Westside has been down F Street before

The Las Vegas City Council on Wednesday voted to spend $8.5 million to help reopen the street, an access point near Bonanza Road that leads to a section of the care-worn, predominantly African-American Westside. Add to that sum another $8 million from the state Department of Transportation and federal government, and road crews should be well under way by late this year.

Despite a lot of intergovernmental buck passing, hot air, and half-truths, the question isn’t whether officials did enough to notify residents of the poor neighborhood and surrounding area before the decision was made to shut off the street during the widening of U.S. 95.

They didn’t, and they know it.

After the fact, the more important inquiry should be how best to heal the wound. Not the damage done to the trash-strewn street that has served as an outdoor sewer for the homeless and a dumping ground for the valley’s mentally ill. Some might call bulldozing it shut and bricking it over a gift.

The wound I’m talking about is the arrogant insult to the black community, which has endured so many slights through the decades in Southern Nevada. The cut has been gaping and red with infection. The F Street amputation is merely a metaphor.

How do we best heal this latest wound, and what’s the best use of that $16.5 million?

I pondered that question as I listened to members of the City Council display regret over the series of decisions that led to the closure. I heard City Councilman Bob Coffin, the former state senator, give a lesson in the hardball that was played at the Legislature to pass the language that enabled the state and city to spend the millions necessary to reopen F Street. Coffin was the lone council member to speak out against the expense.

With F Street activists in the audience, Mayor Carolyn Goodman and council members Lois Tarkanian and Ricki Barlow expressed varying degrees of outrage over the insult to the black community and the suspected shenanigans behind the play that appeared to serve to redirect traffic from a bustling redevelopment area away from the heart of the tattered Westside.

They were right, of course. All were justified in being outraged and insulted.

But if I may borrow a phrase: $8 million here, $8 million there. Pretty soon you’re talking about real money. And $16.5 million buys 160 houses at $100,000 apiece. That’s more residences than now exist on F Street in the vicinity of the road closure. There are better uses for that money in that area.

Trouble with my thinking is, it runs contrary to the daffy logic of government, where there’s always plenty of money for roadwork and litigation, but too few dollars for people stuck in the rutted end of the economy.

In the end, you’re left with a costly decision that treats a symptom without healing a wound.

If the previous council and the NDOT had acted more responsibly and sensitively, millions could have been saved, and Wednesday’s meeting wouldn’t have been necessary. If current local and state politicians had been quicker to plan and slower to grandstand, at least a portion of that money might have been put to better use to help the residents of a neighborhood cut off from the rest of the community by generations-old poverty and a lack of neighborhood investment.

It’s too late for such talk now. The vote has been cast. One day a few months from now, F Street will reopen.

Whether that road leads to a better day for the black community remains to be seen.

John L. Smith’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Email him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 702-383-0295. He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/smith.