Reason #22 to VOTE NO on ISSUE 3 CLICK THIS TEXT TO VISIT THIS BLOG'S CURRENT SITE

Because the jobs promised and the life for the people in those jobs stink.

I don't know how else to say it. And sure, it's just my opinion. But read some of these accounts.

From Gambling Magazine's Las Vegas Spotlight:

The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip (Oxford University Press) is the 289-page product of a group of journalism graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor David Littlejohn (now retired) sent his master's students to Las Vegas to find out, essentially, how people live, work and play in the gambling-obsessed community.

What they find is not pretty. This isn't a book the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce wants to see on America's coffee tables. It's a harsh yet well-documented indictment of the city's tattered social safety net and the 24-hour culture's negative effects on families, teenagers and social institutions. Littlejohn's students illustrate in chapters about the homeless, Hispanic immigrants and teenage life, among others, that even beyond the Strip, Las Vegas is different in many ways from other communities.

Littlejohn and his charges clearly are not impressed with the "fast-buck culture" and transiency that pervade the valley. In an interview last week, the professor described the city as "individualism gone amok." He says he heard the term "entrepreneur" used so frequently in Las Vegas that it came to mean something different to him.

"The American West is generally regarded as a haven for go-it-aloners, I-did-it-my-way types. The guy pumping gas is talking about entrepreneurship. I call it every-man-for-himselfishness. It's been true since the Gold Rush days. You come out and do it your way, break away from old community ties and restrictions. Selfishness becomes part of that. It's very hard to build community spirit when everybody considers himself a can-do entrepreneur."

In the book, Littlejohn attributes the city's faults to the influence of the ever-present casino industry:

"The heavy hand of the industry affects the lives, attitudes and expectations of thousands of Las Vegans, whatever may have brought them to the city in the first place. Bingo halls, neighborhood casinos, the slot and video poker machines in hundreds of local stores tempt most of the population to gamble regularly. The still-growing job market of the megahotels absorbs vast numbers of new residents, demanding for the most part a hardworking but uneducated work force. It persuades many young people to stop their education early and, perhaps most important, has made much of Las Vegas a three-shift, 24-hour-a-day town, with all the implications that situation bears for family life, school schedules and teenage behavior."

Littlejohn's generic judgments, however, are not the book's most penetrating views of the city. The graduate students, most of them experienced journalists, sink their teeth into the nitty-gritty of life in Las Vegas, and their reports are sobering.

* Malcolm Garcia writes about the homeless in Las Vegas, revealing the tricks of survival, from selling blood to finding cheap casino eats, in a city that is antagonistic toward the poor. His descriptions of homeless life are spare and blunt:

"The park sprawls around a housing project down the street from the Salvation Army shelter. We follow a narrow dirt path, stepping over dark splashes of dirt stinking with urine.

"A man defecates ahead of us. He leans forward and scrapes his butt back and forth against the wall of an abandoned building - a rough substitute, I can only suppose, for toilet paper."

Garcia interviews a health care worker, Marta Valenzuela, who deals with addicts.

"Ninety percent of my clients have gambling and alcohol problems," she says. "This town is Disneyland. They want people to come. Any vice you want you can do here. There's got to be some ethics in this. There is a nothingness coming over this city. We are fighting nothingness."

* Marie Sanchez covers Las Vegas teens, painting a disturbing portrait of drug abuse, pregnancy and angst.

Teens she interviews give a laundry list of temptations in adult-centered Las Vegas, arguing, somewhat hyperbolically, that "it's easier to be bad than to be good here."

"This town brings out the worst in people," one teen tells her.

Sanchez explores the root causes of teen problems in Las Vegas, homing in on the lack of activities for youths and low parental supervision. She interviews Dorothy Bryant, who runs the Las Vegas Suicide Prevention Center.

"This is a tough town," Bryant tells her. "You're told that you can finally have all your dreams of wealth fulfilled; but in the meantime this town will eat you up. It's a mean town. ... People come here with a dream. Fairly low-functioning people, with a hope of being able to get over, do something, based vaguely around the idea of getting something for nothing, something they don't have to earn. This town is their last stop - their last shot.

"This town is a lot tougher than they think it is. It kicks the living shit out of them, three, four, five times over six months and they've just played their trump card. It didn't pay off. ... Teens see it. They live in it every day."

* Bill Dauber examines the Hispanic immigrant population that is the fastest-growing minority group in the valley. He reports how immigrant construction workers typically are paid $3 or $4 per hour under the table. He also uncovers a system in which Hispanic workers on a legitimate payroll have to pay kickbacks to their foremen and others.

Not what you're hoping for, huh?

Read more about globalization and female casino workers in Nevada, what you need to be to be a casino host, how in Pittsburgh potential casino employees have to pay fees (up to $350) just to apply for the job and, from Job Monkey, a thorough run-down of everything you need to consider if you want to work in casinos.

And by the way, I couldn't figure out - if these big buildings at Nautica and Tower City are just going to be full of slot machines, well, how many people do such buildings actually need to employ? What do they do? I tried to find information on so-called "slots mechanics." Is that going to be a new emphasis in urban and first-ring suburban high schools?

This rant isn't brought to you just by someone who was lucky enough to be born to immigrant grandparents and entrepreneurial parents who, although they would have let me do whatever I want, had trouble at times with me going more for the social work side than the lawyer side of my education.

This rant is brought to you by a parent. Why shouldn't parents - whoever they are, wherever they live, whatever their place in life now - have the hope, be given the chance and be shown that others care that Ohio's children have the same opportunities I had? I went to public school. I had to use loans and work every summer to pay for everything beyond tuition. I had more than most, but it still wasn't enough.

The jobs that will be created are notoriously low-paying, dead-end and transient - that is, the workers are transient, the turnover, very high. Read more about the effects of transiency in the industry (not to mention how cheap casino owners are reputed to be when it comes to charity and the gambling industry's negative impact on philanthropy; there's even a mention in this article that more money would come from Goodyear in Akron than from casinos in Vegas).

Not only will the jobs that will be created be some of the least desirable when it comes to creating a sustainable, vibrant place to live, but Cleveland will end up being a mecca for breeding more people who will leave Cleveland. Sure doesn't sound like economic development to me.

Previous reasons to vote no on Issue 3:

Reason 23
Reason 24
Reason 25
Reason 26
Reason 27
Reason 28
Reason 29
Reason 30
Reason 31
Reason 32
Reason 33
Reason 34
Reason 35
Reason 36
Reason 37
Reason 38
Reason 39
Reason 40
Reason 41
Reason 42
Reason 43
Reason 44
Reason 45
Reason 46
Reason 47
Reason 48
Reason 49
Reason 50
Reason 51
Reason 52
Reason 53
Reason 54
Reason 55
Reason 56
Reason 57

Vote no on Issue 3.