city.

Las Vegas hosted over 22,000 conventions and meetings attended by more than 5.9 million delegates in 2008.

So far, the agency has focused on educating the Chinese population about what Las Vegas has to offer. By law, it's not allowed to promote gambling anyway.

"We want them to understand the depth and quality of offerings that are here," said Davis. "We offer far more of a visitor experience in terms of shopping, dining and entertainment."

Brand Story will help create relationships with tour operators.

On the U.S. side, the agency is working to get direct flights between Beijing and Shanghai to Las Vegas. But with the absence of historical data, it can be a hard sell for airlines.

It felt like the gate of an airport.

Children milled about. Some scurried; others cried. Parents fed them cheetoes and seven up to quieten them down. A line of about 40 snaked around the room until those at the end seemed to clump tgether in an indistinguishable morass of bodies and conversation.

The wait seemed interminable. I asked a few of those around me if it was always like this.

"Mondays," they said. "We talk about papers and such."

"Ah," I said.

Not, of course, that they weren't already staring. That I was not Guatemalan was painfully obvious, and I haven't felt so conspicuous in a long time.

But most people had more important business to attend to, and this manic Monday was fraying everyone's nerves. I had an appointment with the consul. Perhaps they did as well.

We were prepared to wait. If this was an airport in training, our flights had certainly been delayed.

Few wanted to talk. People stared ahead in a daze, the purgatory of waiting affecting their ability to be present and gregarious. Ten a.m. quickly became 11, 11, 12. My appointment had come and some times over, but a miniscule number had left the room.

I had to go and come back. It would be the only way. I made a tentative appointment with the consul for Wednesday and took a stash of brochures from every catgory available.

I paged through a pamphlet describing the consulate, another explained "gonorrea" while one delineated the attorneys available to those with linguistic or national status limitations. I pocketed business cards and packets, postcards and inserts. I hoped these would give me a clue into the city's Guatemalan community--into the concerns they had, the issues they dealt with and the internal communication they sustained.

Wednesday: I called the consul.

"The consul is busy," Teresa, the receptionist, said (now, I say receptionist, but that place was chaos. "Receptionist" implies someone intercepting communication in an organized manner in a presumably organized institution). I could not speak to him.

"May I speak to the vice-consul?"

"Absolutely."

I called back, and he could not come either. I called again, nothing. And again...nothing. But Teresa was friendly. Frustration. And I had spoken to no one in depth Monday.

This is not a top-down story...but I think it's important to talk to someone who knows general statistics and demographics and make-up and logistics from within who could presumably give me a better idea of where this could be headed, what does it mean for whom, how, when and why...

I will persist.

Big news for California and its water supply --- Interior Secretary Ken Salazar pledged $260 million in federal stimulus money to help California modernize its outdated water system and ease its water problems.

Salazar and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger went on a helicopter tour of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Wednesday. The federal official saw first-hand California's overtaxed water system of reservoirs, pumps and canals (designed to supply water to only half of the state's 37.7 million population), which were built more than 50 years ago. 

The federal funds will help California deal with the drought and institute an updated system.

"It is time to modernize, it is time to make hard choices and it's time for the federal government to re-engage in full partnership with the 21st century water system for the state of California," he said to the Associated Press.

Salazar plans to use money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to create jobs in California and aid its water supply problems.

"From boosting water supplies and improving conservation to improving safety at our dams, these shovel-ready projects will make a real and immediate difference in the lives of farmers, businesses, Native American tribes and communities across California," Salazar said to Reuters.

Gov. Schwarzenegger also used the tour of the Delta with Salazar to promote his plan to build a peripheral canal around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and more dams. Delta environmentalists are either outright opposed to the canal or believe it requires more research.

Doug Lovell of the Northern California Federation of Fly Fishers says the canal is in the "maybe category" because there are still too many questions that need to be answered with scientific information.

The main question is "what happens to the water quality of the Delta if we change the point of diversion (with the canal)?" said Lovell. Other considerations include the nature of the water deviations like when will it be diverted and how much?

For others like Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla of Restore the Delta, the canal is simply a bad idea.

"Building a 6.5 acre canal will kill off species in the Delta and cause it to salt up," said Barrigan-Parrilla. 

So, although the "bailout" funds are good for California, they also open up a can of worms concerning the best way to solve the state's water shortage problems.

In November 2008, 74 mostly white-collar prisoners were living in group homes in Los Angeles, holding down jobs to pay their living expenses and compensate victims of their crimes.

Now, those 74 are back behind bars. They were sent back to their cells in January after the California prison system was forced to cut $800 million from its budget and the residential job program was cut. But Kimberly Wong, an LA County public defender, says it was the wrong move.

"These kinds of programs are what save the system money," she says. "Why not serve your time at a place where you have a job, pay back restitution fines, and have some money in your own trust account? That will help you reintegrate into society."

Wong gave exactly that argument while testifying Tuesday in Sacramento in support for a new assembly bill designed to reinstate programs like these.

State Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes introduced AB 807 in February to provide a way for more non-violent offenders to work and earn money to pay back court fines and restitution fees to victims. The bill recognizes the difficult battle most prisoners will face upon release. Fuentes writes, "The overwhelming majority of inmates in state prison do not access meaningful job training or other programming while incarcerated and have no immediate employment prospects upon release, which ensures that they will be dependent on government aid."

Job training is often cited as a promising way to keep California's offenders from returning behind bars. Currently, "...of the 125,000 inmates annually released from California prisons, more than one-half will return to prison within two years and more than 70% will return within three years." Jobless ex-prisoners often return to crime because of a lack of employable skills. Keeping Californians away from crime not only means a safer state, but it also saves the prison system money.

Incarcerating one inmate in a California prison now costs the state $46,000 a year, not including substance abuse treatment, mental health programs, educational or vocational training. The California Public Defenders Association says restitution programs cut that cost in half. Fuentes' estimate is slightly more conservative. He writes that "...the cost per day of housing a CDCR inmate in a Restitution Center is approximately $50 compared to $97 per day to house in state prison, which saves at least $17,000 per inmate per year."

The California Assembly agreed and passed AB 807 on Tuesday. The bill modified the eligibility criteria inmates must meet to be accepted to the program. Critics in the CDCR said enough people were not qualifying for the program and beds were being left empty.

AB 807 extends the eligibility requirements to prisoners who have served another term within the past five years. It allows only non-violent, non-serious offenders who don't have a sex conviction.

In an unusual move, the Public Defenders Association was joined in support by unlikely allies. Both the prison guards union (the California Peace Officers Association) and the California Police Chiefs association all signed in support on the bill and the restitution centers.

Wong is hoping the bill will bring more attention to the success of programs like the center.

She is part of a group of lawyers who, along with the CDCR, is involved with a similar residential program for incarcerated women. The Women's Reentry Court Project provides non-violent women who are on parole, or facing a new felony case, a residential program that combines substance abuse treatment, psychiatric care, counseling and education.

"The neatest thing is that their children are involved as well," Wong says. Two children under the age of 11 can live with their mothers as a part of the program. "Many of these women are parents and caregivers to very small children. Letting them be a part of the process is the right thing to do on every level."

The program is funded through a grant with the CDCR and was just renewed for another year. Wong is pleased the program is getting so much support from the CDCR but says it's in their best interest as well. "Frankly, it's a good program for them because it saves them money. There's immediate cost savings and long-term savings. The success rate is 80 percent." 80 percent of women in the program won't be back in jail. Joanne Rotstein, also with the LA County public defenders office, estimates the program has collectively saved 231 years of prison time for the 65 women participating.

Wong says the programs are particularly important for women because she says research shows that they often have different pathways to crime than men. "It's pretty well documented. There are often greater levels of trauma, greater levels of sexual abuse and domestic violence."

Currently, the program is run only in Los Angeles County but Wong hopes the success of the program will mean other models pop up across the state. The cost-saving benefits alone are enough to entice other counties to look at the program. "Because of budget crisis, everyone should be saying 'what can we do to save the state money right now?'"

