There’s a surprise twist to CityLife Editor Steve Sebelius’ blog item titled “Teacher Ron Taylor can’t serve on the school board.” Taylor phoned me Tuesday afternoon to say he was putting the announcement on his website, teachers4change.net, that he will retire as a teacher in order to fulfill his obligations as a school board trustee if elected.

“I want to clear up any muddying of the waters,” Taylor said. “I want things to be crystal clear so I can serve my constituents to the best of my abilities if elected to the school board.”

Though Sebelius presents an in-depth, riveting argument about constitutional separation of powers to prevent a government employee from becoming, in effect, his own “superboss” by serving on a legislative body affecting his job, in the end Sebelius has to admit that, heretofore, legal rulings, at least in the state of Nevada, haven’t always gone the way he argues they should. Dina Titus, for example, has served in the state Legislature while remaining a professor at UNLV — a situation comparable to Taylor being elected to the school board.

Presumably, Taylor could be elected, keep his day job teaching and remain on the school board while fighting a legal battle to decide the issue. But Taylor vows on his website not to do this.

“I will not seek an opinion from any court or ethics panel, thus saving the public a long drawn out decision and court battle,” Taylor writes.

Taylor is running in District B against Chris Garvey for the seat being vacated by Ruth Johnson due the term limits. This is one exciting race to keep an eye on. Taylor and Garvey are presently scheduled for several debates in the next two weeks– the first two in Mesquite (Thursday and Saturday, Oct. 2 and 4, at the Eureka Hotel and Casino from 6-9 p.m.); and at Cheyenne High School (Tuesday, Oct 7 at 6 p.m.).

Katherine Duncan, president of the Ward 5 Chamber of Commerce, is troubled by the closure of F Street, a road that originates in the heart of West Las Vegas and used to pass under I-15 and 515 near the Spaghetti Bowl. Turns out her organization had big plans for F Street. They were going to use the road as a gateway into the Westside, an area that’s stagnated despite the Renaissance of nearby downtown.

The chamber hoped to work with the city to bring new educational facilities and religious centers to the neighborhood so they can start getting their fair share of casino/tourist loot. The predominantly black neighborhood is currently one of the poorest parts of Las Vegas.

But instead of moving forward with the plan, it looks like the Ward 5 chamber will be going back to the drawing board, unless the city somehow puts a halt to the construction that’s already well under way. Which seems unlikely.

Ward 5 Representative Ricki Barlow declined to comment for a story in the upcoming issue of CityLife, but is holding a meeting on Thursday at 5:30 at Doolittle Community Center. The city’s announcement stressed the lengths they went to to inform Westside residents of the closure. But the people I talked to for my story, including 93-year-old Estella Jimerson and her family, insist they didn’t get any notice.

I didn’t bring a tape measure to the interview, but it’s possible that they live outside the 400-foot radius the city used to determine who would get maps illustrating the closure. They mailed those out in February 2006, two-and-a-half years before the road closed.

There’s a lot more, and a little bit of Westside history, in this week’s paper.

The tightest economy in decades has spawned a den of thievery at McCarran International Airport, so says Francis McCabe, aka the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Road Warrior.

McCabe describes the rise of the theft of passengers’ belongings at McCarran as part of a natural ebb and flow, most recently exacerbated by tough economic times and the millions of passengers (and most importantly, their bags) that cycle through the airport each year. McCabe goes on to say that he’s been hearing “rumblings” of increased airport theft just in the last several weeks.

As usual, the R-J isn’t telling you the whole story — and they’re woefully late with the “news” that they did put out.

We have nothing against McCabe (he looks like an affable guy in his online staff picture, and he’s a decent writer), but CityLife warned nearly a year ago that McCarran has the seventh highest rate of theft of passenger belongings among the nation’s 10 busiest airports.

