Yant unveils ideas

 9 comment(s)  
 E-mail Story
 Print Story
  Share

 digg it!
 Facebook
 del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit

Text Size: 

Tools Sponsor

By DEENA WINTER / Lincoln Journal Star

Mayoral candidate Roger Yant unloaded a load of opinions during a Wednesday press conference, and offered three new proposals for voters to consider.

Yant is one of four men running for Lincoln mayor in the April 3 primary election. The top two vote-getters advance to the May 1 general election.

Yant, a Republican-turned-independent candidate, said if he’s elected, he’d set up police substations in public schools and staff them with about six officers during school hours, which he hopes would ward off sex offenders, weapon-toters and vandals.

He said he had not gotten cost estimates for his proposal, which he admitted would be expensive, at least initially. He said he would not add more police officers to staff the substations.

Yant also said as mayor he would get Lincoln police involved in a voluntary initiative known as 287g. The program is named for the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that authorizes state and local law enforcement agencies to enter into agreements with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to permit trained officers to perform immigration law enforcement functions.

Participating communities send officers through a four-week training program to get certified to perform certain federal immigration enforcement actions, according to information on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Web site. ICE was established in 2003 and is the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security.

Yant also said if Lincoln Police Chief Tom Casady wasn’t interested in joining the ICE program, he’d “get a new police chief.” The Journal Star was unable to reach Casady for comment.

In a more unusual proposal, Yant also proposed moving the Harold Warp Pioneer Village from Minden to Lincoln. The tourist attraction, with more than 50,000 vintage Americana items in 28 buildings on a 20-acre spread, is about 12 miles off Interstate 80 in south central Nebraska.

A great-nephew of Pioneer Village founder Harold Warp, Minden native Marshall Nelson, has served as the museum’s general manager for the past six years. Nelson was in Georgia promoting Pioneer Village and other Nebraska attractions at the Family Motor Coach Association’s international rally when he first learned of Yant’s proposal.

“If that’s something that he’s advocating it would have been nice to have been in the loop,” Nelson said.

He was dubious that the board of directors of the nonprofit foundation would go for Yant’s idea. He said it would be akin to Minden folks telling the Lincoln Journal Star it should relocate to Minden, a town of about 3,000.

Pioneer Village attracted about 100,000 annually in the decade after it first opened in 1953 and even into the 1980s, and now brings in 40,000 to 80,000, Nelson said.

Reach Deena Winter at 473-2642 or dwinter@journalstar.com.