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California voted Tuesday to reduce its water deliveries across the region by 10% this summer.

The water board has hinted for months that a major reduction was coming down the pipe due to drought conditions (for the past three years) and restrictions on water exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Basically, there is more demand than available supply.

As the water district's general manager, Jeffrey Kightlinger summed it up nicely with - "We're short."

These are the agency's first cuts to residential water users since the early 1990s drought. According to the North County Times, "the agency cut deliveries 17 percent in 1991 and 10 percent in 1977." The cuts will begin on July 1 and last for a year.

And there is more bad news for Southern California residents. In addition to a smaller water allocations, the water rates will increase about 26 percent (on average) on Sept. 21.

"The era of big lawns is over," said Bob Yamada, water resources manager for the San Diego County Water Authority.  "I think we're going to have to make some lifestyle changes with regard to how we use water, and particularly how we use water outside."

The Los Angeles Times explains the new reductions and its penalties:

"The Metropolitan Water District, which imports water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta and the Colorado River and sells it to local water districts, will achieve the reductions by imposing penalty rates. Local utilities that use more than their allocation will have to pay more."

"If Southern CA has been waiting for a signal to implment mandatory conservation...they certainly got it yesterday from the MWD," twittered Ryan Alsop of the Long Beach Water Department.

Yet, the Los Angeles City Council just rejected the LA Department of Water and Power's proposal to increase water rates and face penalties to encourage residents to decrease water consumption by 15 percent. The Council asked for more time to review and vet the proposal. Meanwhile, Long Beach has instituted a successful conservation program (pdf) over 21 months ago. Just last month, it "hit a 10-year low in consumption, or 14% drop in average water use."
 


These are the types of measures that environmentalists concerned about the restoration and preservation of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta have been calling for for years. In fact, Doug Lovell, the Director of the Northern California Federation of Fly Fishers, is all in favor of a concept called "Regional Self-Sufficiency" or "Regional Water Reliability" being orchestrated by the Department of Water Resources.

"And it's promoting the concepts that each area needs to be more self-contained and self-reliant when it comes to using their resources - in particular their stretched water resources in California," said Lovell who believes the movement is underway in Los Angeles.

In addition to water conservation, Lovell cites desalination, reuse of wastewater and the beneficial use of stormwater as ways for areas outside of the Delta such as Los Angeles to become more water self-sufficient. 

"That type of emphasis is going to solve some of the problems created by just exporting the resources from one place to another," said Lovell.

And although water reductions can't solve California's water shortage problems or the issues in the Delta, it is a big part of the answer. According to Lovell, there are three major factors to restore and preserve the Delta ecosystem and create a sustainable water supply. He says the science is fairly clear that (1) water operations have to be changed, (2) toxins need to be controlled, and (3) invasive species need to be controlled.

And the recent Metropolitan Water District's decision to reduce the amount of water available to Southern California shows that water exports from the Delta are a major component of the Golden State's water equation.

"And if I had to put a priority on [factors], I would put the priority on the one that is most contentious -- and that's water operations," said Lovell. "And that involves the quantity and the timing of the water that is exported, diverted or otherwise not allowed to flow through the Delta. It also addresses the issue of where that water is diverted from."

The NCFFF Director says water exports are contentious because it involves people's livelihood directly. Both the state and federal pumping plants export a little over 6 million acre feet a year from the Delta in a normal year. (And Lovell and other environmentalists estimate that of the 6 million acres per foot, 80 percent of that exported water goes to agriculture and helps drive a $25-40 billion irrigated agricultural economy.)

Thus, where the water goes and where the water flows are the major issues of the day. And with water reductions in place, the issue is waking Californians up and hitting them in their pockets.

 The LAX Radisson became the fourth hotel to sign a union contract in Unite-Here's campaign to organize the strip of hotels on Century Boulevard.

The contract gives 160 hotel workers a $2.60 wage increase over the three years of the contract. It also provides free health insurance for families when employees work at least 25 hours.

Combined with union contracts at three other nearby hotels, the contracts will create what labor and civic leaders are calling a "multiplier effect." The contracts will mean hotel workers will earn an extra $12.3 million in wages through 2012 and labor officials estimate more than 66 percent of that will be reinvested and spent in the communities surrounding LAX. The contracts- which cover about 1000 workers in all- will generage about $2.9 million in revenue in the community, labor leaders said.

"Union contract means that I will mean that I will be able to provide for my family better," Ricardo Blanco, a room service worker said. "It will mean that I no longer have to worry about my wife not having medical benefits. I will be able to put money aside for my children in the future."

Card check neutrality was part of the agreement, which essentially means that management would not interfere or retaliate against workers who wanted to form a union.

Across the nation, employers continue to assail unions as job killers. LAX Radisson owner Peter Dumon said that happy workers means happy customers.

"Our general take on business is being a union hotel is good for business," he said. "We want to limit turnover of our employees because we invest a lot of training. We have a corporate philosophy that people don't enjoy serving others aren't going to be good in this business and aren't going to take care of our customers."

Dumon said the hotel owners resisting union activity may be "short sighted."

"In our industry, there's not a lower wage you can find overseas," he said. "The knee-jerk reaction that unions are bad to me is is untrue. The challenge we've got in this country is people disagree on facts, and that's wrong. There are things that have worked time and time and time again and this is one of them. This is going to good for our hotel...It's in our interest as businessmen to have a long-term labor force here."

In the press conference, Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl said Dumon's position was "enlightened." Dumon and Unite-Here Local 11 President Tom Walsh saw this as a business win-win.

"He's just a smart business man, because it's smart to do what was done today, especially in the service industry where what you're selling is not the design of the lobby... but the experience people have," Walsh said. "If people are coming to work at poverty jobs... it's hard for them to really do good work. On the other hand, if they are excited and love their job, then they can do just so much better." 

 

Walsh also praised Dumon for working with a union is "a courageous thing for him to do."

 

"A lot of other owners, I'm sure are criticizing him for it. But he is setting an example," Walsh said.

Union growth was spun as the best kind of economic stimulus by civic, labor and hotel officials.

"This continues my commitment to put a conference center here on Century Boulevard so this becomes a destination point and not just a transit point," Rosendahl said. "The other side has to realize where we are today needs a lot of economic stimulus and commitment from government. Unions provide the vehicle to create the strength of the middle class."

Children born to unauthorized immigrants are twice as likely to live in poverty. A report released by the Pew Hispanic Center shows that the demographics and geography of the immigrant stock is shifting. In California, in-bound immigration is coming to a halt, while a new generation of U.S.-born children are struggling to break free from the cycles of poverty and under-education experienced by their parents. I spoke with Fernando Guerra, director of The Center for the Study of Los Angeles and professor of political science at Loyola Marymount University, about the changing face of the immigrant stock in Los Angeles.

Further reading: The New York Times: "Remade in America: Struggling to Rise in Suburbs Where Failing Means Fitting In"

This interview has also been published on Neon Tommy.com

Geoff Schumacher tries hard to quash the popular and racy mythology of Las Vegas in his book, "Sun, Sin & Suburbia," and to a point he succeeds. After reading his book, you walk away convinced that Las Vegas owes as much to circumstance and droll city planners as it does to its sexier patrons, the Mafiosi. Unfortunately, you also walk away feeling had, as though old pal Vegas is really more monotonous suburb than seedy, sun-drenched metropolis.

Schumacher may have his facts straight, but certainly he doesn't have them in order, and that's an immediate problem. He lacks a consistent narrative, the chapters being divided up by theme rather than chronology. I have nothing against organizing history into themes, per se, but plenty of compelling and deeply researched histories have managed to depict events in the order they unfolded (go figure). Instead, Schumacher has loosely assembled a mass of barren facts and vomited them on the reader's doorstep. The result is a clunky, slipshod piecing-together of factoids that reads like a clunky, slipshod piecing-together of factoids.