According to our investigation, from 2003 to 2006, McCarran passengers filed 1,466 reports for damaged or stolen items worth $1,163,172.13 in claims. Further, while McCarran lands the No. 7 spot in the total number of such incidents nationwide, the local airport ranks No. 2 for per-claim dollar value ($793.43) and No. 3 for the total dollar value of all claims among the country’s busiest airports.

Transportation Security Administration Nico Melendez was quick to deflect responsibility away from his agency, saying, “Theft from bags didn’t start with us.”

Rosemary Vassiliadis, deputy director for the Clark County Department of Aviation, told CityLife last November that “Any theft concerns us, and we’ve been very aggressive at theft. Theft isn’t new because the TSA is here … it’s always been a concern.”

Vassiliadis said airport officials screen, train and monitor the roughly 18,000 people who work at McCarran, about 1,000 of whom are TSA employees. Employees, most of whom are subcontracted with the dozens of airlines at McCarran, submit to background checks with both the TSA and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, are trained by their respective employers and undergo airport-specific instruction that spells out McCarran’s zero tolerance for stealing. In addition, she says, airport officials and Metro officers at an airport substation constantly monitor potential thieves.

UNLV public administration professor William Thompson, however, says the rise in local airport theft has more to do with Las Vegas’ toxic cocktail of 24-hour gambling and the thousands of other neon-lit pleasure merchants across the valley. In his opinion, the numbers reflect tourists wanting to avoid embarrassment if they lose prized possessions – or pawn them to feed gambling habits. He, too, wondered at just how serious TSA and McCarran officials are about cutting these crimes.

Last year, Thompson told CityLife, “Historically, we’ve had a very high reporting of room theft here, much higher than in other places. This could be a similar thing, for people to save face. But another reason could be that the recruiting of airport employees is local and more lax. There could be this false fear that they don’t want to profile people so they don’t check them out thoroughly.”

It’s interesting that, nearly a full year after our initial report, thefts at McCarran remain high.

Since last November, CityLife has been locked in a battle with the TSA for a full disclosure of passenger theft reports through present day. Although the once-frenetic struggle has simmered down to a calmer routine of telephone and snail mail updates, we’re keeping the pressure on.

Once federal and local airport officials finally come clean about the extent of theft at McCarran, you’ll be the first to know.

Anytime the National Security Agency and the notoriously repressive Chinese government agree on something, you’d better damned sure understand what’s happening.

According to CNET, members of the International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations agency, are meeting behind closed doors to establish worldwide tracking protocols and programs to ensure everything you say — and everything you do — on the Internet can be traced directly back to you.

That the Chinese government proposed these changes, and called for this meeting as early as last year, is troubling enough. That internally leaked documents say the international group wants to use these changes to quash political dissent around the world is nauseating. That our own National Security Agency is a willing party to these talks is criminal.

Back when we had a saner regime installed in Washington, government officials worried about the ITU overstepping its bounds and grabbing too much power. In 1997, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright upbraided the group for trying to wrest control of Internet domains. Albright and others expressed concern that this United Nations group, with a budget of more than half a billion dollars, was beginning to wield powers not specifically granted to it. The ITU has no power of its own, but some would like to change that.

Leaders from the ITU have been lobbying for the past several years, most notably at meetings of the World Summit on the Information Society, that individual nations and the United Nations begin to grant it real authority.

Today, it seems as if these multinational cyber tyrants are personifying Lord Acton’s maxim that absolute power corrupts absolutely (interestingly, the 19th century historian, editor and essayist also said that no particular class of people is particularly fit to rule, but that’s another tangent for another day).

Still, before you despair that your late nights of anonymous porn surfing are over, know that legal groups are challenging the proposed destruction of personal, online privacy.

A joint statement of the American Civil Liberties Union and the London-based Privacy International released Tuesday to CityBlog was particularly damning.

“It is simply amazing that the ITU is engaged in a process aimed at a radical change in the nature of the Internet, behind closed doors,” said Gus Hosein, senior fellow at Privacy International. “The interests of virtually every person on the planet are at stake, yet the public does not have a seat at the table, while the Chinese government and the NSA do?”