Boulder City Councilwoman Linda Strickland has sued the city to get the original copies of an employee opinion survey taken last year.

A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday in District Court in Las Vegas, when a judge will determine whether the surveys are public record.

Strickland said she's hoping to see the 96 questionnaires, which were given in July 2007, before the council's Nov. 18 review of City Manager Vicki Mayes.

All City Council members last year received a summary of the surveys of city workers, which shows significantly negative attitudes in relationships between employees and management.

Strickland said she is not confident the summary includes all of the comments from the surveys, and she wants to read what employees had to say before Mayes' next review.

The councilwoman filed the lawsuit Thursday. It also names City Clerk Pamella Malmstrom, after being denied several informal requests to see the reports and after the refusal of an Oct. 7 public records request, she said. She had also offered to review the surveys in private at City Hall, to avoid the need for duplicates, according to her lawsuit.

City Attorney Dave Olsen told Strickland in an Oct. 8 e-mail the surveys were "nonrecords" and protected by a previous court ruling that requires measuring whether the public interest in nondisclosure outweighs the public interest in disclosure.

Malmstrom said the city still has the completed 100-question surveys in storage, and only two people have seen them since employees filled them out: the two members of the city's "Change Leadership Team," who prepared the summary, which shows percentages of how questions were answered and bulleted suggestions based on the survey results.

The survey asked respondents to rank "strongly agree," "agree," or "disagree" about communication in the workplace, corporate culture, management and supervisors, and 16 other subjects. It also allowed the space for comments.

Olsen said of the 96 respondents, 40 made additional comments, and the summary Strickland received includes every comment made on every survey returned.

Strickland in her lawsuit notes that one survey was provided to her anonymously, and when she compared the comments from that survey against the summary, she found those comments were missing. She now wants to compare all of the questionnaires against the summary.

Olsen said that survey was not turned in to the city, which is why it wasn't included in the summary.

In 2006, Mayes implemented the leadership team, and last year she authorized spending about $25,000 to boost morale, with most of the money being used for employee recognition, wellness and training.

Strickland said she's not sure how to evaluate Mayes on that fiscal decision, because she doesn't know why city employee morale was so low at the time of the survey.

"I think I have right to know not only because I'm a taxpayer, but as a City Council person making decisions of how tax money is spent," she said. "For the performance review, I don't know if have the information to make all the decisions I need to make. The city is fighting so hard to prevent me from seeing them."

She said since the forms were "distributed, kept and paid for by taxpayers," they're public record.

Malmstrom and Olsen both told Strickland the surveys wouldn't be released because the city had promised the employees confidentiality in the surveys, which were filled out anonymously.

"I don't think the employees really meant they were concerned the City Council would see them," Strickland said. "But confidentiality is irrelevant. You can't turn a public record into a confidential document by promising somebody something. It has to be declared confidential by law."

Olsen said breaking the promise of confidentiality would "damage the city's relationship with the employees, which would spill over into damages in services to the city."

Strickland is also seeking the city reimburse her for $4,353 in legal bills.

Malmstrom, in a four-page response given to the Boulder City News, a sister publication of the Las Vegas Sun, said she condemned the legal action a waste of taxpayers' money.

"Thoughtful consideration should be given before legal action is taken against the city and its employees," she wrote. "Residents have the right to question and critique city employees, but there are alternative processes."

Cassie Tomlin can be reached at 948-2073 or cassie.tomlin@hbcpub.com.

source: lasvegassun

All of the key players are on board for reducing the trash Boulder City buries in its landfill. The City Council, city staff, Southern Nevada Health District and the landfill operators support the idea. But recruiting a garbage-recycling plant to do just that depends entirely on who would pay for it.

The city says it can't fit any experimental projects into its budget. Picking up the cost of a pilot plant isn't the responsibility of Southern Nevada Health District or Boulder Disposal, the company that collects and buries the town's waste.

So the City Council Nov. 12 will consider drafting a request for proposal to ask entrepreneurs to build a plant and bring a bankroll.

"The city shouldn't be spending its own money to do research and development," Councilman Travis Chandler, who introduced the measure, said at the Oct. 14 council meeting. "Nevertheless, whoever does it should tell us where to get the money with a letter of intent."

At the council meeting, two men from Victorville, Calif., told the city they would submit a plan for reclaiming oil from trash, and they would pay for it.

That's something the council has heard before. Mike Little, the man who brought the idea to Boulder City, earlier this year told council members he had secured enough funding to bring a machine to eat local trash, but a few months later said he wouldn't work for free, suggesting the city could bring him on as a consultant.

On Oct. 15, Chandler, Councilwoman Linda Strickland, City Manager Vicki Mayes, Director of Public Works Scott Hansen, Boulder Disposal General Manager Robert Martello and Health District Environmental Health Engineer Walter Ross visited an experimental trash-crushing autoclave at the Crazy Horse Canyon Landfill in Salinas, Calif.

Neither Ross nor Martello returned repeated phone calls and e-mails about the trip.

The governmental agency that manages trash in Salinas and the surrounding areas bought machine, built in Reno by Comprehensive Resources, Recovery and Reuse Inc., for $100,000, a representative said.

The autoclave, one of two in the country, conveys municipal solid waste from the garbage truck into a cement mixer-like basin, where it is heated and mixed with steam and water and turned it into a mulch-like substance.

