Publisher’s Note: This statement will be read into the record at Tuesday’s Clark County Commission meeting during the public comment period.
Good morning.
My name is Alan Snel and I publish LVSportsBiz.com, a news website that covers the convergence of sports, politics, business, stadiums, sponsorships and the topic of “public-private partnerships.”
I have reported on this news subject for the Denver Post in Denver, the Sun-Sentinel in South Florida, the former Post-Intelligencer in Seattle, in New York where I launched FOXSportsBiz.com that covered the subject nationally and for he former Tampa Tribune in the Tampa Bay market before coming to Las Vegas to cover this beat for the local newspaper in 2012 until 2016.
I launched LVSportsBiz.com in June 2017 and in only three weeks we celebrate our news site’s seventh anniversary.
In my more than 25 years of covering this news topic, I routinely report stories on draft studies and reports. It’s actually quite typical. And in reporting for newspapers across the country, I have found that local governments routinely provide draft reports because they are public records.
But as I have discovered here in Clark County and the Las Vegas market, things are done just a little differently.
On May 1, a county applicant by the name of the Las Vegas Grand Prix submitted a traffic report and it, therefore, became a public record. LVSportsBiz.com, like I have done countless times across the country, requested a copy of this traffic report.
But Clark County government refused to make this public document public.
It described the report as a “draft” and used that as an excuse to deny public access to the grand prix traffic report.
I am here to ask each and every one of you to make public a traffic report that is of immense interest to the public that, in theory, you serve.
The traffic report is very newsworthy because we here in Clark County were able to experience the body of work exhibited by the applicant regarding a car race event it staged on public county roads only a year ago.
This event caused the biggest disruption to commerce, business and transportation not just in the history of Clark County and Las Vegas but in the history of Nevada. That’s not a journalist’s opinion. That’s a direct on-the-record quote from none other than the chairman of the Clark County Commission, Tick Segerblom.
Clark County government, however, is denying the public a chance to inspect a public record that would show the starting point of a traffic study related to an event that is of immense public interest. Your county manager referred to the disruptions to business and transportation as euphemistically, “challenges.”
But the open records law does not distinguish between an event that caused the most disruptions in Las Vegas history and one that poses, “challenges.”
This pubic traffic report — one that your government has chosen to describe as “draft” — needs to be made public so that Clark County and the people effected by this road race understand the traffic starting point for an event that caused more impacts than any other event in Las Vegas history.
Making a public record public should not be such a big challenge for Clark County.