Doing good, doing right

THINGS aren't exactly looking pretty right now in Nevada. A housing market without a pulse. Tourism in a slump. Casino winnings down. State budget cuts eating into vital services.

OK, we're totally bumming ourselves out.

There is a bright side, though. Amid the trials and travails, there are people committed to the idea that Southern Nevada can be a better place to live. Yeah, shocking. But best of all, they're actually doing something to improve the quality of life in our fair town. Here are a sampling of those people -- activists, idealists, movers and shakers who are doing some really cool things.

Heroes, if you will.

Remember those?

Jenna Morton

Activist, environmentalist, entrepreneur proves business and charity do mix

HER car may run on vegetable oil, a peace sign may dangle from her neck and she may have led the push to make the nightclubs and restaurants of the N9NE Group carbon-neutral, but don't just assume Jenna Morton is just another granola hippie chick do-gooder.

"A granola with an eye on the bottom line," she corrects.

Morton is director of community and government relations for the group of restaurants and nightclubs at the Palms that includes N9NE steakhouse, Rain, ghostbar, Nove, Moon and the Playboy Club, but she's most well-known for devoting most of her working hours to charitable and political causes. Those include the Foundation for An Independent Tomorrow (which helps people get the tools and training they need to get or hold a job), the After School All Stars (which provides activities and homework help to keep kids out of trouble), Keep Memory Alive (a foundation to raise money for treatment of Alzheimer's disease) and the Nevada Cancer Institute.

See a pattern? Morton likes charities that are run like a business -- efficiently -- where she knows the dollars and hours she invests are actually going to do some good. "FIT fills that definition," she says. "Every penny with After School All Stars is stretched as far as it can be stretched."

And while some benefits are intangible, Morton says, there are also bottom-line reasons to help make Las Vegas a better place.

"It's our business's philosophy. We are part of this community ... so we participate in this community as much as we can," she says. But there's also a parochial interest: "An economy in which people have jobs is an economy in which people will patronize my business," she says.

She's equally pragmatic when it comes to the big picture: Helping kids become productive members of society -- and avoiding pitfalls such as gangs, drugs and teen pregnancy -- pays off in the long run, since those kids won't end up in expensive Nevada prisons or courts. And bringing major-league medical research to town at the Nevada Cancer Institute and the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute now under construction downtown helps diversify an economy overly dependent on gambling dollars. So Morton is looking for a return on those investments. "It's about being practical," she says.

The tanking economy has her concerned, however: "Now is the time that we need this kind of investment in our community, because our community is in a painful place," she says. "If we can help relieve some of that pressure, we're all responsible to do it."

STEVE SEBELIUS

Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada

Lawyers on a mission to serve the valley's neediest citizens

THE line outside the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada starts shaping up at around 8 a.m. on most weekdays, half an hour before the office officially opens. Its clients come bearing contracts, court orders and a whole host of legal problems -- everything from bankruptcy and consumer protection to divorce and child custody.

Civil issues, in other words, which, unlike criminal cases, don't warrant free legal representation. But these are important issues all the same, especially for thousands of Clark County residents at the bottom of the economic heap who use the center's services to end abusive relationships, obtain government benefits and get services for special needs children.

"Most days it's like a hospital emergency room," says Barbara Buckley, executive director and speaker of the Nevada Assembly.

The center employs 23 full-time attorneys who represent Las Vegas's unemployed and working poor, a population that's swelled since the economy began its nosedive last year. The Legal Aid Center also coordinates a pro bono project that matches volunteer attorneys with needy clients. Its staff operates out of an aging building that's bursting at the seams.

Two employees work out of a converted kitchen. The conference room does triple duty, serving as an ad-hoc break area and classroom when the staff isn't meeting. The domestic violence unit works across the street, in offices rented from the bar association.

And the center continues to grow. Next year, a federal grant will allow them to hire two full-time attorneys to help people threatened with foreclosure. The attorneys will help beleaguered homeowners navigate the maze of mortgage lenders and service companies and stay in their homes.

To accommodate the growing staff and mission, the Legal Aid Center has launched an ambitious capital campaign to raise $15 million for a new building. The nonprofit also finalized plans to place staff lawyers inside the Clark County Courthouse for the convenience of clients.

"This isn't about building a fancy new building for us. With all our major endeavors, we're hoping to always turn fewer people away who need our services," Buckley says.

In 2007, the center, which used to be known as Clark County Legal Services, served only 3 percent of the more than 700,000 residents who might qualify for its services. They could serve more with a bigger building and more staff, things that require a generous infusion of money.

And money has been in short supply lately, delaying the center's expansion plans at the same time it drives clients to its mirrored doors. Recessions breed domestic violence and child abuse, complicate divorce proceedings and generally create more legal problems for those clinging to the fringes of society, Buckley says.

"A typical attorney charges $3,000 for one of the cases we take," says Veronica Thronson, director of the Domestic Violence Project. "They charge more for a custody case. And people just have no money to pay."