Screens sort the broken-down waste from the recycling and the other leftovers— the stuff that isn't glass and aluminum, but doesn't get broken down, that goes into the ground in the end.

From Salinas, the mulch goes to a U.S. Department of Agriculture facility that is studying the best way to make energy out of it — either microbial digestion for methane manufacturing or converting the organic pulp into ethanol.

The landfill operators have run about 15 tests with the machine since May and performed one for the Boulder City group during its visit.

Crazy Horse Canyon, a 74-acre landfill that last year took in 163,600 tons of municipal solid waste, is set to close in May 2009 because it will be full. The autoclaving experiment aims to find a way to put less trash into the ground, to prevent more landfill closures in the area.

The Boulder City landfill takes in about 80 tons of trash a day, and Mayes said the city should have a solid estimate this month of the waste stream specifics, something it needs before asking for plans on the trash reprocessing.

After the visit, Hansen said he was impressed with the technology, which he predicts will catch on in the future. Currently, money is a setback, he said.

"Boulder City has a small landfill operation compared to other locations, so I am sure it would be difficult to get a good return on investing in a full scale project," he said in an e-mail. "If we could build and operate a waste-to-energy plant without raising rates to our residents, we would jump on it."

Cassie Tomlin can be reached at 948-2073 or cassie.tomlin@hbcpub.com.

source: the gorgeous one

Hawthorn Suites Golf Resorts expects to redefine its site plan next month for its proposed hotel on the Boulder Creek Golf Club.

The hotel has asked to move its proposed location across Veterans Memorial Drive from the current clubhouse. That request to the City Council has been the second major roadblock in starting construction, President Morgan Burkett said Oct. 22.

After the City Council approved the lease in June 2007, it requested an attorney general's opinion about legality of the lease with the city. The opinion, which came in January, affirmed the contract.

After the site plans are finalized, the company will reset the project schedule, Burkett said, but he wouldn't estimate when construction would start.

Hawthorn Suites and Burkett's other venture, Legacy Hospitality, have 14 active projects.

He said none of his efforts have been delayed "as a result of the calamity in the financial markets," though he remains cautious.

"Certainly we're faced with challenges like everybody else, and we're all kind of holding our breath, but so far all of our projects are still on track."

The 50-year lease with the hotel, which would be built at the municipal Boulder Creek Golf Course, would reportedly earn the city $173,000 annually. The money would be designated to help pay for the fledgling course.

Cassie Tomlin can be reached at 948-2073 or cassie.tomlin@hbcpub.com.

source: the gorgeous one

With just days to go before the election, the fate of a tax to support Boulder City Hospital is now in the hands of the city's voters.

The arguments for and against have been made, and hospital officials say they are not planning any special push in the final hours before Tuesday to try to convince voters. They canceled the final town hall meeting that had been scheduled for last Thursday, saying the previous two forums had just turned into an opportunity for opponents to make their arguments on BCTV.

In fact, the campaign all along has been low-key, and even the staunchest supporters of the tax for the last several weeks have said that the tax initiative is in trouble.

The hospital's chief executive officer, Tom Maher, first waved the white flag a month ago, saying the initiative, which would raise about $750,000 a year to help the facility meet its operating expenses, seemed destined to fail.

And just last week, Boulder City Hospital Director of Development Craig Bailey didn't offer a much more encouraging prognosis.

"We're hopeful that it will be successful but, being realistic, we're planning that it won't be," he said.

The ballot question, which would authorize a tax of 15 cents per $100 assessed home value, faltered from the start.

Hospital officials calculated it would raise $1.08 million a year and allow the hospital to undertake an ambitious plan to expand and renovate, steps backers said were vital to the hospital's long-term viability.

But even before the first town forum to sell the tax was held, the hospital's top brass had to admit an embarrassing mistake: They had failed to take into account property tax caps and overestimated how much the tax would generate by $330,000.

Instead of a way to improve and expand, the initiative was suddenly being pitched as a necessity to keep the hospital doors open past 2012.

"We're treating this as the 11th hour, Maher said in July, after the error was discovered. "The emphasis has become more and more about keeping the hospital open. It's less and less about improving the facility."

Now a crisis in the financial sector has the public worried, and municipalities around the state are cutting their budgets because of lower-than-expected tax revenue.

That has changed the outlook for the hospital, Bailey said.

"We know people are thinking more with their wallets than they usually do with economic times as they are," he said.

In interviews with residents, the Boulder City News found support for the city having its own hospital, especially given the city's large senior population and the number of recreational visitors. But many people disliked the notion of a property tax to retain emergency services. The Boulder City News is a sister publication of the Las Vegas Sun.

W.J. Perlmutter, 57, counted himself a staunch proponent of both the hospital and the levy.

"Times are tough, the economy's bad and another tax is not wanted," he said. "But this is a good tax. This is not a luxury tax."

He likened the hospital levy to one for schools.

"The hospital is an essential service," Perlmutter said. "The alternative would be to have the hospital close."

Tina Coleman, 30, who was undecided on the issue, said she usually does not use Boulder City Hospital, because the co-pays were higher than when she traveled to Las Vegas or Henderson for medical care.

"It's easier for me to go into town," she said. "Anything I need the hospital for, I go to St. Rose."

However, she added, people probably need the hospital to remain in Boulder City for emergencies.

In the event the levy does not pass, officials are preparing for another attempt in 2010.

Dave Clark can be reached at 990-2677 or dave.clark@hbcpub.com.

source: lasvegassun.com