Coffin opposes approving $8.5 million plan to reopen F Street

A Las Vegas city councilman wants city leaders to back off plans to reopen a thoroughfare into a historically black neighborhood.

Councilman Bob Coffin said the proposal on today's City Council agenda to authorize more than $8.5 million to reopen F Street is a mistake. The street was closed in 2008 for upgrades to Interstate 15 near downtown.

Coffin said lawmakers, including himself, a former state senator, were fooled by assertions that the community wasn't alerted to the pending closure when, in fact, notice was given.

He said there are plenty of places to pass under the freeway instead of reconnecting a lightly used city street.

"If we spend all that money, all we are going to do is open up a bombed-out street one more time," Coffin said of the portion of F Street that was blocked. "What a horrible waste of money. It is as bad as that 'bridge to nowhere' up in Alaska."

When the Legislature approved Assembly Bill 304 in 2009 in response to protesters who opposed blocking the street, Coffin said he and other lawmakers were told by Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, D-Las Vegas, and others that city, state and federal officials didn't give nearby residents proper notification of the project.

Since then, Coffin, who left the Senate because of term limits and won a seat on the City Council, has researched the project and found plenty of documentation that he said shows residents were notified.

"I went along, (Horsford) was the leader, he needed this badly, he says it is important, it is the right thing to do," Coffin said of the bill. "Only it turned out not to be the right thing."

Horsford did not return a call for comment.

F STREET HISTORY

The Planning Commission voted in late 2005 for an amended version of the highway project that reflected plans to save money by reducing the number of bridges required by diverting traffic from F Street one block east to D Street to pass under the highway. The City Council followed suit, although the closure wasn't prominently mentioned in the documentation.

Coffin pointed to records showing hundreds of notices sent to residents within 400 feet of the project, which is required by law, as evidence the community received fair warning of the plan.

The item on the agenda today would authorize following the Legislature's direction and using about $800,000 in property tax revenue to back bonds worth $8.5 million to be repaid over 10 years.

Once approved, they would be combined with about $8 million in state and federal money to proceed with the project.

But Coffin said F Street already has cost the public too much money, and he wants the city to slow down and give the Legislature a chance to reconsider the idea in the 2013 session.

"I feel like we have to talk about this and try to get people aware of the fact that this is a horrible mistake," he said.

COALITION WANTS PROJECT

If anyone is making a mistake it is Coffin, said Trish Geran, who grew up in the blighted neighborhood affected by the blockade. Geran is chairwoman of the F Street Coalition, a group that has successfully used the courts and the political process to get funding to reopen the street.

She said Coffin is overlooking decades of racial discrimination aimed at the historically black neighborhood, which has suffered from poor public services, thoughtless highway intrusions and a general decline in quality businesses.

Geran said the 2008 closure of F Street was another in a string of bad decisions by local government, similar to failed street closures in the 1960s aimed at blocking the community from downtown.

"They've taken advantage of that community long enough," Geran said. "F Street is really not necessarily about just a reopening. It is about a symbolic change of fairness and justice."

Geran said that by closing the street, the city cut the neighborhood off from a straight shot to what is now Symphony Park, an area of downtown where the city is spending tens of millions of dollars to juice development of a concert hall and other economic development projects.

In addition, the city is moving into a new city hall on Main Street and on Tuesday celebrated the opening of the $42 million, publicly funded National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, or Mob Museum. Those projects are examples of city officials spending freely on other development projects, Geran said.

"I personally don't know anyone who would want to go see the Mob Museum," she said. "So he (Coffin) gets to do what he wants to do and that's fine? We don't have a museum."

Geran said not only will reopening F Street create much-needed construction jobs, the project will be valuable to the culture of the community because it will be decorated with historic murals.

OTHERS WANT ROAD REBUILT

Neighborhood activists aren't the only ones resisting Coffin's efforts to rethink the plan to reopen the street.

Other council members have yet to join him in questioning the project, saying the Legislature already has spoken and it is the city's job to follow the law.

"If the state law says we need to spend a certain amount of money to reopen that, then that is what we need to do," said Ward 4 Councilman and Mayor Pro Tem Stavros Anthony.

Ward 5 Councilman Ricki Barlow, who represents the area, had a similar reaction to Coffin's efforts.

"We are only abiding by the state mandate to find the funding," Barlow said.

Matthew Callister, a former legislator and city councilman who represented the F Street Coalition's position in a federal lawsuit aimed at stopping the blockade, said there are legal reasons to reopen the street.

Callister said that even if the city and state followed their own procedures, they didn't meet federal requirements for notifying minority communities of projects that could hurt neighborhoods.

The allegation was contained in the F Street lawsuit but wasn't settled because the Legislature decided to force the issue.

"What was significant was what was missing, which was massive outreach which was required by federal law," Callister said.