These are the people who line up every day outside the office on 8th Street and Gass Avenue. People with paperwork, troubles and nowhere else to turn.

AMY KINGSLEY

James Woodbridge

Revitalizing downtown one beat at a time

MUSIC promoter James Woodbridge is leading a cultural revolution, even if he doesn't admit it.

It's a Thursday afternoon and James Woodbridge is pretty bummed. No more than 12 hours ago, the local music promoter and UNLV philosophy professor was turning his pockets inside out to pay a band after a lackluster turnout for a show that night.

"Yeah, I got my ass handed to me financially," Woodbridge says. "I mean, the shows were amazing, but the people didn't just [show]."

And although he had fun, and lost nearly $600 in out-of-pocket funds, Woodbridge knows he'll be back. He always is.

Yet despite the loss, one fact is clear. In the year or so that Woodbridge and his promotion group MetaMeta Productions has been operating, a revolution of sorts has been occurring in the Las Vegas music scene. National bands that used to shrug off Vegas are coming. A scene that was once dominated by punk and tired alternative metal is transforming into a place where local indie bands can show their faces and sweaters in public.

However, Woodbridge's biggest project -- the nearly weeklong downtown music festival Neon Reverb he and several other promoters produced last fall -- is one of the most ambitious and culturally invigorating music festivals to occur in the city.

Growing up on the East Coast, Woodbridge's entrance into music started during his college years. Between school, work and traveling across the world, he would immerse himself in the local music culture of wherever he lived at the time.

"Somewhere between all my traveling, I decided I wanted to be a philosophy professor," Woodbridge says.

In 2001, Woodbridge emerged with a Ph.D. in philosophy and immediately went on the search for a tenure gig, taking nearly five years to eventually settle at UNLV in 2006. It was, for the nearly always road-bound Woodbridge, a nice place to settle into, and promoting was maybe the last thing that he thought he would be involved in. His first show, an admittedly hastily put together gig for New York pop-rock group Mathematicians in 2007, was born out a wish to help out a band he had heard about while surfing MySpace.

"They said on their page that they needed help, so I contacted them and asked them what they needed," Woodbridge says. "They said they needed everything." Woodbridge took over, and downtown's Beauty Bar was the first to bite. The show was a success, and since then, staple indie pedigree acts such as neo-psychedelic folk act Akron/Family, shoegazers A Place to Bury Strangers, avant-rockers Xiu Xiu and more have come to town under Woodbridge's watch.

"People think of Vegas mainly for rock shows, you know, like glammy or punk rock stuff," he says. "But you know, when you have someone like Akron/Family, it bucks the stereotype for local music. But I don't know about leading [the music scene]. A lot of it is because it's all music I like and I always hope that other people will like it, too."

AARON THOMPSON

Ron Smith

A brain -- and a heart -- for saving planet Earth

IF global warming doesn't one day broil Southern Nevada down to a withered, rocky briquette, we could have an unassuming sociologist to thank for it.

Since helping to found UNLV's office of sustainability in August 2007, Ron Smith -- who also pulls triple duty as the school's vice president for research and graduate studies dean -- has cried from the casino tops about the need for mankind to get serious about cutting greenhouse gases, mitigating existing environmental problems and pushing our homegrown university to serve as a example for how Las Vegas, and the nation, can continue to grow in both environmentally and economically viable ways.

Smith's watchword is sustainability, or keeping human activity from overcoming the planet's limitations. It's a gospel Smith preaches far and wide. In recent years, this once purely academic idea has become the new prism through which a growing number of scientists, economists and politicians are examining the growing threat of global warming and the human race's so-called carbon footprint. Humans can save their own ecosystems while maintaining healthy economic growth, says Smith, but time is running out on how long people have to make the necessary changes.

Under Smith's leadership, the sustainability task force (made up of UNLV faculty/staff) has shepherded passage of a new sustainability energy and water policy for the campus, which aims to cut the school's outdoor water use by 25 percent by 2010. The task force has also taken steps to cut waste by moving to trayless dining commons and reduce the campus' water-thirsty turf by at least 500,000 square feet.

For a guy whose job it is to devise the salvation of a planet, Smith sounds appropriately concerned. "This [initiative] is an attitude thing, it's a value shift. If we don't get people concerned about this community, I'm not sure it's gonna be sustainable," he says.

Smith says the university program, called UNLV Urban 21, is actually a series of initiatives geared toward finding solutions to economic, environmental and social challenges that affect this growing region. With the population of Las Vegas expected to double to 4 million in by 2036 and environmental problems like pollution and Southern Nevada's seemingly unquenchable thirst for water supplies predicted to only grow worse, Smith says someone had to do something.

"This is a big project, bigger than even we at UNLV imagined. But if you want to try to accomplish anything, you have to do it big," says Smith.

JASON WHITED

Myron Martin

Yes, we have culture. And we'll soon have it in one beautiful, central space

AFTER all these years, Myron Martin still remembers those goose bumps.

