New job data and a pending decision from the Fed on interest rates, what this all means for Nevada, plus... -It got to the point where I would plead with the airlines of, Okay, whoever has New York flights, can we get them out?

They needed to get home.

-Retiring Clark County Director of Aviation Rosemary Vassiliadis reflects on the 911 terrorist attacks that stranded thousands of travelers in Las Vegas.

That's this week on Nevada Week.

♪♪ -Support for Nevada Week is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

A local theater wants you to see more independent films on the big screen and only on the big screen.

That story is ahead, but we begin with the economy.

Annual revisions from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show the US jobs market was weaker than originally reported.

The Bureau says employers actually added 911,000 fewer jobs between April 2024 and March 2025.

So how many jobs did Nevada actually add, and what does this new data mean for the Federal Reserve, which could announce interest rate cuts on September 17?

For that, we bring in John Restrepo, Principal of Las Vegas based RCG Economics; and Andrew Woods, Director of UNLV Center for Business and Economic Research.

Gentlemen, welcome back to Nevada Week.

-Thank you, Amber.

-So the report that I just brought up, 911,000 fewer jobs added in the US.

And in Nevada, 3,100 fewer jobs added.

Does that mean much to you?

What do you think of that, Andrew?

(Andrew Woods) Well, it means a lot in terms of what we're looking at for trend and rebasing our numbers.

You know, these revisions are common.

They always have been happening for decades.

The fiscal methods that the BLS uses, you know, have to be checked with.

What they do is they actually check it with unemployment data coming out of the states.

So the revisions weren't surprising.

I think what's been more concerning over the summer is that we've seen that hiring has slowed and the number of job openings has started to slow down, too, as well nationally in the economy.

You have seen a slight tick, uptick in the unemployment rate.

Of course, it hasn't gone up as much as maybe some have forecasted, which maybe also still points to that firms are holding on to their workers, but they're not letting go of their workers.

So we're kind of this weird point in the economic and business cycle where the economy is trucking along, but they're not hiring workers as much as they were in years past, which means a slowing economy, but it's still positive.

So what do you do with that information, and where do we go from here?

I know that's why John and I are here to talk.

-Yeah, John, where do we go with this information?

What do you make of that info?

(John Restrepo) Let me add to what Andrew said.

Remember this correction that we just saw, this 900,000 person, we haven't seen anything that's major since early 1990s.

So it is a big deal in terms of level of correction.

The fact they're correcting things with the quarterly data, correcting the monthly data with the quarterly data, is not unusual, but the size of the correction.

So what's causing that?

It's probably because the economy's evolved and changed over time, and maybe the methodologies that some of these federal agencies, the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Bureau of Economic Analysis, need to be updated to 2025.

It could be the way they survey, how they survey, things like that.

So some methodological advancements and innovations need to take place now, particularly with all the advancements we have in technology to do that.

We also had in this most recent set of numbers the impact of all of the deportations, immigration issues that we've seen in the last 12 months.

And so that comes into play as well.

And so there's a lot of kind of noise right now in the data, but we're pretty sure--and you mentioned it earlier--these are not, the BLS and BEA are not political organizations.

They're statisticians.

They're number nerds like Andrew and I.

So they're just trying to do the right thing.

Maybe their methodologies need to be improved, but these are not people that are cooking numbers or make any administration look bad, bad or good.

-And one of the one issues you get there is, since the covid pandemic, across the board, response to surveys for government data has declined, and particularly that one is below, I think, at or below, 40% response rate.

Whereas, before the pandemic, it was at or above 60%.

-Yeah.

-And so you're just going to get these wild swings in these numbers because they have to go back and check them, but you're getting lower and lower response rates.

-Right.

And part of that, real quickly, just to add to that-- Sorry.

Not to belabor the point, you know, we've cut back the budgets on these agencies that do the data, so now we have fewer people with a lot of, a lot of work they have to do to maintain this information, with business depend on it and all these sorts of things.

And so it's kind of funny, you can't cut someone's budget and expect them to do the same level of due diligence and data confirmations.

Someone said the other day, yesterday, on the news about this, and the Congress said, you know, it's like cutting your neighbor's tires on his car when they don't move the car, blaming the neighbor, right?

So you have to be very careful.

