News - February 12, 2025 - by Ray Hagar

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Shelley Berkley, the newly- elected mayor of Las Vegas, said on Nevada Newsmakers she has wrapped up her first priority since she was elected last November -- resolving the multi-million "Badlands" lawsuit against the city.

Now, she will turn her attention to two other priorities -- the homeless plus abandoned and abused animals.

"It had to come to an end," the former seven-term Democratic congresswoman said of the longtime "Badlands" legal battle.

"The city had lost every lawsuit against it," she said. "The last one was a Supreme Court decision -- 7 to 0, which you don't always see when it comes to the Supreme Court.

The settlement will cost the city $286 million, leading to a partial city hiring freeze, offers of buyouts to city employees and the shelving of planned projects, according the the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

In  describing her role in ending the legal quagmire, Berkley, Nevada's 1st U.S. House District representative from 1999-2013, said:

"I pulled the trigger."

She added: "I realized that we were spending a fortune on outside counsel and on legal fees. And our costs kept going up because with every decision, we owed more and more millions of dollars to the developer.

"Yes, it is tough..." she said. "It was time to just own up, get this off the table and move on."

Now, Berkley says she's on to the next crisis.

"I took care of the Badlands first," she said. "Now I'm working on abused, neglected animals and abandoned animals. This is a human problem that, unfortunately, these animals are suffering because of it. I'm working on that right now. The next thing I'm going to do is move over to the homeless."

Berkley called Las Vegas homelessness the "No. 1 issue" during her campaign for mayor in early 2023. She called it a "huge and complex problem" during the most recent Nevada Newsmakers interview.

"If it was easy to solve, it would have been solved years ago," Berkley said about the homeless.

"It's a national problem," she added. "Human beings do not belong on the streets. That is not a place for human beings to live. It's inhumane.

Berkley views the issue from both ends. She is sympathetic to the plight of the homeless but sees the economic destruction homelessness causes, especially when hitting small businesses.

"It is an economic problem and a business problem for the city and small business people, who have their life savings tied up in their restaurant or their boutique or their clothing store....and if you've got homeless people sleeping at the entrance and your customers can't get into your establishment, that's a serious problem," Berkley said.

The issue doesn't stop there, she added.

"Also, the larger businesses in downtown Las Vegas, the hotels have challenges with the homeless, harassing customers and whatever."

Lack of mental-health care is a root of the problem, Berkley said.

"What I would like to see is doing everything we can to provide services to get people off the streets," Berkley said.

"A lot of people are addicted," she added. "They're fighting addictions. A lot have mental-health challenges and are having a very difficult time living on their own. And I am committed to doing everything I can to figure out how we're going to get the most number of people off of the streets, how we're going to provide mental-health therapy for those who need it, and many do."

Berkley said she is especially saddened to see so many military veterans among the homeless.

"Twenty percent of our homeless are veterans," she said. "What in heaven's
name? This country ought to be ashamed of itself, that people who sacrificed so much for the rest of us are living on the streets. And again, there's a lot of PTSD and mental health issues (with veterans)."

A factor in the homeless issue across Nevada is a lack of mental-health professionals, she said.

"We've been talking about this in my experience for well over 40 years -- we don't have the (necessary) number of mental health professionals we need across this state, let alone in Las Vegas," Berkley said.

A similar problem has led to the issue of abandoned animals in Las Vegas and surrounding communities.

"We have a tremendous shortage of veterinarians in this community, which is contributing to the problem we have with abandoned and neglected pets, abused pets," she said.

Berkley, who resigned as senior vice president for the Nevada and California campuses of the Touro College and University System in 2023 to run for mayor, wants to see a children's hospital built in the Las Vegas area.

"Even though it probably will not be within the jurisdiction of the city, I'm a tremendous proponent of it," she said about a children's hospital. "I think we need a children's hospital. We've reached a level of population and sophistication in all of Southern Nevada that we could easily have one of these hospitals and it would be successful."

'MEDICAL TOURISM' NOT FEASABLE: Berkley also scoffed at the idea of Las Vegas being a mecca for "medical tourism," where people travel to a resort destination to receive care for medical issues.

"You know, years ago, there was all this talk about medical tourism," she recalled. "The attraction for Las Vegas is that it never made any sense to me...We don't have enough doctors to take care of the people that call Las Vegas home or all of Nevada home. And we want medical tourism? To bring in more patients? Who's going to see them? So I was never particularly enthusiastic about it."

NO NEED TO BUY NEW OFFICE FURNITURE: Although outgoing Mayor Carolyn Goodman did not leave a written note for Berkley, she left the mayor's office in "pristine condition," Berkley said.

"I'm very grateful to her," Berkley said of Goodman. "The city is kind of tightening our belt right now. So, we need to be very careful with our resources.

"I have a budget to buy furniture but when I walked into the mayor's office, I looked around and said, 'Oh, my God, this is beautiful. I didn't change a single thing. So I saved the taxpayers a lot of money just by using what Carolyn had purchased years ago.

"I'm very comfortable in the office," Berkley said. "My congressional office was about a fraction in size of what the mayor's office is."

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