Culinary union shakedown

The politically potent Culinary Local 226 says it already has enough signatures to require a popular vote on the City Council's current scheme to move Las Vegas City Hall to an abandoned casino site six blocks to the southwest -- between the Clark County Government Center and the Regional Justice Center.

The union actually threatens to place two measures on the ballot, possibly as soon as June. One would require voter approval for lease-purchase construction projects (that's how the new City Hall plan would be structured), while the other would actually repeal the city's current redevelopment plan -- otherwise scheduled to sunset in 2031 -- giving voters the power to approve or reject individual redevelopment projects.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman responded Thursday that the city will fight both ballot initiatives. The mayor further said existing projects would continue no matter what voters say.

For the record, if these initiatives reflected the union's true goals, they would have enough merit to justify serious and thorough discussion.

For decades, downtown redevelopment has been an excuse to make heavy-handed use of the city's powers of eminent domain, and to plow tax money into projects designed to benefit existing downtown casino owners and favored downtown law firms, while driving away or shutting out property owners not so favored.

That would be bad enough if it had worked. But downtown gaming tax revenues continue to fall, while dust devils swirl scrap paper through the echoing redevelopment showplace known as "Neonopolis" till it starts to look like a set for "On the Beach" -- even as the ongoing redevelopment apparatus continues to divert tax revenues that might be better used in the general fund.

Meantime, the scheme to move City Hall arises not because the "old" City Hall is decrepit or inadequate, but as part of a real estate deal that resembles a college football parlay card, in which everything has to fall into place -- including hypothetical future bidders willing to pay big bucks for the current City Hall site, in the midst of a recession -- for the city to collect any "payoff."

But is the Culinary really against redevelopment or a new City Hall?

Longtime Las Vegas political reporter Jon Ralston reports that a few weeks back, Culinary chief D. Taylor met with Mr. Goodman for coffee, and they "did more than chat." Mr. Taylor gave Goodman a document, Mr. Ralston reports, that detailed requested "reforms" of the redevelopment agency. "Goodman and others took this as a quid pro quo: Do these things and we will not try to kill City Hall and the redevelopment plan," Mr. Ralston contends.

The list of demands is a veritable union wet dream.

While NRS 279.500 already requires that ginned-up "prevailing wages" be paid on redevelopment construction sites, "there are no parallel provisions for permanent jobs created through redevelopment projects," the union complains in the document. So -- if the city would like to see these ballot initiatives disappear, presumably -- the Culinary would prefer that the city institute a provision under which developers in the redevelopment area would have to pay a "living wage" (defined as "100 percent of the statewide hourly wage") and "provide a health insurance plan for all employees that includes an option for health insurance coverage for dependents of the employees." Furthermore, the union stipulates, these provisions should apply not only to developers, but also to future "tenants in the project."

The union also wants a guarantee that 15 percent of any housing units built in the redevelopment area will be "devoted ... to low- and moderate-income families."

Finally, the unions demand that the city "adopt a labor peace ordinance," in which anyone developing a large hotel, entertainment or retail project ("including grocery stores") would have to first negotiate and sign "a labor peace agreement with a union."

Gee. Wonder how one goes about getting one of those?

Even before the current economic downturn, it was hard to get major investors to pour money into projects in downtown urban cores. Downtown Las Vegas doesn't have nearly as severe a problem as areas in downtown Detroit, Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. But the mayor hasn't even been able to attract a supermarket to replace the lone downtown grocery driven out so the redevelopment advocates could use the site for Neonopolis. Does anyone believe piling on expensive additional requirements -- requiring some convenience store to pay its cashiers the "average statewide hourly wage," in perpetuity -- is going to help?

The mayor is right to call the Culinary's bluff. But the problem is that it's unlikely these initiatives really reveal the Culinary's goals. Rather, this has all the earmarks of an old-fashioned shakedown.