In case you haven’t checked your calendar lately, spring training camps have opened, exhibition games are in full swing, and the start of the 2015 Major League Baseball season is only weeks away. But for more than 5,000 kids in Southern Nevada who are connected at various times to the Las Vegas Baseball Academy, baseball season is a year-round experience.
Herb Jaffe
Herb Jaffe was an op-ed columnist and investigative reporter for most of his 39 years at the Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey. His most recent novel, “Double Play,” is available.
hjaffe@cox.net
You have to know Jerry Izenberg to understand why it took him 32 years to write a book about Pete Rozelle, the late, great National Football League commissioner responsible for turning the NFL into the most successful conglomeration of team franchises in the history of American sports.
More than five months ago, an official from the Nevada Department of Wildlife shocked a few hundred inhabitants of Sun City Summerlin when she talked about the overabundance of coyotes living in Las Vegas and especially within the Summerlin area.
More than 900 acres of grass have been removed from Southern Nevada golf courses in the last 12 years, conserving more than 2 billion gallons of water. Now, that’s big. Moreover, those numbers are especially notable when you consider that we live in a desert and a sector of the country that has been suffering from a lingering drought for more than a decade.
If you’re betting that Tivoli Village won’t succeed, then place your bet again, and don’t let recent construction delays deter you.
So you’ve had it with all this stadium and arena talk in and around Las Vegas. Who’s in? Who’s out? We know that soccer is in after the Las Vegas City Council approved a new stadium, provided that major-league soccer awards a franchise to Las Vegas.
The reviews are in. The handful of critics, pessimists and nit-pickers have had their day, but the overwhelming response has been just what many expected: Downtown Summerlin is far beyond the phenomenal success that was expected.
Ward 4 Councilman and mayor pro tem Stavros Anthony insists that public funds generally should not be used to accommodate private interests. For that reason he cast the only opposing vote on Oct. 1 in the City Council’s non-binding decision to proceed with a proposal to build a soccer stadium on the city’s Symphony Park property, across from The Smith Center.
Would you believe there are some folks out there who blame “those geezers,” which is how they refer to residents of Sun City Summerlin, for the need to reconstruct Rampart Boulevard?
You might ask why a tough criminal lawyer would change his career in mid-stream to become a Major League Baseball Players Association certified agent, with four clients presently on the rosters of major league teams.
If you think public utilities are just cold, heartless, regulated monopolies that are forever bent on seeking rate increases, keep reading for another side of the story. Yes, indeed, there is some give-back.
Don’t believe any of that talk about golf losing its popularity. The truth is that golf is gaining in popularity — at least among women. It certainly is in Summerlin, and for sure it is at the three golf courses in Sun City Summerlin.
An increased fuel tax and fuel revenue indexing (FRI) are paying for $12 million in road construction on Rampart Boulevard. FRI ties the increased income to the rate of inflation from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 31, 2016, resulting in an estimated $700 million in bonding capacity to fund 199 needy transportation projects in Southern Nevada and create as many as 9,400 jobs.
Imagine living in these surroundings: No Summerlin Parkway, no Anasazi Drive, no Suncoast, no JW Marriott, no Summerlin Library, no Summerlin post office and no Summerlin Hospital. Indeed, it will all be recalled by some and rededicated by others starting Oct. 1, when Sun City begins the celebration of its 25th anniversary.
which has been many years in the making and survived an economic collapse of unparalleled proportion for Las Vegas, may be the first section of the most exciting and innovative “mixed use” project of its kind in America.
