Ken Todd Email Address

Principal Systems Administrator

We pride ourselves in providing opportunities for families to get back to basics, to come together with their neighbors to have fun at little to no cost. We hold celebrations year-round, such as Tastes & Tunes, Independence Day Jubilee, the Concert Series, Movie Madness, Safe Halloween, National Night Out and more. Just this fall, more than 30,000 of us attended BalloonaPalooza at Craig Ranch Regional Park. The City is committed to continuing these programs. Bringing our community together is as important as keeping our community safe. To me, that says police and fire protection. This year, we'll spend, along with a significant contribution from the Olympia Group, in excess of $11 million dollars on new and upgraded equipment, fire station relocations and remodeling. We'll begin construction on the new Fire Station 50. We'll spend over $9 million dollars on renovations and construction for police and detention facilities. These buildings and equipment would be nothing without the fine men and women in uniform who serve and protect us every day - our police and firefighters - the backbone of our safe and livable community. I've been talking about well planned, quality growth since I started today. Fiscal responsibility, economic development, public safety, parks and cultural activities, transportation. When well planned, all of these add up to quality growth. But I would be remiss if I didn't mention that North Las Vegas is home to three amazing master planned communities. While Eldorado and Aliante are home to more than 10,000 North Las Vegas families, the Olympia Group, another great partner with our city, is planning our largest community yet, Park Highlands. We know that when the time is right, Park Highlands will become a community of choice without having to play "catch up" on the infrastructure side. We're proud that North Las Vegas has become the Community of Choice for the Apex Industrial Park, with more than 13,000 acres of industrial property. The owners have chosen to annex their property to North Las Vegas for the provision of municipal services. Apex will broaden our tax base. Because we've been focused heavily on industrial and manufacturing businesses, it made perfect sense to begin the annexation process and spur development for Apex. It's been decades in the making - and it provides North Las Vegas with many more years of development opportunity. My message to you today is one of optimism. In North Las Vegas, for at least the past twenty years, we've been struggling to keep up with infrastructure and services to provide those quality of life amenities that have made us Your Community of Choice. The bright spot in this economic downturn is that we've planned well. We can catch up with providing services for our existing residents - while laying the foundation for those who've yet to come. Our redevelopment agency has been in place since 1990. Over the past couple of years the Redevelopment Agency succeeded in attracting tens of millions of dollars of investment in retail development. One example is the $20 million investment by Montecito Companies for the Cheyenne Pointe shopping center, which is thriving. Along with several private partners, we're currently planning a $120 million dollar shoping center, called Las Flores -to be completed in 2010. Our downtown businesses, including Jerry's Nugget and the Silver Nugget, are meeting regularly with our staff to discuss their plans. While our spending on infrastructure this year will create new employment, we expect our general fund revenues to continue to decline. The capital expenditures we're making have been planned for some time and will breathe some life into our economy, creating jobs and securing our future. They'll prepare us for the economy's rebound when we will grow once again. We have difficult decisions to make. With 75 percent of our budget going to human capital, we know our decisions affect the lives of our North Las Vegas family. We're working every day to maintain our current levels of employment - and in Nevada, we have one of the lowest public employee-to-population ratios in the nation. The untold story is that we've always done more with less - and we continue to do so today. That's not enough. Every day we see the revenues of our strongest companies declining. We witness their excruciating decisions - decisions that affect their employees - and their homes. These are the companies - and their employees are our residents - who, through their taxes, pay our salaries and benefits.