The real story of Vegas never gets told here. Schumacher hints at a lot of books that have some very interesting, if not entirely accurate, depictions of the city's origins. He refers to them really by way of clarifying his oh-so-very diplomatic middle position. "Yes, mobsters played a role in the making of Vegas. Yes, the casinos are an important part of the Vegas economy. But a lot of smart city leaders and developers were important, too. Haven't you visited the suburbs?" he seems to be saying.

I admire Schumacher's gumption in telling us everything we probably never wanted to know about Vegas, but while he does everything in his power to pull your eyes from the glitz and glamour--like a parent trying to steal his child's attention away from the boob tube--what you really want to do is look over there, where the action is. You want to wander away from this tour of the bland and the banal, in which you hear the guide saying, "Over here is where there used to be a K-Mart. There was no road here 50 years ago." (There was no road anywhere if you go back far enough.) "That didn't work out so well," he continues. "Now they're putting up a Wal-Mart, they've expanded the strip mall to include a walkway and a beautiful fountain, and they've installed some statues."

No, none of these are direct quotes from the book. But this is:

"In the late '90s, the intersection of Craig Road and Martin Luther King Boulevard became the northern valley's retail center, home to two major discount retailers (Wal-Mart and Target), three supermarkets (Albertson's, Vons and Wal-Mart), a home-improvement store (Home Depot), an office supply store (Office Max), drugstores (Rite-Aid, Sav-On) and a range of restaurants (Applebee's, Outback Steakhouse), shops and banks."

Wait, there's more:

"The corner also has the only Starbucks coffee shop within a several-mile radius."

So much for the wedding chapels and the prostitutes (which, to be fair, he does mention). And I haven't even started on the long, glowing reviews of the Irvine-esque master-planned communities, which read more like travel brochures than works of historical non-fiction. Come on, Schumacher, you're not here to sell me a house in Summerlin, are you?

Despite all his insistence on downplaying the sexier aspects of Vegas history, Schumacher is forced to admit that Sin City was built on and will continue to depend on gambling, not just a little, but a lot. He practically mutters it under his breath, begrudgingly: "Downtown is unlikely to survive in any desirable form without the casinos serving as the primary economic engine," he writes at one point. In the introduction, he writes that "Las Vegas is still the only major city that depends almost entirely on gambling for its livelihood. Gambling, along with the accompanying attractions, remains the linchpin of the economy."

His major motivation, presumably, is to show that the natural evolution of the city's recreational entertainment industry owes as much to demographics and pop culture trends as it does to the big movers and shakers now immortalized in films like "Casino." I can accept that. City planners and casino developers will have to keep outdoing themselves in this city that only lives by constantly reinventing itself to please the consumer. Yet he fails to convince me, in any case, that the real history of Vegas isn't the history of the casino industry, after all, or that it wouldn't be what it is today without all its lively and sinister and mad characters dragging the city with them or being swept away themselves.

Ironically, the most compelling parts of Schumacher's book are its quirky tales about those very same people, who came to the table to play their hands at the card game of creation--Howard Hughes, Steve Wynn, Bugsy Siegel, William Bennett, Hank Greenspun, Meyer Lansky--some who won, some who lost, but all who became part of history (unless you intentionally write them out). That's right, history, not a laundry list of street corners, strip malls and neighborhoods. I don't mind reading about a neighborhood if you have really captured its essence, but that probably means spinning a good yarn. In making his point, Schumacher neuters Las Vegas.  

In comparison, read "The Devil's Highway" and see how author Luis Alberto Urrea brings a scruffy patch of desert to life. The place as he describes it inhales life and exhales ghost stories, as you'll notice every place does if you listen close. Schumacher simply tunes out the human whisper in favor of mechanical facts. His neighborhoods have no souls. They are simply lists. But where Urrea, blessed like Geppetto, took a pair of shoes or a belt buckle and magically transformed them into living, breathing characters, Schumacher throws his facts into the wood chipper, murdering Vegas in the process.

Instead, Schumacher only hints at the vigor and human drama that went into building the gambling Mecca of the United States. He hints at it and then says, "Oh, but you don't want to hear about that." Yes I do, thank you very much! Perhaps the paper trail of new buildings and city zones will be interesting to some, but I think it safe to assume that most people would rather get to know the life of the city, and the lives of those who helped to build it.

Maybe the history of Vegas is the history of an adult Disneyland in the making, but Schumacher doesn't even manage to get that across.  "Sun, Sin & Suburbia" succeeds neither as comprehensive overview nor as compelling human history. So, why then should anyone bother to read it? Better to stick to the many enticing works mentioned in the appendix, which may be the most useful part of the entire book.

(City Center Web site)

More than 8,500 construction and 12,000 hotel, restaurant and casino workers' jobs are at risk of disappearing as the fate of the largest development in Las Vegas and the only major casino hiring in the last three months may be in limbo.

News organizations reported this week that partners MGM Mirage and Dubai World were considering placing the $8.6 billion Strip development City Center under bankruptcy, sources have confirmed. Australian gambling magnate James Packer was weighing a stake to keep the project from shutting down, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The complex is scheduled to open in phases starting late this year.

Those looking for entry-level positions are worried that City Center's bust means they won't be able to land a job before year's end. Luxury casinos typically hire staff with experience from other high-end establishments, which then creates job openings for employees at casinos the next tier down, and so on. The process takes a few months to flow down the chain to smaller casinos at the edge of town, which are willing to take those with little work experience.

The mega-resort's plight has come to symbolize Las Vegas' struggles in a global recession. The Strip's gaming revenues are in the midst of the worst annual decline on record. And Southern Nevada saw a record 10.1 percent unemployment rate in February, according to the state's Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation.

"If City Center opens, it would say we're on our way back," said Bill Thompson, gaming expert and professor of public administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "I think it's going to take at least another year for the city's economy to recover." 

MGM Mirage and Dubai World must come up with $800 million before lenders will give a $1.8 billion credit facility that would fund the project's completion, but the United Arab Emirates government-owned company sued MGM Mirage last month, claiming mismanagement and wanted out of further financial commitments. The U.S. company hired bankruptcy lawyers and was forced to inject an emergency $200 million to keep construction going.

At the project's unveiling in November 2004, City Center was called the nation's most expensive privately-financed construction. It promised to change how people think of Vegas.

What have the Chinatowns in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Honolulu meant to each city and to America? And how does the newly developing Chinatown in Las Vegas figure into the landscape?

In American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods (Simon & Schuster), to be published August 2009, former Travel + Leisure editor Bonnie Tsui follows the lives of several generations to explore the identity specific to the Chinatown experience.

She answered some of my questions via email.

Q: What role does Chinatown play in the Asian American community? How is that changing?

BT: Chinatown has been the first stop for many Chinese immigrants to the U.S. over the last century and a half, for many reasons: economic, cultural, linguistic, filial. The Chinese were the first and most prominent Asian group to establish itself in the U.S., and their communities offered protection against the racism of the wider world.

In more recent decades, as other waves of Asian immigrants came to the U.S., Chinatown became more of a pan-Asian gathering place -- for example, a Thai or Vietnamese arrival could also find familiarity among other Asians. For poor working-class Chinese immigrants, it does remain a place of refuge, but educated Chinese are able to bypass Chinatown -- they have no reason to move there. And as more generations of Asians assimilate, Chinatown acts as a cultural touchstone for those American-born.

Q: What are some qualities that different U.S. Chinatowns share? You write that Las Vegas Chinatown represents a new generation of Chinatowns. How so? What makes this new generation different?

BT: The traditional settlers of U.S. Chinatowns are Cantonese from Guangdong Province. Cantonese/Toisanese is still widely spoken in the oldest Chinatowns, but the latest wave of Chinese immigration has brought in immigrants from all over mainland China. Given the variety of dialects, Mandarin has become more widely used, since it is the common dialect of all China.

Las Vegas Chinatown represents a new breed of Chinatown in that it was founded around a retail establshment; in the last 15 years, however, it has taken on many characteristics of the old traditional neighborhood -- besides being a place to shop and run errands, it fulfills an important need as a social and cultural hub. There is even a Chinese newspaper that is
published in Chinatown Plaza, and an annual Chinese New Year festival.