There's a lot of this, it's budgetary issues and things like that too as well.

-You brought up immigration, increased immigration enforcement and its impact on the jobs market.

Have we seen that in Nevada?

Has it had an impact so far for either of you, do you think?

-We haven't seen it quite yet.

I think there hasn't been a lot of this ICE enforcement coming, happening here in Southern Nevada or Northern Nevada in agricultural, the agricultural economy.

We haven't seen that quite yet.

Will it happen?

We don't know.

That's going to be a political decision, right?

What state, what cities, what metros, what states are being affected by the ICE activities?

So, no, we have not seen that quite yet.

What we're starting to see more, though, is slowly seeping in the impact of tariffs.

-One more question on immigration.

There is increased immigration enforcement in California.

How does that end up impacting Nevada, or does it?

-Well, so UNLV Center for Business and Economic Research, we do the population forecast.

We've been doing that since 1997.

We look at not just the year ahead, but the next 60 years.

And a large driver of our population growth, especially since the pandemic, has been immigration, which could be coming from California.

But we also know California, in general, is-- 60% of our growth comes from the population moving from California.

So there's this question that we have is, if you have lower international migration in the United States, that's going to filter through to the Nevada economy because a lot of those workers backfill the jobs that domestic workers that live here in Nevada don't necessarily want to do, which is a lot of these entry-level jobs, say in leisure and hospitality or construction, which are very much kind of drivers of growth in Southern Nevada.

So it's not immediate in terms of like month to month, but we're anticipating, and when we go revise our numbers in February, March, and April, we're expecting to see a big impact on limiting our ability to grow, because who's going to take these entry-level jobs?

-That's right.

And the other thing, too, tied into that--Andrew makes an excellent point--that, you know, international, international visitation is an important part of the Nevada, also the Nevada experience.

I think 10 or 15%, I can't remember the number-- -It's about 11 to 12.

-11 to 12% are foreign travelers.

And so when we're fighting with foreigners, when we're threatening the Canadians and making them the 51st state, all that other stuff, and we're charging Canadian or foreign visitors an extra fee to come here and all these sorts of things and dealing with creating kind of anxiety among our allies, they're not coming here as frequently.

So that's all part of the immigration discussion, as well, is the foreign visitor.

-And the drop in tourism.

That we have covered here on the show, but tariffs you mentioned.

What impact have they had thus far?

-It depends on the product.

It depends on the country, but it's still flowing through the system.

And so we're starting to see, like Andrew mentioned earlier, I think offline, there's certain consumer products are going up.

I'm noticing where prices at a restaurant-- For example, my wife and I were in LA visiting my daughter this weekend, and we noticed that the prices haven't changed dramatically.

The portions have gotten smaller.

So you have these subtle little things like this, but we're starting to see the prices seeping.

We're probably not going to see the full impact of the tariffs probably until the end of this year or early the first quarter, where we start really seeing the effects of it.

Right now, businesses are absorbing.

The importers are absorbing it in China and India a little bit.

You know, the prices, they've kept the prices down.

The American company importers have been absorbing-- so I don't want to scare the consumer, but at some point they're going to stop absorbing these things.

They're going to start passing it on.

-And I think you see it in these earnings reports.

So Home Depot, Walmart, Amazon have all said, like, we can't hold back much longer or at all anymore.

-We can't absorb this anymore.

-Yeah.

And you know someone's paying them, because every month, you get the numbers from Treasury on how much they're collecting in tariffs, which is somewhere between 200 and 300 billion a month.

So someone's paying that.

It's most likely the companies that will actually pass it on to us because, because consumers, we will pay it.

-Consumers could certainly be paying much more attention to this around Christmastime.

-That's when you'll see it, yeah.

It's interesting, because I saw weird statistic the other day.

90% of all our toys that we buy in this country, in Christmas items and things like that, you know, decorations are all Chinese.

And so what is that going to do at some point?

This is the thing that I think we underestimated as a policy: Countries have national pride.

They're not going to sit back and not respond because it's the United States demanding something.

They're going to fight back in the best way they can, so we're still waiting for all of this to play out.

-Okay.

Will the Fed be lowering interest rates?

What do you think, Andrew, and by how much?

-I think there's a very strong possibility for a 25 basis point cut next week.

