F1, of course, is what teed off our Henderson Nevada Democracy Project listening session.

But residents there express several other concerns they have about housing, taxes, education, and more.

-I'm what's called an elder millennial.

I'm going to be 40 this year.

I was hoping that at this point in my life I would be on the property ladder.

That is not the case.

I'm still renting, and I have seen how in recent years, house prices have skyrocketed, the interest rates have skyrocketed.

Rent, including my own, has skyrocketed.

My rent has almost doubled since 2019.

And so-- and because of that, that's forced me to dip into savings that I was using to put down for a down payment on a house that I could no longer afford anyway.

So like many people my age, I'm kind of giving up on the idea of getting on the property ladder.

It's like, well, it looks like I'm going to be renting forever.

I don't know.

-You can definitely say that the gas prices are higher in Nevada, but there's a reason for that.

And it's going to turn into a game of Whack-a-Mole.

If you knock the taxes down, you've got a big hole in the budget.

One partial solution to that that I think--and this is kind of an unpopular thing--but you can put a fee on the electric vehicles, because the electric vehicles obviously are not paying fuel taxes, so they're not paying their fair share.

And if you were to put a $100-$150 per year fee on an electric vehicle, maybe even less than that, those owners can easily afford it, because they're saving much more than that by not buying gasoline.

-I think the urban planning issue here is the worst concern, living here in Las Vegas.

In fact, it impacts a lot of issues, such as gas prices, car insurance, housing construction.

The list goes on.

We have to move away from cul-de-sacs, strip malls, and the system that we've had for 80-90 years.

And it's time to really look back what we used to do in Downtown or even historic Boulder City.

Until we don't look and address this issue and build something different at a massive scale, I believe most of the problems here in Las Vegas are going to persist.

-The most recent primary, it was hard as heck to find any information on most of the candidates that weren't running for one of the major offices, for Congress or for the mayor's office.

And you had this whole list, from judges to city council members, but no information anywhere were we able to find-- I looked on the internet, went through all different sources.

How can you as a citizen make a good decision on candidates when the press doesn't have the ability to really report what's going on?

All of that leads me to question the state of our democracy in this state.

-I don't think there's any value in us being or having the fifth largest school district in the country.

Numerous studies have shown that the best possible size for a school district is between 35,000 and 50,000 students.

Yes, we hear about the inequities of tax across the valley, and there's generally solutions to fix that in terms of the number of students, the funding, the equity.

Everybody talks about, Well, then we're going to lose the value of central administration and central HR and central busses and all of that.

No, that's shared services.

That's done in many areas.

I just can't understand why we can't get past one of the most critical things, because if you have education, you understand why you're going to participate in things like this.

-Joining me to host that Nevada Democracy Project listening session and joining me again now is Rocio Hernandez, Education Reporter for The Nevada Independent.

Rocio, welcome back to Nevada Week.

Let's talk about the last issue discussed in that series of sound bites, breaking up the Clark County School District.

Of the recent efforts that have gone toward that, what stands out to you?

-So there's always been, historically, for the past, I don't know, like 10 years, pushes to break up the school district.

But they never seemed to go very far.

The latest attempt that we saw was in 2020.

It was a petition to-- that would have allowed municipalities that wanted to form their own school district and break off from CCSD.

That petition didn't get the valid signatures it needed to qualify for the ballot, so it essentially just died out.

But what we have heard in the past, concerns about those kind of efforts, is there's people who are worried about what that would mean in terms of inequities it could potentially create, like these unintended consequences of breaking up the school district.

There's also been issues or questions about, like how much this would actually cost to break up the school district.

I think there's been efforts in the past to do a study on how much that would cost, but it just doesn't seem like it's-- there's some support for it, because obviously there's a lot of people that are frustrated with the state of the district, that want some different kind of option.

And they see breaking up the school district as one of those options, especially because we're the fifth largest school district in the country.

And a lot of people say that CCSD has just gotten too big over the years.

Like there's 300,000 students, and how can you possibly effectively manage all of these students and understand the needs that each one of these communities that the schools are in are facing.

They're so different.

There's so many areas.

It's more than just urban Las Vegas here.

-Totally.

We'll talk about the rural areas, which you've done some reporting on.

That initiative was the Community Schools Initiative, and that was ruled, just as recently as December, that that was not going to be on this year's ballot.

So these efforts take time.

But also CCSD's response to why they do not want to break up the school district has included, as you mentioned, inequities.

Will you explain that better to our viewers how that would work, why they think breaking up the school district would result in inequities.

-Yeah.

The school district and I think even others in the community are concerned that if you break up the school district, you'll have neighborhoods that are just well off more because they might have more tax revenue because their properties have higher value, that they'll have more resources than you'll see in maybe like inner city schools, where maybe the property tax isn't as strong.

So they're concerned that by breaking up the school district, you'll have districts that are well off, and you'll create districts that aren't as well positioned to compete with those districts.

So that's one of the concerns.

And I think in the past we've also heard former Superintendent Jesus Jara saying that he thinks a lot of those conversations are a little bit of a distraction from the work that needs to happen in CCSD, that they kind of take away from the message, and it's a distraction from the real-- what he sees as the real issues, which is funding issues across the state.

-Okay.

Let's talk about last legislative session.

There were a couple efforts to, one, to break up the school district in terms of Moapa Valley and Mesquite, right?

How did that one work?