Many new Chinese arrivals to the Las Vegas area have gravitated to Chinatown Plaza and the "Chinatown Strip" that has sprung up around it; some even move to the apartments behind the mini-malls to have a sense of community, to be closer to all that is familiar: food, shopping, language.

Q: How are these differences between the older and younger generation of Chinatowns indicative of larger social or economic trends, within the U.S., or the Asian American community?

BT: Residents of older Chinatowns tend to be working-class and do not speak English well; residents who gravitate to the new-school retail-based Chinatown in Las Vegas and other cities are of varying economic groups; many are wealthy, speak English well, and live where
they want. It speaks to the continuing (and growing) economic achievement of Asian Americans in the U.S.

The vast majority of people drive, not walk, to these next-generations Chinatowns to take part in the cultural experience, whether it's eating at a restaurant or shopping for groceries. It tends to be less of a residential space and more of a commercial one.

But the two generations of Chinatowns, interestingly enough, do dovetail: older Chinatowns, as they lose residents, have tried to attract more business and visitors with commercial events, fairs, and festivals; the newer Chinatowns, as more people move in, drawn to the retail conveniences, start to feel more like actual communities.

Nestled on the northeastern corner of Wilshire BLvd. and Lucas Ave. (a capillary several blocks east of Macarthur Park and just next to Los Angeles' Good Samaritan Hospital) lies the "Guatemalan House of Culture."

Its founder, a journalist and Guatemalan ex-pat, describes it (originally in Spanish) as "a meeting point for the Guatemalan to go in order not to lose his or her identity in a new country."

He would, perhaps, have liked something of the sort to have existed when he first arrived.

Byron Vasquez left Chiquimula, Guatemala in 1974, feeling anathema for the politics of the country as well as any party that could and did crop up there.

"Guatemala was a country governed by the military," he said. "It's the inheritance of an unjust war, and a consequence of the United Fruit Company's presence within the country."

Opening the House of Culture in 1979, he explained he wanted to give the already burgeoning Guatemalan community (many, leaving for similar reasons Vasquez, others, more often uneducated, escaping what amounted to a barren landscape unlikely to ever give them enough to eat, let alone on which to make a life) a place bereft of religion or politics that could, at the same time, "promote cultural values."

Vasquez' institution offers marimba lessons and art classes, and he boasts that no less than 65,000 visit the place a year.

He indicated the community is relatively tightknit--even if 22 indigenous dialects may create internal divides between those comprising the group.

"At the end, we're all Guatemalan," he said.

It is, however, inevitable that there be a sort of schism amongst countrymen who do not speak the same language. Moreover, he explained that that schism translated to the Guatemalan's relationship to other immigrant communities.

"There's a lot of jealousy coming from other groups--Mexican and Salvadorian--regarding our closeness as a group," he said. "And when there's no Spanish shared [between indigenous Guatemalans and other Central American immigrants], what do they all have in common?"

Vasquez writes for the LA-based Guatemalan news site guatemalaenusa.net, and clarifies that it makes the most sense there be a publication like this solely geared towards Guatemalans here.

"Los Angeles has, what, 350,000 Guatemalans?" he began. "California has 1,000,000 Guatemalans? They need news."

I do not yet know how accurate those numbers are, but if they are anywhere near them, that's quite the community.

He added "And that's thousands less than there were here five years ago. Many have been deported."

***

I do not yet know where this is going...how the community will illuminate demographic shifts amongst Guatemalans in the southwest (besides the fact that it is a visible community, it is different than other Central American communities, is usually ignored and/or disparaged both by Americans and other Spanish-speaking groups and that there may be fewer here than there were five years ago, still amounting to a huge number of people from a small country having left it to settle elsewhere) and what that says about the group about the subject in the larger sense--what it means--...but I think speaking to Vasquez was a good start.

He's acquainted with many of the people within the community--from his work for the Web site, but especially as the head of the House of Culture, a common visiting ground for these folks.

I will be scouring the site, speaking to him again and visiting the House of Culture.

(Onward, to the consulate.)

USC's Energy Institute head says the next frontier in the race to increase renewable energy production is what land to use for these new projects.

"Land use I predict is going to be the issue," said Dr. Donald Paul, executive director of the USC Energy Institute. "For renewables to get big enough, to make a difference, they're going to take up a lot of land."

As more companies, utilities, and consumers look toward renewable energy projects, the question of where to build them will quickly follow. Paul said there will have to be "tremendous growth and land use to reach 20 percent," renewable capacity, which is California's standard it hopes to meet by 2010.

            San Diego Gas & Electric's Sunrise Powerlink project, now set to move forward, was proposed almost four years ago but has faced delays because of debates over land use and subsequent environmental impact.

The project exemplifies three conflicting forces: first, that the growing demand for electricity requires more generation, which most agree needs to come from renewables; second, residents close to large-scale projects object to their "backyard" being invaded; and third, it is likely if the project is built in a remote area environmentalists will undoubtedly object.

The rush for renewable generation with the help of tax incentives, have resulted in 170 applications for wind and solar projects pending with the Bureau of Land Management. The projects would cover a total of 1.8 million acres in the state, according to Mike Pool, the BLM California's state director. The BLM oversees 256 million acres--more land than any other Federal agency. And one of the agency's responsibility's is to manage energy production on these lands as well as other public resources.

Conversely, Senator Diane Feinstein recently announced her effort to protect the desert land of California. Feinstein is preparing legislation to preserve 800,000 acres from the Mojave Desert to Joshua Tree. The area includes wildlife habitats and animals that could be in harmed should a energy project be constructed. Within the plan, the section of land would become a national monument.

It appears Feinstein would want it both ways, she claims to be a supporter of renewable energy while this new proposal has prompted critics to accuse her of being a "Not In My Backyard" sympathizer.

Time may become a key issue for Feinstein's legislation since in January the BLM announced it will implement four new Renewable Energy Action Team offices (REAT). REAT is a partnership between the BLM, California Energy Commission and California Department of Fish and Game to create a "one stop permitting process" and streamline the procedure for those seeking approval for renewable projects for lands including the Mojave Desert, according to the governor's office. The new offices are supposed to cut down the application time by 50 percent.

And if more projects are popping up for approval, it's inevitable there needs to be more land to accommodate them. This idea counters the thinking that smaller, more localized renewable projects--such as solar panels on rooftops--are a viable solution to renewable energy. But most energy experts agree large renewable projects will be needed to meet growing energy demands.

"If you're going to make it work you have to make it big," said Paul. "Issue of land use and scale is a crucial issue."

Here is a look at proposed solar projects in the California desert:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many of California's troubled children find themselves poised on the edge of society - balancing between lives in a detention facility and returning to the communities where they came from.

Detention facilities designed to keep kids out of society in punishment for their crimes can also keep them disconnected from any positive influence in their lives.

Three residential detention centers in Los Angeles County alone handle a population of between 1,500 and 1,800 juvenile offenders a day.

The L.A. County Probation Department's Detention Services Bureau provides behavioral management and counseling for the most troubled of these children. Residential Treatment camps for 2,200 kids are spread out between 13 locations across the county.

But caseworkers at the Youth Law Center in San Francisco say the programs offered aren't doing enough to improve the chances of success for kids in detention. Carole Schauffer is the executive director of the YLC. She says the rehabilitative services offered are not adequately directed toward minors. She says counties should think of them as "habilitative" services instead of rehabilitative.

"I would think of them like that because they're just kids," she say. "They haven't even gotten to the point of being rehabilitated because they haven't lived as adults yet. They have to be habilitated."

Schauffer's organization litigates cases to improve the conditions in county facilities, mainly in California. She says the two main issues that need to improve for minors in county detention are education and access to family and community.

In Los Angeles, the responsibility for educating the county's young offenders falls to the LACOE, the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which employs roughly 240 teachers. The Youth Law Center recently threatened the LACOE with litigation claiming they were not providing enough hours of school a week for youth in detention.

