When Brent Bell saw the video of what was going on inside one of his taxicabs, he couldn't believe his eyes.
With the driver in the back seat as a passenger, two female customers took turns driving the cab in a joy ride approved by the cabby.
"He's no longer employed with us," Bell said of the driver in testimony before the Nevada Taxicab Authority this week.
Bell, president of Whittlesea Bell Transportation, which operates the Whittlesea and Henderson Taxi operations, was telling Taxicab Authority board members why he thought it was important for taxi owners to be allowed to view videos captured by cameras in cabs. The board was debating a regulation that would have prohibited taxi certificate holders from using camera-system audio, which could inadvertently record private conversations of passengers, in evaluating or monitoring a driver's performance.
Bell's company was the first to embrace the installation of cab cameras, primarily as a crime deterrent.
The board ended up scrapping the proposed regulation but not before Bell offered his own "Taxicab Confessions."
In addition to the passenger joy ride, Bell said, a worker doing routine maintenance on a vehicle accidentally smashed the back end and apparently was going to leave the blame with the driver. He got caught.
Bell also spotted two men he didn't recognize racing a cab over a series of speed bumps. They turned out to be representatives of a company that sold the car to Bell's company. Bell said they knew the vehicle was under warranty and just wanted to take a bumpy thrill ride.
Bell said the cameras in his cars start taping when the vehicle makes an abrupt movement. Drivers who don't activate the camera for a month are eligible for cash bonuses and Bell says he hands out about $15,000 a month while drivers have friendly competitions over who can go the longest without triggering a camera start-up.
The new law that requires that Americans traveling to Canada and Mexico and Mexicans and Canadians traveling to the United States have valid passports has some tourism officials spooked that visits to Las Vegas from those countries will slow in the months ahead.
The question is how many potential travelers will cancel plans rather than spend the time and money to acquire a passport.
Critics of the passport requirement have successfully delayed its enactment date for land and sea border crossings. But for tourists who travel by plane, the passport requirement takes effect Jan. 8.
Tristan Landry, consul for the Canadian Consulate in San Francisco, which serves Nevada, said the large number of Canadian "snowbirds" who migrate to the United States in the winter months, including those with second homes in Las Vegas, could get caught in the middle of the policy change if they're unaware of the pending switch.
"If one of them arrives in the United States in the next few weeks without a passport and then tries to go home next spring, they could be in for a surprise," Landry said.
Representatives of Las Vegas-based Olympia Gaming will have to wait a little longer to find out whether they'll get to build a 1,000-room resort as part of the Legends at Sparks Marina project.
The Nevada Commission on Tourism met Wednesday to determine whether more than 50 percent of the retail sales at Legends would be generated by out-of-state visitors.
If that determination is made, Sparks would be allowed to create a tourism improvement district and, in turn, issue bonds backed by the anticipated sales-tax revenue from Legends to help build the project.
But Red Development LLC of Kansas City, Mo., has run into a chicken-and-egg problem: Potential tenants such as Scheels All Sports, T-Rex restaurant, Corona Cantina and Olympia can't commit to a lease agreement until they're assured the project will get built, and the Tourism Commission won't approve the deal until the lease agreements are nailed down.
The commission voted to let the stakeholders resolve the problem before the next regularly scheduled meeting Dec. 11.
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