After 25 years, the city of Las Vegas will have a mayor with a new last name. Former Mayor Oscar Goodman served a twelve-year term from 1999 to 2011. In July of 2011, his wife, Mayor Carolyn Goodman, took his seat. Mayor Goodman is reaching the end of her 13-year term limit, and 14 candidates are running for the position.

On June 11, 2024, Las Vegas residents will vote in the primary election, and if one candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, that candidate will become mayor. If not, two candidates will be selected to run for office against each other, and the second vote will take place on November 5, 2024. One of the candidates on the ballot is Donna Miller, a nurse, business owner, mother, and active community member who wants to make a difference.

“I am seeing here the very things I ran away from in Romania,” she says, “We are going backwards.” Miller says the direction the country is heading in is sad. So, she decided to run for mayor.

Miller has spent 28 years as a nurse and is ready to help the community at large, not for herself but for the people. Putting others first is second nature to her, she says. As a nurse, she had to make difficult decisions. She couldn’t just “kick the can down the road.” She adds that trust is important in any relationship and references Gallup poll results; nurses have been the most trusted professionals for 22 years. Politicians are rated the least trustworthy.

Miller’s Story

In a video on Miller’s website, she shares that she came to the United States from Romania in 1991 and became a hospice home health aide. Her first hospice patient was a retired teacher who was dying from lung cancer. The former teacher promised her children she’d teach Miller English before she passed away, and she kept her promise. She also enrolled Miller in nursing school.

Miller worked as a nurse in New York for several years and moved to Las Vegas in 1999, where she continued her nursing career. Eventually, she became a flight nurse, which inspired her to open her own air ambulance company, Life Guard International.

When Miller started Life Guard International, no organ transplants were performed in Las Vegas besides kidney transplants, which is still the case today. So, anyone needing a heart, liver, or lung transplant would have to have the procedure done in Los Angeles or Phoenix.

When a person waiting for a transplant was nearing the top of the list, the person on the list and their whole family would have to move to the city where their operation was going to be performed. When an organ is available for you, you only have a few hours to get to the hospital. Then, people’s families would have to go with them because if their caregiver, like a parent or spouse, weren’t with them to take care of them post-operation, the individual would not qualify for a transplant.

Miller created a program with her company, Life Guard International, that would allow people on the transplant list to stay home in Las Vegas until an organ became available.

“I trained them like pregnant women,” she says. The patients had their hospital bags packed and brought the bags with them everywhere they went. When they received the call that it was time to go to the hospital, they had thirty minutes to get to the airport and were airborne within an hour.

Life Guard International had the patients at their destination within three hours. Miller says she had the program running for seven years, and they never missed a transplant. Another company bought Life Guard International, but she wants to bring the air transplant program back.

Mental Health

Running a business and being a nurse gave Miller experiences she is confident will help her as Mayor of Las Vegas. Mental health resources are a top priority for her, especially for children. Miller sees “parenting being replaced by electronics,” parents are working long hours to provide kids with their basic needs, and children are under a lot of stress right now. She explained that mental health services receive the lowest reimbursement from insurance companies. Miller says it is not enticing to choose a career within the mental health sector when providers aren’t adequately paid. So, a goal for her as Mayor is to make the reimbursement for mental health services equal to physical health services and increase the number of service providers in the city.

Education

Another issue on the top of voters’ minds is the education system. Las Vegas has the second worst education system in America, according to a 2021 report from the Thomas B Fordham Institute. “Education starts from home,” she says. A teacher’s job is to make learning fun. If you don’t learn respect at a young age, you will learn the opposite. Miller says one of the biggest issues with the education system is we are teaching children to disrespect teachers by saying things like “Oh stupid teacher.”

Miller said her child was a bored social butterfly in school, so she developed a program with her child to make sure she behaved in school. She gave her daughter a pocket calendar, and at the end of every day, her daughter had to ask the teacher to write “good” or “not so good” in her calendar depending on her behavior, and if her teacher didn’t write in the calendar, it counted as a not so good day. (Miller isn’t a fan of the word bad.) If her daughter had two not-so-good days, she wouldn’t have gotten to watch TV. Miller says it is essential to teach children responsibility.

Her daughter is a “product of public school,” went to Las Vegas Academy, learned Japanese, studied abroad in Japan, and now works with the Japanese Tourism Board. Kids are very smart, she says. You just have to give them something to do.

Recently, Miller was cooking for her church and had her 10 and 14-year-old nephews helping her. At first, they were huffing and puffing and didn’t want to do it. But, they quickly changed their tune and carefully plated and garnished the dishes.

She wants to see programs in school that teach children skills, so they don’t have to sit in a room bored. Teaching children how to recognize quality information online is another thing she wants to see added to the curriculum.

Homelessness

Homelessness is another important topic for voters in Las Vegas. According to HUD Point-In-Time Date, homelessness has gone up 16% from 2022 to 2023. In 2023, 6566 people were experiencing homelessness in the valley. Miller, who was homeless before, says that most candidates just say they don’t want Las Vegas to look like San Francisco. But she goes to the Courtyard— a homeless resource center to provide healthcare services to homeless people and has genuine conversations with the people there. They are in a “bad chapter” in their life, but homeless does not mean hopeless, she says. As mayor, she would want to focus on homeless prevention and also create an Expedia-style website that provides easy access to all of the services available to people in need.

Miller is nonpartisan and believes that becoming mayor is the perfect office for her because it is a nonpartisan position. She believes there is a middle ground on most political issues and just wants to see Las Vegas progress.  

To learn more about Donna Miller and her campaign, visit https://donnamillerformayor.com/