LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – People living in the Windsor Park neighborhood of North Las Vegas, which is slowly sinking into the ground, feel left behind. Some of them who’ve lived there for decades made their voices heard in testimony before the Nevada Senate Committee on Revenue and Economic Development Thursday.
“My father bought that home when I was two years old,” Pamela Neal said during her testimony. “And now I’m 53 and I live there.”
The longtime resident is disappointed in the lack of attention paid to her now-deserted neighborhood, which has cracked sidewalks and crumbling home foundations thanks to being built on top of unstable ground.
“Give me the ticket book,” Neal said. “Because I want to give North Las Vegas a ticket for all the lots they are not maintaining to make our neighborhood look good.”
Windsor Park lies in a Nevada Senate district represented by Dina Neal, who made emotional pleas to her colleagues.
“I don’t have the power to lift these 90 families by myself,” Dina Neal said. “I’m not leaving this building without a remedy for those families.”
The neighborhood was deemed unsafe to live in by a study in the early 1990s. As a result, the city received a federal grant to pay residents to leave the area. Since 2004, the incentive has been $100,000. Most neighbors moved out in the years following the study, but those who remain want money to be spent improving the area instead.
“North Las Vegas can only find a way to condemn us, not help us,” lamented longtime resident Webster Davis during his testimony Thursday.
Senator Neal says there’s not enough money available to help the neighbors of Windsor Park and wants to know where it went.
“It’s not clear that this money was expended on that community,” she asserted.
While Thursday’s hearing did not immediately make clear how that money was spent, the city told FOX5 in March that claimed it only had a few million dollars left of that federal grant, and that it would have to be awarded another one if it were to raise the move-out incentive.
But that’s not what these neighbors say they want. They want to remain where they are and see effort be put into maintaining Windsor Park.
“North Las Vegas made promises that are not being kept,” Davis said. “The neighborhood is ours, and we deserve so much better.”
In a statement sent to FOX5 in March, the city of North Las Vegas said it’s making efforts to get more federal funding for Windsor Park.
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