"LA is a good example where lots of kids were being kept out of schools for the convenience of the probation department," Schauffer says.  "Schauffer's law office claims probation officers wanted to keep kids separated to reduce the possibility of gang violence. She claims that led to their school hours being cut. "So rightly or wrongly they ended up giving kids only a few hours of school a week. We negotiated that and resolved that issue. Now they have a regular school day."

In 2008, LA county supervisors admitted that students attending schools in probation camps were not receiving an adequate education. High school age students in these probation camps average a fourth-grade reading level and fifth-grade math. Supervisors proposed turning several of the probation camp schools into charter schools.

There has been a lot of praise for individual teachers who manage classrooms full of troubled kids, and Schaeffer acknowledges what a difficult job it must be. The problem is not with the faculty, but with the lack of diversity in the types of courses offered. "There's often not adequate bilingual or special education and there's often not adequate linkage to these schools where they will be released so they're off track.

Schauffer recommends counties make more of an effort to connect students with the schools they will be attending when they are released from detention. Keeping students separated from their regular schools can mean that it's more difficult for students to pick back up where they left off.

To try to make the transition easier, the Youth Law Center has set up two pilot programs in Fresno, Calif., and Reno, Nev.

"We developed a program where the students are all on the same computer system, they're sharing information. We start to enroll kids before they leave, figure out where they're going to go, figure out if the program is tracking them."

The program has been running for almost three years and Schauffer says it has been successful. The program is being used as a pilot to determine if keeping kids more connected to their home schools will improve success rates for kids reintegrating into their communities.

The Youth Law Office, in partnership with Georgetown University, also started pilot programs to help connect juvenile offenders, who also happen to be parents, with their children. The program is now run in four California counties, San Bernardino, Fresno, Orange and Yolo, and allows incarcerated teens to visit with their children and to learn how to play with their children better.

"What you see in most facilities is if you are a parent you can't see your child except on very unusual occasions or as a reward for good behavior. Some people have some parenting classes but we need to try and strengthen those relationships that are healthy and will motivate them for good."

Schauffer argues that keeping juvenile offenders connected to their communities will mean they have a higher chance for success once they are released. Instead of only allowing parental visitation, as some counties do, she advocates letting siblings and extended family participate in the lives of incarcerated youth.
 
"You take kids away for a substantial period of time from anybody who might be a healthy influence or a healthy incentive, and place them in with other kids that have also been in trouble. Logically, that's not what you would do with your child. Say, 'Oh he's getting in a lot of trouble. Let's see how many other people that are getting in a lot of trouble I can put him away with and I won't see him at all and see how it works out.'"

When headed to downtown Las Vegas to connect with the human trafficking division at the Salvation Army, I was struck by how the homeless situation mirrored the infamous "tent city" era of Skid Row.  There were five solid blocks lined with tents, some with three people inhabiting only 5x5 feet of space.  There were many wheelchairs, single men, and even a pregnant woman milling about -- pale white belly exposed because her t-shirt was too small.  A loud argument broke out in the middle of the street, but few paid attention.  The sun was hot, the air was dry.  And there they sat, on cartons and curbs.

Why were there so many homeless people here? Aside from the close proximity of the social services buildings across the street, I didn't know the answer...the real reason why these people didn't have jobs or homes or places to go.  So I walked down the row of tents until someone beckoned me to come over.  And I met Eddie Arzola, a 46-year-old political refugee from Cuba.

Eddie didn't look like he was homeless.  The English soccer jersey he wore was a bright, fresh-from-the-store white.  His black track pants fell stylishly over his blue and red Chiva sneakers.  He was clean-shaven with short hair.  He didn't smoke cigarettes, declining my offer of a Marlboro Light.

Eddie sat on a plastic milk crate in front of the tent he shared with two other Cuban men.  One was napping inside the shelter on top of a sleeping bag.  The other bummed a cigarette and wandered off down the street.  Next door a lone Chinese man squatted down on the cement in front of his tent while smoking.  "He doesn't talk to anybody," Eddie said of his neighbor.

At the age of 17, Eddie came to America.  It was 1980, and Jimmy Carter had just signed the Refugee Act, bringing U.S. immigration laws in line with United Nations protocol by defining a "refugee" as a person unwilling or unable to return to his or her country of origin because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinions. 

Fidel Casto's response to the law was to allow any Cuban who wished to emigrate to board boats at the Port of Mariel.  Five months later Castro closed the port after 125,000 Cubans fled the Communist nation.  This mass influx of Cubans into the States led to a Presidential order in the same year to classify the new immigrants (along with immigrants from neighboring Haiti) as Cuban/Haitian Entrants, guaranteeing any Cuban or Haitian political asylum seeker the same benefits granted to refugees.

"They put me in that boat, and I come over," Eddie said of leaving his homeland and making it to Miami, where his grandparents lived.  "Twelve hours, bad weather."

Eddie's story is one you don't hear too often.  Today's headlines are filled with tales of undocumented immigrants allegedly draining our resources and jobs.  But what about legal immigrants who face hurdles to employment and issues such as homelessness?

"We're legal, we do nothing wrong," Eddie said when asked about Las Vegas' assistance to people in need.  "People from the church feed you.  They give you clothes.  The city comes over here once in a while to clean.  They want to throw you out but they can't."

City policy doesn't always seem on board with the best interests of the homeless.  In 2006, the Las Vegas City Council voted to make it illegal to give food to a group of 25 or more homeless people in a public setting.  "You can feed pigeons, but you can't feed the homeless," said a guard at the nearby Clark County welfare building who declined to be identified because he is not permitted to talk to the press.  But that law doesn't stop people from doing it anyways.  While talking with Eddie, a gray car parked at the end of the street, and dozens of people lined up for free sandwiches in plastic baggies.

"They come by and give food," Eddie said of the good Samaritans who regularly help the needy in downtown Las Vegas.  "The cops chase them away."

A senior Democratic leadership aide confirmed Senate Democrats will not compromise right now on a labor law that has seen several Democratic senators abandon ship last week.

Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Blanche Lincoln will not be a part of the 60 votes necessary to bring the Employee Free Choice Act to the Senate floor, they said separately last week.

However, two freshmen Sens. Mark Udall and Mark Warner said they would vote on cloture, but remained mum whether they would part of a 51 vote majority necessary to make the bill into law.

Advocates say the Employee Free Choice Act will facilitate union organizing. It would allow employees to decide what method to create a union, instead of employers making the choice for them. There is also mandatory government arbitrartion provision in the bill as it is currently written. Detractors said the bill is a job-killer and will undermine employer's hold on the workplace.

"We remain committed to passing Employee Free Choice Act and will work with both Democrats and Republicans to do so," the senior Democratic aide said.

A spokeswoman for the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee said a timeline for the bill is "unclear as of now."

Labor insiders reported that lawmakers are using the spring recess to hash out a compromise that would require "dual-purpose-like cards," which would offer employees a choice of selecting the union through card check or an election.

Whole Foods, Starbucks and Costco have proposed a deal that would see labor law reformed with stiffer enforcement, but without majority signup and arbitration provisions.

Meanwhile, AFL-CIO has forged a new alliance with seven former member unions and the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the U.S. The new National Labor Coordinating Committee will handle important national issues and could be the first step for the breakaway Change to Win Coalition to come back into AFL-CIO. 

Labor officials have kept mum on EFCA markup, but labor observers said demand for labor law reform is larger than when the Carter administration reforms died in the Senate almost 30 years ago.

"The bottom line with this - old fashioned collective bargaining, that's over," Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at UCSB, said. "It's over because everything is political. The really crucial things are the regulations of government. The zoning laws, reimbursements for Medicare these determine wage levels."

Many observers have said they are recoiling at the level of intransigence coming from both big labor and business. "I don't think a compromise will take place," Lichtenstein said. "Business doesn't want stronger trade unions and the Blanche Lincolns go along with them."

It's a dramatic departure from the employer-employee relationship that has evolved in Las Vegas, where hotel owners have come to live with unions, and rely on them to enhance custormer service.

