The Las Vegas Monorail might suck now, but thanks to some nifty marketing, it’s going to be great soon!
If you’ve read anything in the newspaper about the monorail, you’ve likely to have read some version of those words, usually from the lips of monorail spokeswoman Ingrid Reisman. Sadly, no matter how many times she repeats the mantra, it’s no closer to being true.
But after reading her most recent quote, we at Various Things & Stuff decided to take a look at just how long Reisman has been parroting the party line. It must be a pretty long time; she didn’t even bother with a live interview this time, opting to release this statement instead: "We are expanding and enhancing our marketing and advertising partnerships to increase awareness of the system and ultimately ridership."
The whole "marketing will save us" thing actually isn’t original with Reisman; it was originated by former monorail spokesman Todd Walker. Back on March 10, 2005, the Review-Journal quoted him thus: "I think there’s only one way for the system to go, and it’s upward," Walker said. "I think we’ll see a steady increase in the number of riders due to the word-of-mouth and increased marketing, now that we’re past the reliability problem."
Much like the rest of what Walker said about the monorail during his tenure, this quote turned out to be bullshit. In fact, there was another way to go, inconceivable as that might be. And that way was down. Walker predicted a daily average of 30,000 riders; alas, the numbers continued to slowly fall.
But Reisman, then an employee of the Regional Transportation Commission, was getting her feet wet with the whole monorail-defending business. She said this: "We have a constantly changing visitor population. I think it’ll be a little bit of an education process until visitors know the monorail is there and they know how to use it and are comfortable using it."
After Walker left and Reisman took over, things didn’t get better. Faced with some bad news, Reisman was quoted in the Feb. 11, 2006 R-J saying this about the monorail’s efforts to market itself and sell tickets: "We have a lot of initiatives we’re working on this year. We’re very excited about this year."
It turned out to be the monorail’s worst year ever, except for the first year, when it was pretty much non-functional due to mechanical problems.
A few months later, on April 14, 2006, Reisman was still singing the same tune. "Reisman hopes several marketing initiatives will soon start to show ridership results," the R-J story says. "’I believe we’re making huge strides in increasing the awareness [of the monorail]. Seeing results in ridership, I think it’s going to take a couple of months."
Of course, a couple of months later, things were no better. On July 20, 2006, Reisman was still pleading for just a little more time. "Nothing happens overnight," she said in an R-J story. "Everything I’m working on today won’t increase sales tomorrow. It will in a few months." (You guessed it; a few months later, things would still blow.)
Perhaps realizing this, Reisman added: "I think really where we’ll see a lot of progress will be in 2007. We’ll see some in 2006. Everybody will be testing it out."
Flash forward to the end of summer, Aug. 30, 2006, where Reisman put the window for success at six months to a year. "I’d love to see it sooner, but I have to be realistic," Reisman said. (It’s still too early to call the one-year window, but six months later in March, things hadn’t exactly turned around.)
By Oct. 18, 2006, the time frame had been widened as talk of default on the state-issued, tax-free bonds spread due to poor performance. "We’re developing a good plan, and we’re implementing what we need to implement for the system to perform the way it’s supposed to perform," Reisman said.
"We’re constantly looking at our business model. We’re constantly tweaking things here and there," Reisman added. "We still anticipate a 12- to 18-month time frame to see results. There are still so many activities that we are just starting to implement."
Those activities didn’t bear fruit over the next four months, which sparked an eruption of promises in an R-J story published Jan. 30, 2007, which reported that 2006 was the monorail’s worst year ever.
The paper quoted monorail CEO Curtis Myles — who participated in an editorial board at the newspaper’s offices in December — saying this: "There is an expectation that we’ll see, as a result of the fare increase, some decreases in ridership. We expect to increase ridership from marketing efforts. Hopefully, the two will offset."
And Reisman? She offered this: "It was always expected that a transit system fare increase would result in a ridership decrease; however, the monorail implemented marketing initiatives simultaneously to boost ridership. We expect to see the full impact of these initiatives in the next year or so."
After that, in early March, the monorail announced it was going to report its ridership results every quarter instead of every month. Could it be the monorail realized that Reisman’s oft-repeated promises were getting stale?
Not at all. On Tuesday, remember, she said the monorail was "expanding and enhancing our marketing and advertising partnerships."
Yeah, success is just around the corner. In the next year or so. Or after that. You’ll see.
CARSON CITY — As the snow — yes, the snow — falls here in the state capital, we can’t help but be transported back to our idyllic youth in the great city of Huntington Beach, Calif. There, we had no snow. Which is super, because WE HATE SNOW!
But, neither rain, nor snow, nor endless floor sessions full of legislative arcania, nor thick clouds of cigar smoke nor gloom of night will keep us from our appointed rounds. It’s bloggin’ time, people!
• State Sen. Joe Heck is a physician. He’s also in the U.S. Army Reserve, where he holds the rank of colonel. And he’s recently been assigned as commanding officer of a San Diego medical unit that oversees troops returning from, and deploying to, battle fronts in the war on terror. (That’s a battalion-sized commands with elements in five different areas around Southern California, including lovely snow-free San Diego.)
We say that only to raise this legitimate question: Why would a physician vote against inoculating young women against cancer? That’s precisely what Heck did, twice. He’s voted against state Sen. Dina Titus’ bill to mandate insurance coverage for the human papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer, once in the commerce committee and once on the Senate floor.
Heck has an answer: He’s against telling insurance companies that they must cover something. “We are one of the most heavily mandated states” in the nation, Heck told us. “It’s a philosophical issue with respect to mandates.”
With each mandate, Heck said, the cost of an insurance premium rises between 0.5 and 1 percentage point, he said.