-Like I said, there's different pockets in CCSD, so the Moapa area is one of those where the issues that those schools are facing are very different from the ones that you'll see here in the urban core in the Las Vegas Valley.

So for a while, those schools have felt like the district being here, centered in Las Vegas, they have felt historically ignored.

They feel the issues that their schools face are a little different than what you can encounter in Las Vegas.

So they've been wanting to see some sort of solution to what they feel, being ignored.

So one bill that was introduced last session would have allowed them to create their own school district.

So not essentially as big as this whole break up CCSD, but more just let one little part of CCSD break off and become its own school district.

But that bill didn't get a hearing in, so it didn't get very far.

-The other effort that did result in, again, not a breakup, but some movement in this area, deals with authorizing municipalities as charter school authorizers.

I mean, what a-- it's a strange set of words.

What does that mean?

There has been progress in that area.

-Yeah.

Normally right now, or before this bill, we had three kinds of charter school authorizers.

So the Clark County School District, the Washoe County School District, school districts in general, can become charter school authorizers.

Then we have the one that most people are familiar with, the State Public Charter School Authority.

And so you'll see the majority of the Nevada charter schools authorized under that entity.

What this bill did is it allows municipalities that are interested to become charter school authorizers.

So this allows them to open up schools, you know, and be involved in the process of opening up more charter schools in those municipalities.

So right now we saw that North Las Vegas, City of North Las Vegas and the City of Henderson have both applied and got an approval to become charter school authorizers.

So there's still a couple more steps to go.

They have to figure out what's the process that they're going to use to authorize these charter schools before we see those up and running, but we could potentially-- -Does that mean they would run these charter schools?

-I think they would work to authorize them.

So they would be responsible for overseeing the charter schools, but not necessarily being the operators of the schools.

So you'll have like, you know, let's say so-and-so has an idea for a charter school.

They'll go up to the City and ask them if they can bring this idea, this idea for a charter school to life in the city.

-And that's allowing these municipalities to exercise a little bit more control over the education that their residents are receiving?

-So it's almost like not exactly like a breakup of CCSD, but it does allow for more options in these different cities now to create not a new school district, but to create different school choices for their community, for their residents that want this.

-And you, in your recent reporting, talked a little bit more about Moapa Valley and Mesquite.

You spoke with some people out there who have some hope that perhaps a new superintendent will better address the challenges they're facing.

How much optimism do they have about that?

-You know, like you said, with the new superintendent, there's this potential that this person can come in and give them a little bit more focus, a little bit more attention than what they've been used to in the past.

So the residents that I spoke to have been longtime education leaders, advocates in their communities, so they're definitely going to be staying involved as CCSD School Board does a superintendent search.

They're definitely going to be looking to see which of these candidates that come forward will be the best for their area.

But I don't think they're necessarily holding their breath, because historically, people come in and they'll say they want to and care for Moapa areas.

But it seems that over the years, with all the stresses and challenges that come along with managing a school district the size of the Moapa area is kind of, is left in the rearview mirror.

-Rocio Hernandez of The Nevada Independent, thank you for joining Nevada Week.

We move now to the listening session at OLLI at UNLV.

OLLI stands for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and that is where more than 1,000 retired and semiretired adults meet to take classes and participate in special events like the Nevada Democracy Project.

For this session, I was joined by Jon Ralston, CEO and Founder of The Nevada Independent.

Here's some of what we heard: -We were ground zero for the mass, biggest mass shooting in America.

Nothing made sense.

-What would be your first wish?

If you could get one piece of gun control legislation passed in the state, what would it be?

-You know, I'm concerned about automatic weapons and, you know, high capacity weapons.

Anything related to that being banned, that would be my biggest wish.

-My concern is more specifically on the housing crisis, lack of affordable housing.

I read in the news recently that 70% of Las Vegas population cannot afford a home.

I'm also seeing a higher level of homelessness, and I think it's a big area, not only for seniors, but for the whole population.

-Federal Section 8 Housing.

I don't understand why the federal government doesn't have a massive program to support people who are on the margins so they can come upward in the economic ladder.

-Most of the problems, like the school and the legislature, has a problem of overpopulation.

Four months every two years was fine 30 years ago, 40 years ago, but it's not fine now.

Our problem is we don't know what an optimum population ought to be for us.

We don't know why we want to keep expanding.

Because we're going to be just like Los Angeles.

We'll all be moving to South Carolina to get the hell out of here.

-There was a bill SB 235 that gave terminally ill patients the right to choose to die, and that was the first time it's been passed by the legislature, and he vetoed it.

And as a senior, seeing many of my friends who have suffered with terminal illness and family members, that concerns me.

-Every governor that I've-- that's been governor since I've lived here has said they're going to fix schools, and they've gotten worse.

What is it that can be done?

-Well, what do you think should be done?

If the governors can't fix it, maybe you can.

Go ahead.

-Burn them all down and start over.

-When schools fail, it's not simply a matter of lack of resources, but it's also a function of parent participation.

It seems to me that when parents participate in the schools and participate at home with their kids, helping them understand topics, encouraging them, that's when schools prosper.

But when parents don't do that, schools do not prosper.

-There's no magic bullet that's going to solve the education.

You can throw money at it, but that alone will not solve the problem.

It's going to take a combination of things.

You got to have the funds, you've got to have some sense of accountability, Title II programs going to low-income school districts or schools, and bring in extra.

The funding is supposed to be used for teachers' aides to help in those classrooms where you have these low-income kids that aren't going to get the help from home.