In 19th-century America, the government awarded land grants to start what would become the transcontinental railroad and establish universities such as Rutgers and Michigan State.
Tom Skancke, president of The Skancke Company and transportation consultant to the LVCVA says now is the time to focus on building Interstate 11. The proposed freeway would connect Phoenix and Las Vegas and be part of a redesigned Boulder City bypass. But who would benefit from this highway? And how will it be funded? Tom Skancke joins us to discuss how and why we should build the I-11.
If Las Vegas hopes to recharge its sputtering economy, the city should increase exports to other countries by developing an international trade center where business deals “get done” and encouraging more consultants to set up shop in Southern Nevada.
Southern Nevada has long struggled to build a sense of community, and now a crossroads of sorts is approaching.
A new federal grant program appears to be tailor-made for the Las Vegas Valley — hundreds of millions of dollars to help at-risk children succeed in school and life, with a cradle-to-college approach.
LOS ANGELES — The West may not be the geographic center of the country, but these days it sits at the heart of its political culture.
Strobe Talbott and William Antholis of the Brookings Institution are in Las Vegas Wednesday at UNLV's Brookings Mountain West to speak about their new book Fast Forward: Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming. They join us to talk about the increasing threat of climate change.
Strobe Talbott has been tracking — and making — international news for decades.
He was Time magazine’s principal correspondent on Soviet-American relations through the 1980s. Then he became deputy secretary of state for his college buddy and fellow Rhodes Scholar, Bill Clinton, from 1994-2001.
Denver and Phoenix are competing for economic development opportunities in the same way Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala. battled at the height of the civil rights movement.
During the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, Atlanta promoted itself as “The City Too Busy to Hate.” Atlanta mayor William Hartsfield used this phrase to promote Atlanta’s urban growth and to indicate the city would not succumb to the evils of racial prejudice and violence.
Virginia's Fairfax County has 59 Starbucks, 32 golf courses, eight synagogues, four mosques and a House race that's a bellwether for Republicans in this year's midterm elections.
In this least good year in decades, someone has to sit at the bottom. For the most part, the denizens are made up of "usual suspects" from the long-devastated rust belt region around the Great Lakes. But as in last year's survey, there's also a fair-sized contingent of former hot spots that now seem to resemble something closer to black holes.
Las Vegas property values have declined to levels of 10 years ago, but will recover to 60 percent of their peak in the next two to three years, the leader of a local academic institution said Wednesday.
Bruce Katz from the Brookings Institution tells us how Nevada can rethink its approach to business and innovation and bring Las Vegas out of the recession. And the key factors in creating and sustaining jobs and a strong educated workforce.
In this crucial election year for Nevada it’s troubling that the Republican candidates for governor seem to have taken a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” approach to diversifying our economy and improving our quality of life.
So I’ve just been in Las Vegas where Metro Program Director Bruce Katz gave a speech at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) on the next American economy and what might drive it in Southern Nevada.
Who is going to lead this?
It was a very simple question that Ted Quirk asked at a gathering Monday afternoon at UNLV. The answer, however, was not so simple.
A group of business leaders, government officials and scholars gathered Monday at UNLV to discuss Nevada’s future. Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution, which has been studying the Mountain West, brought the group together to talk about how Nevada could position itself for the “new economy.”
The auditorium at UNLV was filled about to capacity, some 150 business leaders, scholars and government people, gathered to discuss Nevada’s future and how to pull it out of the Great Recession.
Bruce Katz, vice president of the Brookings Institution, will speak at an invitation-only event today at UNLV. He’ll also lead a panel that will include MGM Mirage CEO Jim Murren.
Katz and Brookings, whose Mountain West Initiative is at UNLV, are on the forefront of thinking about how the United States and areas such as the Sun Belt need to transform their economies. With the recession winding down, Southern Nevada will need to rethink its economy to prevent another debt-fueled collapse.
For the past four decades, ever since Kevin Phillips coined the term in his 1969 book,"The Emerging Republican Majority," most Americans have known what the Sunbelt is. It is the huge swath of territory running south along the Atlantic from the southern border of Virginia to Florida, then west to Texas and all the way to California.
Nevada's economy typically roars back from recession, but not this time around. We're joined by Mark Muro, one of the authors of the Brookings Mountain Monitors Report. He tells us why Nevada continues to struggle even as the nation inches forward.
Robert Lang, director of Brookings Mountain West, a UNLV-based offshoot of the prominent Washington, D.C., think tank, spoke to the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce this week at the Four Seasons Hotel. His message to the business leaders was essentially positive about the future.
"This region will grow again," he said. "We are due at least one more mini-boom."
Adele Morris is a fellow and policy director at the Brookings Institution, which, in partnership with UNLV, runs the Brookings Mountain West think tank.
Her work focuses on energy and natural resource policies related to the economics of climate change. Brookings Mountain West brought her to the university last week.
Regionalism is too often thought to require government initiative. As a result, progress is associated with full-on structural reform--and so the controversy (and usually frustration) begins.