"You can have long periods of time when unions and employers get along and Las Vegas perfect example," he said. "When unions are strong, there's no conflict. Hotels compete with each other for who has best restaurants. They don't compete on wages. If you have industry that is partially unionized like hospitals or retailers, then you have bitter conflict because those that are unionized say they are at a 'tremendous disadvantage' and those in the crosshairs say 'this is the last thing we want.' Las Vegas is classic example of taking wages out of competition."

This week the American Rivers released its America's Most Endangered Rivers reports and lists the Sacramento - San Joaquin Delta in California, which nearly 25 million Californians depend on for drinking water, in the number one spot. Thousands of farmers as well as the commercial and recreational fishing industries also depend on California's single most important natural resource, according to the report.

American Rivers claims that this Delta is in bad shape because of the "outdated water supply and flood management systems have put at risk the ecosystem and thousands of Californian families and businesses that depend upon it." The report also cites years of mismanagement, neglect and conflict as part of the Delta's problem.

The Los Angeles Unified School District supports the majority of immigrant and low-income students in the city. But as budget cuts and teacher lay-offs threaten to decrease resources and increase class sizes, students from struggling communities could be most vulnerable.

***

I guess it all comes down to motive.

Caught somewhere in that large, hazy ether dividing "novel" from "textbook," Geoff Schumacher's Sun, Sin & Suburbia, an alliteratively titled dissection of his adoptive hometown, Las Vegas, can be effective depending on the experience you may seek to glean from its pages.

Should you wish to immerse yourself in a work able, with its vivid descriptions, to propel you to the place, make you feel the city's scorching sun, or face the sprawling urban-bound suburbia neighboring that sinful center strip, you will not have found it here.

But should you approach it in hopes of encountering what seems like a thorough introductory breakdown of the many faces Las Vegas daily wears that is, at the same time, readable, Schumacher's work will present an option into which you may delve.

Logically divided into chapters that trace the city's history while leading up to its future and potentially exponential growth, Schumacher methodically accounts for background while writing from a personal perspective that serves the dual purpose of lending him a transparent credibility that also makes his work more human.

His prose clear, each of those chapters helpfully parsed into segments (e.g. Chapter Seven's "North Las Vegas: Rags to Riches," inclusion of sub-headings "Eldorado," "BLM bonanza," "Downtown," "Origins" and "Closing the Gap."), Schumacher hands his readers a work that may be approached without the kind of trepidation that often accompanies opening an academic tome.

If, at certain points, the reader must ask herself "why go through this? What connection do I have to a wretched city?" S,S&S will assuage those doubts by illuminating the larger role this most idiosyncratic metropolis will play in, say, the Southwest.

Following an explanation of how Vegas differs from other cosmopolitan centers--a variance far from difficult to perceive--Schumacher raises the essential issue that

Greg Schumacher's dry and somewhat tiresome history of Sin City suffers from one major problem: a singular perspective.

A native of Las Vegas, Schumacher presents a lovingly detailed account of the city's tremendous growth in the last half-century, from first casino to open on the Strip (El Rancho Vegas) in 1941 to the glittering gambling mecca it is today. We meet mega-hoteliers and real estate proprietors and witness their projects succeed and fail, but we are told nearly nothing about the masses who spill into the city every day, trying their luck or looking for jobs. Latinos, who literally built Vegas and comprise more than a quarter of the city's population, get but a couple quick mentions. Schumacher briefly acknowledges the niche Hawaiian tourist market that has become the lifeblood of Boyd Gaming, but ignores the considerable rise of the Asian community. And blacks, none at all. A people's history this is not.

What began as a tiny outpost valued for its water and grass, Las Vegas got lucky when Senator William Clark of Montana routed the railroad through the city in 1904. By the 1940s, casinos along Fremont Street downtown were flourishing as illegal gambling joints were pushed out of other American cities.

In 1941, it was so costly to break into the Fremont Street market that California hotel operator Thomas Hull decided to set up his El Rancho Vegas on Los Angeles Highway, along the road to downtown. Within five years, it was joined alongside by a Western-themed hotel-resort and the glamorous Flamingo. This became the Strip, and the rest is history.

Schumacher is astute when he concludes that the market dictates where and when development occurs in Las Vegas. As illustrated by the city's various failed attempts to revive downtown, no place in Vegas is likely to survive without the casinos serving as the primary economic engine. But Schumacher often touches too lightly upon prevailing economic and political conditions, in Nevada, the U.S. as a whole, and, of increasing importance, globally.

As the current U.S. recession deepens, the Strip saw its gaming revenue drop 15 percent in January, extending the worst annual decline on record. Casinos have shed thousands of jobs. [Bloomberg]

Looking for fresh blood, Vegas casinos have intensified their efforts to tap into the huge middle-class Asian market. The Chinese, especially, love to gamble. Taking a cue from the success of Macau, Vegas is increasingly catering its entertainment, food, and games to Asians. A former Portuguese colony, the Chinese territory has long been dependent on gambling to survive. Its government in 2002 opened the market to international gaming companies, and Vegas casinos have rushed in to capitalize. Gaming revenue in Macau has more than doubled since then, to about $1 billion a month in 2008. The Wynn Macau opened in 2006; the MGM Grand and the $2.4-billion Venetian Macao Resort Hotel both opened in 2007. [Canada Business]

Schumacher writes in the concluding chapter, "The community thrives on growth. It's addicted to it. The boom-and-bust mentality that has characterized Nevada history continues to pervade the thinking in Las Vegas political and business circles." If he had looked at the moguls in the same way as the Latino construction workers, African cab drivers, and Asian card dealers -- as people driven by greater market forces, he might have given us a deeper understanding of his beloved home.

The book "Sun, Sin & Suburbia" made me feel completely unoriginal.  I had always thought my family and I were cool when we went to Las Vegas and the Hoover Dam in 1995.  I was only 14 and remember how badass I thought it was that the Elzers were hanging out in Vegas.  We stayed at The MGM and I was able to able to play at the amusement park while my parents played in the casino.  

After reading the comprehensive history of Vegas by Geoff Schumacher, however, I found out that my parents were merely following course and taking their children to the revamped "family friendly" version of Vegas.  How pedestrian.

The history and evolution of Vegas is fascinating and Schumacher provides in-depth detail to each stage of the city's development.   As a fan of the current strip in all its grandeur, the stories of how the casinos came to be were fascinating.  Like Billy Wilkerson, who had the idea to showcase the casino and not let the gamblers see daylight.  And after a development plateau in the 50's, "the ingenious solution was to turn Las Vegas into a convention mecca."

The buildup of the outlying suburban areas was interesting though by the fourth comprehensive description of a neighborhood, it was getting to be a bit much.  The impact of the development was lost in all the details.  Things like costs of acreage and federal laws that allowed the purchase, all became too complicated to follow.  The attention paid to the details did however prove that Vegas is much more than the Strip.  

What I love about the story of how the modern day Vegas came to be is that it all seemed to be a gamble.  With every new casino or planned community there was no guarantee that it would be work.  There was, of course, every effort made to be smart about the development but really, Vegas was and still is an experiment.

Though my project for News 21 is not Vegas based there is a major overlap between the future of energy and the history (and future) of Vegas...land.   The Bureau of Land Management has played a major role in the development of Vegas.  For example, the expansion of North Las Vegas in the late 90's was because the BLM allowed the purchase of the federal land.   And according to Schumacher, the BLM currently "owns tens of thousands of acres scattered across the Las Vegas area."

The future of energy is also going to directly affected by the BLM's sale of lands and the permission to build in sensitive areas.   Most people agree that the future of renewable sources of energy will involve at least some large scale solar fields, which will inevitably be built in the desert - BLM land.  And it is not just the actual sites of the renewables that will need land, but the actual construction of transmission lines like the Sunrise Powerlink Project in San Diego County.  In order for the project to be approved, the BLM had to agree to the designated path.  The end results are grandiose, whether solar panels or casinos, but they all start with the purchase of land.