He was in the fourth grade when a class field trip to Jones Hall in Houston gave him one of his fondest memories. It wasn't any particular thing that made the memory per se. Rather, a swirl of Proustian sensations would make it one of those life-changing moments -- seeing the sweeping marble facade seem to rise before him, craning his neck to take in the grand lobby, feeling the red velvet seats.

"And just as the house lights went down and the curtain went up, I got goose bumps," Martin says. "I knew at that moment that I wanted to do something related to the performing arts." The abridged performance that followed, by the Houston Grand Opera, only steeled his resolve. The kid known as the neighborhood entrepreneur -- the one who'd pluck the pine cones from a neighbor's yard and sell them back by the basket as "special Christmas pine cones" -- had his little world of commerce touched by art. "The fourth-grader I often talk about named Myron Martin, on that day he was a truly inspired kid," he says.

It certainly seems like fate, then, that today Martin is the president of the Smith Center for Performing Arts, due to become Las Vegas' center for all the fancy events you put on dress shoes for. Set to open in late 2011, the center aims to bring together a cultural scene that, like Las Vegas, is spread across the valley in pockets and clusters. As the center's chief and cheerleader, Martin brings to the project a blend of traits that aren't quite captured by the term "Renaissance man." He's got a business savvy (a marketing MBA from Golden Gate University) and artistic training (bachelor's in music from University of North Texas). He has a measure of worldliness as well, having seen Europe's great performance spaces. Perhaps most notably, though, Martin has an earthy, almost visceral enthusiasm for sharing the experience of the arts.

"We're the largest community in North America without a performing arts center," he says. "A lot of people look at Las Vegas as an entertainment city, but not a cultural city. The Smith Center is going to change all that." It'll also become home to local groups such the Nevada Philharmonic and Nevada Ballet Theater.

The Smith Center also aims to do it in grand style, with a building of such originality, architect David Schwarz had to break out a new term for it -- "neo-eclectic." That is, it'll take visual cues from both Southern Nevada's desert environs as well as its history, taking form in Art Deco stylings inspired by milestone projects such as Hoover Dam. "In a city where we try to make faux versions of everything, we didn't just want an Art Deco building," Martin says. "We wanted a building that was timeless and elegant and lasting so that future generations would be as excited as we are."

Most importantly, though: You're invited. Seriously. This is what really makes Martin a local hero. His enthusiasm for building the center isn't necessarily about crowning Vegas with some halo of cultural legitimacy; that would require a certain institutional grimness Martin thankfully lacks. Rather, the man just wants to share the goosebumps.

"A friend of mine used to run the Hollywood Bowl, and every once in a while he'd go into the parking lot to listen to the people walking in. He said every single time he would do that, he would hear someone say, 'So, who are we going to see tonight?' We want that kind of place, the kind of place where people will buy a ticket just to see what's happening."

ANDREW KIRALY

Save the Huntridge Group

Preserving old buildings the new-fashioned way

IN Las Vegas, preserving history is an idealistic cause that sometimes requires radical action. And when a group of downtown history buffs heard the Huntridge Theater might be razed, they took just such a radical route: They traded in their idealism for pragmatism.

"The coolest thing about saving the Huntridge is that we didn't have to fight," says Brian Paco Alvarez, an urban historian and member of Save the Huntridge. "It was actually of us sitting down and being realistic and very pragmatic and coming to an agreement with the property owner. We took a more conservative approach, and it worked."

What didn't work was hewing to the quixotic notion that the long-shuttered theater should reopen only as an entertainment venue. Between the costs of rehabbing a delicate building and a rash of competing clubs that sprung up in the '90s, owner Eli Mizrachi couldn't make it pencil out as a venue. The options: Remain a dim, empty monument to history, or bring the building back to life in a reimagined form.

"The Huntridge of the '90s was a great concert venue, but it never made any money," says Alvarez. He should know the sting of a big show gone bust: He put on a few shows at the Huntridge and didn't exactly walk away with a suitcase full of cash. "The reality is that a theater isn't going to work."

With the blessing of the Save the Huntridge group, in August, the building's owner, Eli Mizrachi, announced plans to revamp the Huntridge as a commercial retail building. The city approved his plans last month, and now Mizrachi is scouting for tenants.

The history wonk's term for it is "adaptive reuse." The layman's term is compromise.

"One of the best parts of the process was working with Eli so he realized we weren't trying to tie his hands," says Lynn Zook, another member of Save the Huntridge. "We didn't come at him going, 'You must do this.' It was about what we could do to make it viable for him and still keep the building."

So, there's one happy ending for preservationists -- and some valuable lessons learned for future battles in saving Southern Nevada history from the wrecking ball.

"The great lesson to be learned with the Huntridge is that we can save these old structures by sitting down, being open-minded and really coming up with plans that the majority of people will be pleased with," says Alvarez. "When the project gets finished, not only will it be the most beautiful building in the area, but what it will do for the redevelopment of the neighborhood and that corridor will be immense." Historic, you might say.

A.K.