Hope like hell

We Renoites have had our teeth kicked in these last couple of years. Many of us have gotten cynical. We’ve seen businesses we never expected to close, close. We’ve seen sophisticated organizations make absolutely predictable, but seemingly suicidal errors.

We’ve seen our elected officials throw their legacies to the wind in their efforts to glad hand their buddies and establish jobs for themselves when they’re out of office. (And just watch how this increases as some approach their term-limited time in office—oops, that’s our inner cynic talking.)

One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results each time. It’s also said that hope springs eternal. If both these statements are true, then it must follow that hope is insane.

So call us nuts. We hope.

We hope like hell the Silver Legacy is able to work out its debt problems with its creditors. The joint venture between the Eldorado and Circus-Circus owes $142.8 million in mortgage notes on March 1. The entire casino is only valued at $98 million. That would be like making a $438,000 balloon payment on your $300,000 home in 16 days. A bank would foreclose on you faster than a Grammy tribute show could be put together for a singer who kicked it in the bathtub. The thing that gives us hope is the sheer amount of debt that casino has. Creditors would surely prefer quarters to pennies on their dollars. Cross your fingers.

We hope with our whole hearts that Burning Man will work out its lottery SNAFU. The problems were predicted by more Burners than we can count. And you know, those Burners, while creative, are not exactly known for their financial acumen.

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure public relations disaster—same way. Absolute buffoons were able to hear with absolute clarity the likelihood of a nationwide freak-out when the news first broke that Komen was going to discriminate against Planned Parenthood, an organization that does so much for the prevention of cancer. The thing that gives us hope for both these organizations is that there’s so much pre-existing goodwill. Everyone screws up, now and again. Admit it and move on. Knock on wood.

We’ve watched members of the Reno City Council give away so much of our taxpayers’ capital and real property that we didn’t have much hope when Our Lady of the Snows made a grab for yet another chunk of public property. Remember when Mill Street used to go all the way to Virginia Street before the City Council gave a block of our property and our right of way to the Siena Casino? We had hopes that situation would be rectified when the casino closed. That hope was unfounded. But our hope sprung eternal when, against all odds, the City Council did not give Lander Street to the Catholic school.

That gives us a little hope when the same City Council begins talking about what to do with the proposed park at historic Moana Springs. There’s a capped geothermal well there that could give year-round use to that publicly owned property. Go ahead and hang that horseshoe.

We hope they make the Harvey Whittemore story into a movie. Well, that’s more about cash than luck. And how crazy is that?