I think the real question is, will they do it again before the end of the year?

-What do you think?

-I agree totally.

They're going to increase it by 25 basis points, or a quarter of a percent, and they're going to see what-- help prop up the job market, because it's getting weak.

-Increase or decrease?

-Decrease, I'm sorry.

And prop up the job market, stop the job market from going into kind of some kind of downward spin.

They're going to watch it carefully, because inflation is still there, so they have to be careful, not create too much demand, right, because they have to tame inflation.

So it's kind of a two conflicting set of metrics that they're being looked at.

But yeah, they will definitely decrease it at the end of next week, for sure.

-And the President has argued that had they done this earlier, that could have, you know, helped with allowing for more borrowing and then allowing employers to hire more people.

Perhaps the jobs report wouldn't be as bad as it is if the Fed had lowered interest rates already.

What do you think of that argument?

-I think that's assuming that the Fed is in the driver's seat of the economy right now.

I don't think the Fed is in the driver's seat of the economy right now.

It's the policies out of Washington, D.C, are driving the economy and affecting business decisions.

It certainly can help or hinder what the Fed does, but they're no longer in the driver's seat.

And so that's, that's how I would frame it.

-What presidential policies have had some positive impacts, perhaps the maintenance of the tax cuts that were already in place from his first administration.

He implemented them, and those are staying at the rate that they are.

-Yeah.

I mean, that's worked.

The other thing that's not-- it's-- it's you kind of you, you don't want to do it broad based, but it can work in certain situations.

Tariffs can work when it's strategic things like computer chips and rare earth metals and things that you need for national defense, things like that.

In a targeted way, limited tariffs can work, I think.

The President did this his first term.

President Biden continued them.

But when you have these broad based, you know, tariff everything, including, you know, coffee from Brazil, whatever it is, it just makes no sense.

But so tariffs, in and of themselves, in a limited way, can work.

The continuation of the tax cuts from the-- I forget the name of the, the jobs act, the Tax Economy and Jobs Act, whatever the tax bill, bill that the President passed a number of years ago in Congress.

I think continuing those probably is best than not.

We also have to understand that they were concentrated in certain groups, too.

And so let's make sure consumers are also benefiting from these tax cut and it's just not the large corporations and the super wealthy.

So that's-- but in general, I think that it's a good thing.

-I think, too, for workers here in Southern Nevada, the, you know, as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, you know, the no tax on tips and the break on overtime, you know, we estimated last year, when there's all this discussion on the campaign trail, right around 18% of the workforce here in Nevada would benefit from those kind of policies because they're dependent on tips or there's the overtime as part of their job.

So assuming that actually it occurs in the way that it's, we all assumed it's going to.

Now, I think John brought up when we were talking before this is that, you know, there's these time periods.

This is not a permanent thing.

And of course, we know that they're in DC, though, just because it's temporary, it ends up kind of sometimes being permanent as well.

So it will be interesting how this evolves with, when they go back and do more tax changes, another reconciliation bill, the budget process right now.

But I do think that does help benefit our workers here in Southern Nevada, because we have an economy largely driven with a, on service work, service work, or you have a lot of workers who get overtime as well.

-The only footnote I would add to what Andrew and I are saying, you have to adjust spending.

-Yeah.

-So with these tax cuts, the One Beautiful Bill and the previous tax, the one-- Let's talk about the One Big Beautiful.

You also have to have companion spending cuts, and that's what no one wants to deal with.

And that's what's causing the deficit and what's causing the issues that we're having right now.

What's the latest?

Where are we on the deficit.

-We're north of, what, 23 trillion?

-Yeah, something like this.

-I want to say-- -You have to have both, and no one wants a cut.

That's the problem.

-You basically, you need to raise revenue.

-In federal offices.

-You need to raise revenue or cut spending, but I would say, going back to the Fed conversation about interest rate cuts, it won't really matter if no one has-- if we don't have the credibility that we have our debt under control, because a lot of interest rates that we pay, whether it's on a new home or car, for example, a lot of those are more determined by the bond market, which is dependent on the confidence of America, our ability to pay our debt.

-And a lot of foreign countries and investors are buyers of our bonds.

-And own America's debt.

