Parks alter path on fees
Large increases at select sites out in favor of small hikes for all
Instead of doubling entrance fees at select high-traffic sites, the National Park Service announced plans Thursday to spread the pain systemwide.
Starting June 1, all 117 fee-collecting parks will charge an extra $5 for admission, including Lake Mead, Death Valley, Grand Canyon, Zion and other park sites in the Las Vegas vicinity.
Lake Mead National Recreation Area will see its seven-day entry fee go from $20 to $25 for passenger vehicles, from $15 to $20 for motorcycles, and from $10 to $15 for individuals on foot, bicycle or horseback.
The fee increase does not apply to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, which is operated by the Bureau of Land Management, or Great Basin National Park, which doesn’t charge for
PARK FEES
against rancher Cliven Bundy and his co-defendants over the armed 2014 standoff near Bunkerville. Navarro concluded that Myhre’s prosecution team committed “flagrant” misconduct by not turning over evidence to the defense that could have harmed the government’s case. The Justice Department earlier had ordered an internal investigation of the prosecution team.
Elieson this week refused to confirm or comment on Myhre’s move and other management changes in the office, including the promotion of Andrew Duncan from criminal division chief to executive assistant U.S. attorney. She said through a spokeswoman that she considered the matters to be personnel issues. But other U.S. attorneys across the country put out news releases about such changes, and larger offices in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., include the names of supervisors on their websites.
Charles La Bella, a retired Justice Department official, said Elieson has an obligation to disclose the names of her managers.
“While I understand personnel actions are not public and shouldn’t be public because people have a certain degree of privacy, the people who are in those positions should be identified,” said La Bella, a former U.S. attorney in San Diego and deputy fraud chief with the Justice Department. “The public has a right to know.”
At the same time, La Bella said he has sympathy for Elieson, who is new to Nevada.
“She has a formidable task getting the office marching in the same direction when she has no history in that office,” he said. “Every United States attorney’s office has its own personality. It’s like walking into a new classroom as a teacher.”
Elieson has not filled the first assistant’s position, and it is unclear whether Myhre requested the new assignment or was demoted. Trisha Young, a spokeswoman for Elieson, denied a request to interview Myhre and Duncan, now the No. 2 person in the office.
The Justice Department in Washington did not return a call for comment.
Myhre was among those singled out last year in a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decision critical of the office under Brower.
The EEOC decision, obtained by the Las Vegas Review-journal in July, concluded that Brower had subjected the female prosecutor, who has since left the office, to sex discrimination and retaliation. Myhre was Brower’s first assistant.
Brower, a former Nevada legislator, displayed a “hostile” attitude toward the prosecutor after she complained about sexist remarks her white collar crime supervisor had made, the decision said. The office also was slow to transfer the prosecutor out of the white collar crime unit.
The EEOC ordered Myhre, Brower and other office managers, to undergo anti-sex discrimination training and submit a compliance report.
The agency also ordered the Justice Department to pay the female prosecutor $287,998 in legal fees, costs and damages.
Brower at the time was the FBI’S top liaison with Congress during a politically charged investigation into Russian election meddling.
Last month, he left his position as an FBI assistant director to work in the Las Vegas and Washington, D.C. offices of the high-powered law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.
When the EEOC decision became public last year, Myhre was the acting U.S. attorney in Nevada as a result of the Trump administration’s firing of longtime U.S Attorney Daniel Bogden. He also spent more than a year as acting U.S. attorney in 2007.
In January, the Justice Department took the unusual step of bringing Elieson from Texas to temporarily take the reins of the Nevada office rather than hiring someone from within the state.
Nevada’s congressional delegation traditionally recommends a new U.S. attorney, who then is appointed by the president and approved by the U.S. Senate. But in Elieson’s case, the Justice Department took control of the process with her temporary appointment.
Contact Jeff German at jgerman@ reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4564. Follow @Jgermanrj on Twitter.