For anyone about to run for city planner in or around Las Vegas, I would suggest memorizing Schumacher's words.  And again, the author showed, however blandly, that Vegas is much more than just the major hotels and casinos on the strip.   The research and delivery was clearly comprehensive and painted a multilayered picture of the city.

Geoff Schumacher's Sun, Sin & Suburbia was a breath of fresh air in terms of readability. His conversational tone in describing how sin city has evolved from desert, to casino haven, to real estate metropolis, to a city beyond the strip was a joy to follow along with and learn about. 

While I appreciate the collective evolution he describes of the modern Las Vegas as it sprung from the Glitter Gulch and Freemont street, to the newest incarnations of Steve Wynn--I started to tire of the same story. Growth and redevelopment. Growth and redevelopment. That's all it seems to do, and all it is good for. And while that would seem like a compelling story to constantly be rebuilding, it started to feel to me like nothing is ever genuine in the city--which is why some people like it I think--and at that point I start to lose interest as each new development plan feels like groundhog day. 

When Schumacher began to talk about things other than the rising casinos--I began to pay attention again. Although the casino industry has an iconic presence in the area and a functional reality in providing jobs to Vegas--Schumacher promised to show that there is more to Vegas than the Disneyland transformation of the strip.

Reading about the neighborhoods that have sprung up around Las Vegas I found a bit more interesting since it became a more real place. It seemed areas like Summerlin and North Las Vegas had developed at warp speed. Almost as if I was watching a time lapse of growth--since the writer described the communities as they evolved from developmental stages.  Perhaps it was the way in which he had to condense the story that made the community seem lack luster, and uninspired.

But with that said, I thought it was helpful to see how a city evolves and spreads--especially at a rate like Las Vegas. For example, in an area like North Las Vegas--a stereotypically crime-ridden area.  I found it helpful as a reader to see how politics and developers work in a place like North Las Vegas. He describes how at first in late 1950s, "public services were meager" and  the "city did not have political leaders who sought to take advantage of dramatic changes happening in Las Vegas."

Then it evolved into when Clay Lynch was city manager and began a progressive movement to grow the community. These kinds of signs can help a journalist see how communities develop from their roots and are shaped by the political decisions and people that guide them.

But as the story goes on it seems like the same old tales of investors, groomed, tree-lined communities and shopping centers. Everyone looking for the next frontier.

I thought the most important parts of Las Vegas he wanted the reader to learn about was the history, politics and culture behind the stereotypes of an entertainment convention or bachelorette weekend--beyond the strip. Schumacher did that pretty well--I think I personally am just not invested in the greater Las Vegas. 

Another issue, which cannot be avoided I suppose, is how the book is now out of date with the ever growing city. Schumacher acknowledges this early on, and makes sure to tell us by the time the book is printed, it will already be obsolete with regard to some details. But it becomes even more apparent when he approaches present day, talking about Steve Wynn's newest resort, and further developments that he can only speculate will have a great effect on the current landscape of Vegas.

I think the author got me to understand Vegas best when he described its dichotomy. "Some say Las Vegas is completely different from other cities. Others say once you venture beyond the strip, it's basically the same as anyplace else. They're both right." 

If I cared about Las Vegas on same level as, say, an obsessive stamp collector or a Trekkie who can speak and write in Klingon, then perhaps Geoff Schumacher's book, Sin, Sun & Suburbia: An Essential History of Modern Las Vegas would have been remotely interesting. But given the fact that I have little passion for Las Vegas beyond the realms of Hunter S. Thompson and drunken weekends, reading this book was pain-stakingly hard work. Extracting information worthy of occupying my mind was like sifting through bales of hay in the hot desert sun, searching for an invisible needle. Contrary to what the title would imply, this book is like a collection of museum placards: meant to be ignored.

It's no wonder that the copy I received from Amazon was an autographed edition. Schumacher propably penned more copies than he could sell.

What disturbs me the most is the fact that Schumacher felt the need to write this book at all, when he blatantly states that "a hundred books have been written" on the topic. It's almost as if he wanted to punish us, to suck the fun out of one of the most easily interesting cities in the world and slap his work with a catchy title. "Sin, Sun and Suburbia" should be an action-packed, racy, sexy, crime-ridden, alcohol-infused piece of Las Vegan art. Instead, it's a non-essential history of the most boring aspects of Sin City.

And I really did try. I did.

I tried to extract some semblance of wider relevance, but what minor pieces arose came in negatives. Las Vegas has no historical connection to the American story. Everyone is glad that "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," because it means that less of it happens near them. Some casinos fail and some are successful. He, and I, aren't really sure why.

  So, what can you learn from this book? A lot of names and dates, sure, but where is the creative analysis and broader social context? I want to know the whys of Las Vegas, not the whens and whos. Encyclopedias were meant for mundane historical information, not 264-page theses. I think Schumacher is missing the point, and it only takes a brief peek at his author's photograph to see why. Standing in front of the chaos of Las Vegas, the man is the vision of acquiescence. Mustached and bespectacled, this man has apparently been a resident of Southern Nevada all his life. Yet, somehow, I doubt he had ever partied until dawn on the strip. And if you haven't woken up, fully dressed, minus your memories of the night before, or swum in the Tropicana pool for nine hours because you're too stoned and sun burnt to get out, or lost your child's college fund at a black jack table, then what do you really know about Las Vegas?

I tried to draw similarities between Schumacher's Las Vegas and, well, anything of relevance to my own reporting, as well as highlighting passages that were mentally stimulating, and here is what I came up with:

While growth brings jobs and culture and money to the community, it also brings headaches. The roads are congested and constantly under construction. The air is dirty. The schools are crowded. The social safety net is full of holes. Historic landmarks and ecological havens are destroyed to make way for the new. The city at times feels chaotic, anarchic, a constant whirl of noises, frustrations and changes. It's difficult to get into a routine, because the environment is always different. Very little of the city feels permanent, including the people.

- It's worth quoting that entire passage because it is, in my opinion, the best part of the book. But none of what he says here is unique to Las Vegas; in fact, Schumacher has just given a fairly well-written summation of any city, from Los Angeles to London. Next...

America's love affair with the car has dictated urban development patterns across the country, but it has been particularly influential in the more recently emergent West.

- This little gem hints at something deeper and broader, which is what attracted me to it, yet Schumacher passes the buck to one of the other billion Las Vegan authors to explain, before quickly changing the topic, leaving me to feel like I would much rather be reading Joel Garreau's Edge City: Life on the New Frontier than this cop-out. And finally...

The community thrives on growth. It's addicted to it. The boom-and-bust mentality that has characterized Nevada history continues to pervade the thinking in Las Vegas political and business circles. There's a persistent fear that everything could blow away in a moment's notice, so we'd better take full advantage of our good fortune now. Until Las Vegas can shed this historical burden and outgrow its adolescent mindset, it will continue to expand chaotically and lag in quality of life. In short, it will continue to be Las Vegas, where sun, sin and suburbia combine to form one of the most interesting, if troubled, communities in America.

- I like this paragraph for two reasons. One, it characterizes all the interesting things that could have been written about and weren't, and two, it's the end of the book.

Las Vegas isn't the kind of city that suits being written about in the way Schumacher writes about it, like a model-train-set collector publishing the history of model-train-sets for an obscure industry magazine. It has little wider appeal, and carries the pre-requisite of an already abnormal fascination with minute detail.

Despite reading this incredibly name-and-date heavy book, I don't feel like I know Las Vegas any better at all. Which is ironic considering the author's note above his bibliography: "The more I read about Las Vegas, the more I realized that a lot of the books shed little light."

Well, you can add yourself to that list, Schumacher, But don't worry. Who needs light in the city of lights anyway?

    

  

In 2003, the Atlantic City, NJ took its first step in becoming Las Vegas East. The Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa set a trend for waves of luxury spas, world class shopping, and fine dining that followed. Atlantic City saw in 2003 the similar trends that, in a general sense, fueled Las Vegas since its inception, and more specifically, has redefined the Nevada desert over the last 25 years.