-You saw that going into the jobs report last week that there was this unwinding between short-term and long-term interest rates, because the bond market is really queasy about all of this debt that we keep selling.

-John, I think ahead of this off camera, you described it as messy, and that's what it is, so we'll leave it there.

Thank you both for joining Nevada Week.

-Thank you, Amber.

-We move now to a new endeavor for the Beverly Theater.

Las Vegas' only independent film house and performance venue recently launched Ink Films, a theatrical distribution arm.

Unlike film distribution, theatrical distribution focuses on releasing films that can only be seen in theaters.

So why did the film house go in this direction?

Joining me for more on that is Kip Kelly, Founding Creative Director and Chief Experience Officer at the Beverly Theater.

Kip, thank you for joining Nevada Week.

-Thank you.

What an absurd job title that is.

I don't know where-- It's so long.

I'm sorry you had to read that, but thanks.

-Did you make that up?

-I did not.

I-- Well, I had a part of it, but the first part was actually Beverly Rogers, who, for those who don't know, is the namesake of the theater and also the foremost champion of arts and education in Southern Nevada, I believe.

And she's always talked about arts and education as it affects people's lives, not just let's save the arts, let's fund the arts, let's protect the arts just for arts sake or just for education sake.

It's really about how those things affect or change or transform people's lives.

And so the theatrical distribution arm of this really, when we started it, it really had to do more with, well, we've built this brick and mortar theater, and we have all these roads that that go to and from when it comes to films coming into the theater, because we do everything at the theater.

And so we, we really kind of built this system and these roads that can can go two ways.

If we can receive films and we can book films, then we could probably distribute them, although it wasn't that easy.

I just felt like that made sense at the time, and we said, let's try it.

And the mission of Ink Films, specifically, is really we want to work with filmmakers and partners who are committed to their mission.

They want to get their film on screen.

They want to get their film in front of a broader audience or our national audience.

And everyone wants to do that, so it's not like it's hard to find those people, but there's a lot of really good films that don't have a distribution home or don't have kind of that support to help get them into the, into the theaters and on the big screen.

And we, of course, have a vested interest in getting people into theaters--we want people to come to our theater--so we want to work with titles that encourage people to get out to other people's theaters as well.

We kind of-- We want to be a part of people's night out, you know?

And so that kind of goes both ways with what we do at the Beverly Theater and then also what we do with Ink Films.

-You want to help bring back the time before covid.

(Kip Kelly) I don't know that we can do that, but I think it's, it's if you aim for the stars, you land on the moon.

And I do think that there is still something very magical about going to the movies and watching something with friends or with other people.

I love to stream.

I think streaming is, is a powerful tool, but that's a very personal thing, kind of people's night in.

If I told people what I streamed at home, they'd probably, you know, there's guilty pleasures, like, I leave that to people at home.

What do you want to stream?

For me it might be some Dateline episode from 2005, you know?

Like we choose what we choose at home, but when we talk about being a part of people's night out, it's about encouraging and getting them to inspire or to create or to think or to engage and be a part of the community which we like.

We like doing that.

-Talking about changing people's lives, this inaugural release, in particular, is going to help the animators that are featured in this film.

How?

-Animation Mixtape actually is a kind of spin off of something called "The Animation Show," which came out in about, I think it was 2003.

Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge, who are world renowned animators, came out with this touring animated shorts festival called The Animation Show, and it's in partnership with MTV.

And the ethos of that was really-- And I think the quote exactly is: To release animators from the dungeon of internet exhibition, something like that.

And even at 2003, they were, they want, they, Get off of the internet and go see the movies.

And that was 22 years ago.

-Wow.

-And so we went to Don and thought that this would be a good idea to kind of do it again.

And he is a big fan of independent animators, obviously.

He's won himself.

But he's, he's a little more big time now.

He's got a couple Oscar nominations under his belt, and he's done a lot of big things.

And he really wanted to work and to put this project together to benefit other independent animators who haven't had a chance to have their stuff on the big screen yet.

So not every project we do will be like this, but this was close to the heart of what we do at Ink Films and what Don and Mike created in 2003.

So to kind of bring it back to life in 2025 with kind of the same goal in mind, which is just to get people into theaters and to help filmmakers.

But I do think people who are fans of animation are going to love this.