Oh, and just in case you might think he’s sexist, Heck reports he voted against mandates to cover prostate cancer screenings for the same reason.
• We’ve got to hand it to the Nevada Resort Association. On Tuesday, NRA President Bill Bible came up with a new, creative and actually meaningful objection to a state lottery, one that we had never heard before.
Under state gambling regulations, “all gaming devices submitted for approval must theoretically pay out a mathematically demonstrable percentage of all amounts wagered, which must not be less than 75 percent for each wager available for play on the device.”
And, Bible says, since lotteries pay out less than 75 percent of monies wagered, they can’t possibly legalize lottery machines here in Nevada.
Good one, Mr. Bible. If your industry didn’t already have the Legislature in its pocket, you might actually haven been able to win on the merits, at least when it comes to that one.
• Speaking of the NRA and the lottery, the rest of the arguments deployed against it were — oh, what’s the word? — totally bankrupt? Yeah, that’s it.
Lotteries don’t make investments in buildings and jobs like bricks-and-mortar casinos do, and, according to some gambling industry types, a lottery can become a regressive tax on the poor.
A regressive tax on the poor? Pardon our French, but what the fuck are slot machines? And we’ve hardly seen casinos summon their sympathy for the legions of gamblers who are even as you read this pumping cash into casinos that are regularly posting record revenue figures these days.
Kudos to Assemblyman Marcus Conklin for shooting that old saw down. “You name me a tax where the public has a choice. How a person can call that regressive — I don’t understand it,” he said. Well, that’s because it doesn’t make sense, assemblyman.
But the industry does have at least one other good argument.
“The state, in effect, becomes the competitor to the state’s biggest industry,” Bible lamented.
Now this is a legitimate objection. Casinos are in the business of separating suckers from their money thanks to long odds. If the state were to create a lottery, it would also be engaging in the business of separate suckers from their money thanks to even longer odds.
So when, we wonder, will the NRA be asking its friendly crew of lawmakers in the Legislature to close the Las Vegas Convention Center, run by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority? After all, the convention authority competes with similar venues at The Venetian, the Mandalay Bay and the MGM Grand, among others. If government competing with private industry is really that bad a thing, we must close the convention center!
• And finally this morning, we ran into the nice folks from the Nevada Cancer Institute today at the coolest coffee shop in Carson City, Comma Coffee. They were in town for an early-morning meeting to ask for government funding for the center, which aims to research new cures and treatments for that disease.
According to institute CEO Heather Murren, the institute has been able to leverage those state dollars to raise even more money in the private sector, as well as recruit top researchers from places like Yale, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Stanford and the Salk Institute, among others.
Very impressive, and well worth the $10 million the institute got in the last two-year state budget. If you ask us, the Legislature should keep up the funding, not only to help the institute’s current 2,500 patients, but also to help the thousands of people who will develop this disease until a cure is finally found.
And just because we’re up in the (literally) frozen north, it doesn’t mean that we’re still not keeping an eye on things going on down south. Here’s a couple of Quick Hits, Southern Variety:
• U.S. Rep. Jon Porter may have only raised $234,927, but don’t count him out yet. Here’s why:
First, it’s not surprising he raised less in the first quarter of 2007 than in the first quarter of 2006. He was in an election year 12 months ago.
Second, he’s now a member of the Ways & Means Committee, which we understand makes you popular among donors.
Third, he’s shown an ability to raise plenty of cash in the past; in his razor-thin victory over Democrat Tessa Hafen, Porter collected $3 million.
On the other hand, Porter is now in the minority, and from what we understand, that cuts your fundraising ability. (USA Today on Tuesday published this handy chart showing how much more Democrats have collected in 2007 — after they took over Congress — than they got in 2005, when the Republicans were in charge.)
• Speaking of political fundraising, USA Today also published a state-by-state chart as to where the candidates were getting their money. Based on that chart, the Silver State financially loves, in descending numerical order:
Rudy Giuliani, Republican ($526,375)
Mitt Romney, Republican ($397,235)
Hillary Clinton, Democrat ($317,000)
John McCain, Republican ($92,025)
Barack Obama, Democrat ($63,530)
John Edwards, Democrat ($45,500)
No love for our man Joe Biden? Oh, Nevada. Why must you always break our hearts?
• Are we the only ones who think that the approval of the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s pipeline to rural Nevada is a huge loss for opponents? Sure, the state engineer limited the water draw to 40,000 acre feet per year for the first 10 years, and perhaps as much as 60,000 after that. (The SNWA wanted 91,000 acre feet per year.)
But the point of this whole exercise was the approval of the pipeline itself, we think. Once it’s in place, the amount is a matter of negotiation with rural residents and the state’s political apparatus. We’d bet a lot that Las Vegas will be sucking way more than 40,000 acre feet before too long.
• You know, developer Bill Walters and Mayor Oscar Goodman are absolutely right: The investigation into the allegedly criminal collaboration between the city and Walters needs to move forward, and the guilty parties need to be brought to justice.
We’re just curious as to why Walters, who allegedly got plenty of favorable treatment from the city over the years, and Goodman, who allegedly provided some of that treatment, are so gung-ho on the subject. A report commissioned by the former attorney general already alleged wrongdoing. Shouldn’t they be keeping their heads down?
Oh, that’s right. So long as the cloud of scrutiny hangs over them, Walters and Goodman can’t possibly move forward with Walters original plan, which is to build houses as close as 20 feet to the property line of a sewage treatment plant. And we may be just speculating here, but we think that’s precisely what Walters has in mind.
In the meantime, the city is trying to adopt a series of reforms to prevent another Walters-type incident. The list includes asking top city managers to stop being such goddamn pussies. (We’re pretty sure the city’s formal plan is worded somewhat differently.)
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