Audio clip from interview with Lawrence Weekly by Claytee D. White, April 22, 2013

I' m just boggled by a lot of the dialogue about the Westside; that everybody keeps talking about the Westside because most people spend so much time talking about what the Westside used to be. I've watched a couple of documentaries about the Westside and I've seen some people who they've interviewed and they've made comments about, oh, the Westside ain't what it used to be and this is a shame about the Westside. But I have never seen any of those people come back and do a doggone thing, not bring one penny to the westside, not come to a city council meeting or a county commission meeting to raise one question about how can we. This is a take-take-take-take situation. Being an elected official, being a member of that city council was probably one of the toughest jobs because you're one vote and trying to get people to come out and help you fight on certain issues. See, the Westside is not going to ever look like Summerlin and Green Valley because we have too many issues. When you look at West Las Vegas and you look at many of them dirt lots, you've got property owner A who own this one, ten feet away property owner B owns that one, C, D, E, and so on. Well, what if the first three want to get together and link their properties together? Well, then you got two to three other ones, don't touch my property; I'm saving my property to pass on to my kids, which is fine. But then you turn around and don't pay your taxes on your property and then it gets taken from you. The county owns it. They auction it off. Some out-of-state person comes in and purchases it. Instead of us assembling parcels, get enough of them assembled where we can build something, where we can say, all right, now we have 20 or 30 acres over here in West Las Vegas; let's wheel and deal, City of Las Vegas; let's wheel and deal, Clark County; let's go. Nobody's going to come in and invest over there with one parcel here and then you got a church in the middle of it here and then you've got to fight. I mean when I first set out to widen Martin Luther King Boulevard that was like pulling wisdom teeth that didn't exist. Why? Ricki Barlow will tell you. He came in after I left and came here and brought up the rear, and thank God. Ricki finished that project and it's beautiful. I had the front end of it where we were going to those properties. I mean we walked those businesses on the east side. We had to hit those property owners, Bonanza Village on the Westside. And Lord have mercy, it wasn't an easy task. My vision was I wanted to have one of the most beautiful Martin Luther Kings in the nation; that was my vision. Does it look beautiful? It does. It doesn't look like what I want it to look like, but I like what it looks like. But it was hard. You've got them dirt lots right there on Martin Luther King right now. Something can be done there. But because you've got property owners that don't want to play, what do you do? Nobody politically wants to come in and enforce eminent domain; it's political suicide.