North Las Vegas makes changes to naming guidelines for parks, facilities

North Las Vegas adopted changes to its park naming guidelines Wednesday that included requiring a super-majority vote of the City Council to allow parks and recreational facilities to be named after living people.

According to the new guidelines, "natural persons" for whom facilities are named should be deceased for at least two years. Naming a park or rec center would still be allowed, but it would be an "exception."

The changes were made to help the city avoid potential embarrassment that could come from a living person's indiscretions. The vote was unanimous.

The new guidelines also allow facilities named after individuals to be renamed "under extraordinary circumstances" including the individual being convicted of a felony, a crime involving moral turpitude, or "any other disreputable behavior which would have a negative reflection on the community."

The city's previous guidelines, written in 1992, made it difficult to rename parks and did not allow renaming parks that were originally named for individuals.