The boom that remade Atlantic City and defined Las Vegas is now threatened by the worldwide economic situation. About 4,000-8,000 people moved to Las Vegas every month during the peak of the boom. That has dropped by a third, leaving some observers wondering whether the city- and the hospitality and gaming industries- will ever be the same. That story ought to be the sequel to Sun, Sin & Suburbia.

Geoff Schumacher's history of Las Vegas ends in 2004, long before the growth stopped. Schumacher's 2004 Las Vegas is full of activity. Communities are planned. Desert is transformed into golf courses. The city's history unfolds so fast and evolves so quickly that Las Vegas can be easily, and often is, misunderstood.

Schumacher witnessed Las Vegas' growth firsthand as a reporter who actually grew up in Southern Nevada- usually the destination for the restless souls who leave Anytown, USA. That's part of what makes Las Vegas so unique among American cities, Schumacher writes. Its history is not woven into its culture. Unlike Boston, Philadelphia or San Francisco- cities that have contributed rebellion, independence and the Gold Rush and counterculture in Americana- Las Vegas is more in line with Pittsburgh or Detroit- cities associated with a dominant industry.

There's no mistaking the importance of gambling in Las Vegas or Nevada. One-third of Las Vegans work directly for the industry, and another third work for it indirectly, Schumacher writes. Many residents try to avoid gambling, but there's no escaping the casinos. They are home to the city's finest restaurants, concert halls, nightclubs, art museums, "making them the city's primary cultural and recreational centers," Schumacher writes.

Growth has brought jobs, culture and money to the community, but "it also brings headaches," Schumacher writes. The city is always under construction. Schools are crowded and the air is dirty. Social safety net is weak and "the city at times feels chaotic, anarchic, a constant whirl of noises, frustrations and changes." Las Vegas has a community problem. That community problem yields gambling addiction, which is everywhere. Las Vegas collectively does little to mitigate and prevent abuse, he writes. It is a reflection of a weak civic core of the city, where businesses and politicians are more concerned with themselves and their legacies.

Neither civic shortcomings nor growth's excesses could stop the migration. Clark County's population in 1980 was less than 500,000 people and 1.6 million at the time of Schumacher's writing in 2004. The population was 1.8 million, according to U.S. Census Bureau's 2007 estimates. The city has only ever known growth.

One reason is the climate. Eight months a year, Las Vegas has better weather than most of America. Another is the economy. Until recently, it boomed since the early 80s while the cost of living remained steady. Unemployment was always low, wages remained pretty fair, and opportunity to advance in almost any field was as great as the Strip casinos are huge. "While young couples in cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco struggle to find ways to afford an entry-level home, my wife and I have been able to partake of that piece of the American dream with relative ease," Schumacher writes-- which instantaneously made me wonder what kind of hand an institution like Freddie Mae had in fueling Las Vegas' rapid growth.

Most of that growth has been on the Strip. When the partially mafia funded Flamingo opened in 1946 and cemented the Strip as Las Vegas' future economic engine. "It also altered the idea of what kind of visitor the city was aiming to attract," Schumacher writes. By the 60s, the city hit its stride. Hollywood boosted the town with Rat Pack-led Ocean's Eleven (1960) and Elvis's Viva Las Vegas (1964). A publicly funded convention center opened in 1959 on the site of a defunct horse track. Five years later, the Beatles took the stage. Las Vegas arrived.

Residents and tourists who'd rather avoid the 24-hour lifestyle that is now much of the Strip head to the resurrected Downtown Las Vegas. Downtown is the home to many firsts in Las Vegas (first hotel in Nevada, telephone, paved street, traffic stop and elevator), but saw hard times until about 20 years ago. Gaming corporations and investors rebuilt Glitter Gulch and the area even began to attract artists and creative intellectuals, like Manhattan's SoHo district. Schumacher, writing before the Great Recession, saw hope for a downtown revival primarily through the area's new investors, like the Poster Financial Group, which bought up old casinos like the in 2003 and 2004.

Those investments seem regrettable now. The recession's impact on growth will be the central narrative in the sequel Schumacher ought to write. He could call it, Sun, Sin & Foreclosure: Back to Austerity.

With a title like "Sun Sin & Suburbia" most readers would expect a full-blown expose on all the sun, sin and suburban areas in Las Vegas. Instead, Geoff Schumacher's book about the casino industry and the rather uneventful history of the city before the late 20th century without any real mention of sin. (And since gambling is a legalized activity in Vegas as well as 48 other states, its coverage hardly counts as sinful.)

Likewise, readers may have hoped the book would dive into "Sin City" topics like strip clubs, prostitution, sex rings or drugs, which the "Entertainment Capital of the World" is also known for. Or perhaps, Schumacher, could have written about squabbles between the Mormons and the casino and strip club establishments since gambling and stripping run contrary to the Bible. No, instead the two organizations seem to pretty much co-exist in relative harmony.

Alternatively, the book spent the majority of the 264-pages discussing the rather uneventful history of the major Southwestern town in-between Salt Lake City, Utah and Los Angeles, California until the booming 1990s. And although the background was somewhat useful in understanding modern day Las Vegas, much of the book's discussion around the suburban communities was so preliminary that it's almost useless only four years post-publication (of his second printing).

Quite interestingly, there are several mentions of The Strip but few mentions of the more seedy side of it like the strip club establishments. There was an especially descriptive overview of downtown Las Vegas, also known as "Glitter Gulch," fighting to reclaim its glory. It's just surprising that between the Gulch and The Strip there were few stories about the "darker side" of the casino and gambling business. The book would have benefited from mafia stories since the casinos were supposedly run by them.

One of the most entertaining portions of the book was the Howard Hughes: Mixed Legacy" chapter. Who knew this man sought to own Las Vegas? The play by play on his purchases and the reasons were definitely a page turner. He created his own movies-on-demand system back in the 1960s when he bought KLAS-TV Channel 8 to "control what movies were aired and when." Pure genius.

And the tales of his idiosyncrasy are legendary. Hughes was at once a germ phobe yet lived in filth. His hatred of parasites and pathogens prompted an all-consuming concern over nuclear plants. And he was racist but couldn't really tell who was black. He made friends and enemies (like Frank Sinatra) depending upon whether his million dollar land and business purchases affected them. Hughes chapter and his legacy definitely gave the middle of the book a pick-up.

Even though the book may have several readers who are vividly familiar with the streets of Las Vegas -- like Fremont and Main Street in downtown -- maps would have been incredibly beneficial to "Sin City" newcomers.  Surely, they must have been a mere oversight of Schumacher who grew up in Southern Nevada and worked as a reporter and columnist there for 16 years. The rich descriptions of the cities and budding communities next to I-5 and other freeways would have danced from the pages if there were accompanying geographic outlines. 

All in all, the book was rather dry. Although Schumacher efforts can be applauded for his attempt to cover a city that is always changing, it's regretful that most of his work on suburban communities was incomplete because the areas like Henderson and Summerlin were still developing (and now beginning to fail with foreclosures increasing). Vegas' booming era is quickly changing into a bust in only four years since 2004-2005. In striking opposite to the book's predictions that all indications point to more announcements proclaiming Las Vegas the nation's fastest-growing metropolitan area. The growth machine shows no signs of slowing down." With current economic crisis, the author and the experts he relied upon could eat those words.

In late March 2009, Nevada Senator Harry Reid announced the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) release of more than $72 million in federal grants to counteract the effects of the foreclosures in the state, according to MSNBC.

"The state will receive more than $24 million and Clark County will take in more than $22 million. The cities of Las Vegas ($14.7 million,) North Las Vegas ($6.8 million) and Henderson ($3.2 million) will also be given a major boost."

With so little mention of "sin" in the book, one can only conclude that Schumacher either loved the "s" alliteration or knew the use of the word would help him sell books about a city supposedly plagued with sin. Maybe the author took the supposed "high road" or wrote the story not yet written about Vegas. Perhaps? If so, the book should have been more accurately titled --- "Crazies, Casinos & Communities."