And if they happen to bring somebody who hates animation or is not a fan, I think this is a good one to kind of get your feet wet in, because it introduces you to some some old animation and some new animation, and all in the spirit of Don Hertzfeld, who's beloved as an animator.

-And you mentioned that he released a trailer for this, and we do have that, so let's show some of that right now.

-All right.

[drumroll] -Yea!

-Woohoo!

-Yea!

-Yaba-Daba-Doo!

-Yea!

-Wow!

Wow-ow!

[laughter] -Okay.

So I've seen this a couple of times now, and I laughed and I don't know why.

-Yeah, me either.

So a lot of people are probably not familiar.

This is, these are kind of Don's signature characters.

And we were talking off camera, I was explaining to some of the crew here.

We've been calling them clouds.

Others have called them sheep.

Don himself has no idea what they are, so you can call them-- -Yea!

-That's also his voice doing all of those.

Those are just kind of his characters that make-- They make appearances throughout a lot of his films and of his projects.

And there, there's other parts of that trailer as the intro.

If you-- You'll see it's not just the trailer, it's also the intro to the film.

He's got some gnarly characters that pop up after that.

-What would you tell a viewer who just watched and said, What in the world was that?

-I think that's exactly what you should expect when you go see anything animated in theaters, like it's, it's, I've-- As somebody who's watched a lot of animation over the last year, I still don't get a lot of it, and I-- but I think that's okay.

A lot of it's open for interpretation.

It's just supposed to be fun.

Like those guys are just-- Those clouds, whatever they are, are just inherently fun, and you laugh and don't know why.

-Kip Kelly, thank you so much.

-Thank you, Amber.

I appreciate it.

I love PBS.

I love Nevada Week.

Thank you guys.

-And we end now with a look back on the local impact of the 911 terrorist attacks that happened 24 years ago after terrorists hijacked four planes killing 2,977 people when they crashed into the World Trade Center, Twin Towers in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Operations at airports and air space around the United States paused for two days.

In Las Vegas, it took an unprecedented effort to get the thousands of visitors stranded here home, and it was a defining moment in the career of Clark County Director of Aviation Rosemary Vassiliadis.

At the time, she was a deputy director and had the daunting task of reopening a major airport.

She shared those memories in a recent episode of Nevada Week In Person.

(Rosemary Vassiliadis) And as you know, I was there at 911 and I was there when TSA was born.

And it was hard for a lot of airports to bring that in, because they had such command over a huge part of the operation.

But we know, here in Las Vegas, we wanted everyone to feel safe, you know, as a discretionary and a leisure destination.

So I embraced them, saying, okay, it's side by side.

What do you need?

You know, what are your rules?

And what are we going to do to make it feel for our passengers to come back because they know they're going to be safe.

-Whereas, other airports may have had kind of a power struggle with the introduction of the TSA?

-That's exactly right.

-What do you remember about the days after 911?

-It's hard to remember because there was no sleep, but it was, it was very difficult.

I really-- I actually didn't know everything that happened that day until the year anniversary, because we had to get through that day.

You know, airspace was never closed.

Commercial airports were never closed.

You know, I was the one that was there that was in charge.

And we kept on getting security rules from FAA, because that's who had the security regulations at the time, every few hours.

But what we did know here in Las Vegas is we had 90,000 hotel rooms that had a very healthy occupancy rate, and they wanted to get home.

So when we reopened, we knew what was going to happen.

And they did, they all came back.

We had to literally shut down our roadway system and had, you know, passenger snake queues to be able to get them processed to go back home.

And that was something that was our responsibility, and we had to do the best we could.

-Gosh, I didn't think about that aspect, all of the visitors that were staying here in Las Vegas at the time wanting to get home.

-It was heart wrenching, because the people from New York couldn't get through to their families by cell.

Remember at that time, everything was just so, you know, overpowered.

So it got to the point where I would plead with the airlines of, okay, whoever has New York flights, can we get them out?

They needed to get home.

This was three days later.

That's a long time not being able to contact your family.

-After serving more than 28 years as an airport leader in Clark County, Rosemary Vassiliadis retires on September 12.

She shared more of her experiences with us on Nevada Week In Person.

You can find her episode, as well as other resources discussed on this show on our website, vegaspbs.org/nevadaweek.

♪♪