Live wait times. Published fees. Public performance dashboards. An open-records portal that honors the Nevada Public Records Act while protecting personal data. Dr. Howell Shaw will turn the Clark County Clerk's office into one you can watch work, in real time.
The Clerk's office touches some of the most important moments in a resident's life, getting married, starting a business, getting commissioned as a notary, securing a public record. Today, the information around those moments is scattered, hidden, or invisible. You cannot see how the office is performing, and you cannot see how long you will wait.
Finding a public record today can mean phone trees, a downtown trip, or guessing which form applies. The path to a marriage record, a business filing, or a notary commission is not laid out where residents can simply read it.
Residents often learn the cost of a service only after they have waited in line. A clear, published fee schedule, service by service, should be a click away before anyone leaves home.
There is no public, real-time signal for how long the line is at the Marriage License Bureau or the service counters. Couples and small-business owners plan their day blind.
How many licenses were issued last week? What is the average turnaround on a records request? Without published numbers, the public cannot judge whether the office is improving.
The Nevada Public Records Act gives residents a right to inspect public records. The process to actually exercise that right should be obvious, trackable, and quick, not a mystery.
Journalists, researchers, and watchdogs need machine-readable data to do their work. When numbers live only in PDFs and counters, accountability slows to a crawl.
Walk the path a resident walks now, and notice how often it ends in a guess.
A couple wants to know if the Marriage License Bureau is busy this afternoon. A founder wants to confirm the cost of a DBA filing. There is no single screen that answers either.
You scan a county website, open a few PDFs, maybe call a number during business hours. The answer is somewhere, it is just not where you looked first.
When the web does not give a clear answer, residents default to showing up in person, and then they wait, with no idea how long.
Even after the visit, there is no public scoreboard telling you whether your experience was typical, fast, or slow. The office stays opaque.
Open online record search. Published fee schedules. Live wait-time boards for the Marriage License Bureau and every counter. Public performance dashboards for volume, turnaround, and satisfaction. Open-data feeds. Plain-language guides. All of it built to honor the Nevada Public Records Act (NRS Chapter 239), while keeping personal data private.
A clean, fast search for the public records the Clerk maintains, with clear guidance on what is public, what is confidential, and how to request what is not online.
Every service the office charges for, listed in plain dollars and cents, in one place, updated whenever fees change under Nevada law.
Real-time estimated wait times for the Marriage License Bureau and service counters, on the website and on screens in the lobby.
Service volumes, average turnaround, and satisfaction, refreshed regularly so the public can watch the office improve.
Machine-readable exports of non-sensitive operational data, aligned with the county's open data portal, for journalists and researchers.
Step-by-step explainers for marriage licenses, business filings, notary commissions, and records requests, written for humans.
Seven simple steps residents take with the new transparency tools.
Open the Clerk's site and see the live wait time for the Marriage License Bureau and each service counter, the same way you would check a restaurant wait or a freeway map.
Look up any service on the published fee schedule. You know the cost, and what you need to bring, before you leave home.
Use open online record search to locate a public record. The tool tells you plainly whether the record is available online, available by request, or confidential by law.
If a record requires a formal request, file it through a guided public-records portal that honors the Nevada Public Records Act, with a tracking number from the start.
Watch your request move through clear stages, with expected timelines, instead of wondering whether anything is happening.
Anytime, open the public performance dashboard to see how the office is doing on volume, turnaround, and satisfaction, the same numbers leadership watches.
Download open-data feeds to analyze trends yourself, or read a plain-language guide that walks you through any service step by step.
The line, in real time, before you stand in it.
Estimated wait times for the Marriage License Bureau and every service counter, published live on the website and shown on lobby screens. Couples planning a Vegas wedding and founders filing a DBA can pick the quietest hour and walk in with confidence.
The same numbers leadership sees, open to everyone.
A live board of the office's core metrics: services delivered, average turnaround, and resident satisfaction. When the public can watch performance, improvement stops being a press release and becomes a measurable promise.
Your right to public records, made easy to use.
A guided portal for requesting public records under the Nevada Public Records Act (NRS Chapter 239), paired with a published fee schedule for every service. You see what is public, what costs what, and exactly where your request stands.
Data the public can actually use.
Machine-readable exports of non-sensitive operational data, aligned with Clark County's open data portal, plus plain-language guides for every service. Watchdogs get spreadsheets; first-timers get a friendly walkthrough.
Anyone planning a visit, especially couples timing a marriage license around a Vegas wedding, can see the wait and the fee before they leave home.
Founders filing a DBA or chasing a notary commission get clear fees, clear steps, and a clear view of how busy the office is today.
Open-data feeds and published dashboards turn weeks of records wrangling into a download, so reporting can be timely and accurate.
Public performance numbers give every taxpayer a way to judge whether the office is delivering value, in real time.
Clear, public expectations help the team rally around shared goals, and let great work get the recognition the numbers prove.
Out-of-town couples and travelers get the same clarity locals do, in plain language, from any device, any hour.
This is not a politician promising a dashboard he has never built. Designing clear, trustworthy information experiences is the work Dr. Howell Shaw has done his entire career.
The transparency plan is not a leap of faith. It is the application of a proven craft to the Clark County Clerk's office.
Visible wins first, deeper tools next, open data and continuous improvement to follow.
Openness and privacy are not in tension here. The plan shines a light on how the office performs while keeping sensitive records and personal data firmly protected, in full compliance with Nevada law.
Confidential marriage records and other protected information stay protected. Transparency means showing how the office performs, not exposing the people it serves.
Published numbers and live estimates are built to be honest. Where a figure is an estimate, it is labeled as one, credibility depends on it.
Public dashboards and portals are designed to share non-sensitive operational data while safeguarding the systems and records behind them.
The open-records portal honors the Nevada Public Records Act, including its rules on what is public, what is confidential, and the timelines for response.
The standard is simple: open the office's performance to the public while keeping personal data private. Light on the institution, shade for the individual.
Refresh cadences and data definitions are published, so the public knows how often numbers update and exactly what each one means.
Targets for trust and efficiency, published, so the public can hold us to them.
An office that serves the public should be an office the public can see into. Show the wait. Publish the fee. Open the records. Then let the numbers speak.
Non-sensitive operational data: service volumes, average turnaround times, resident satisfaction, live wait-time estimates, and a complete fee schedule. These describe how the office performs, never the private details of the people it serves.
No. Confidential records, including confidential marriage records and other information protected by law, remain confidential. The dashboards report aggregate performance, not personal data. Transparency here protects people; it does not expose them.
Wait-time boards are designed to refresh continuously. The public performance dashboard targets a regular, published cadence (for example, weekly), so residents always know how current the numbers are.
Through a guided open-records portal that honors the Nevada Public Records Act (NRS Chapter 239). You will get a tracking number, clear status stages, and expected timelines, instead of a process that feels like a maze.
Yes. Every tool, wait times, fee schedules, search, dashboards, and guides, is built mobile-first so residents and visitors can use them from any device, any hour.
The approach favors responsible, off-the-shelf tools and the county's existing open data infrastructure over costly custom builds. The goal is more transparency at a disciplined cost, consistent with Dr. Shaw's taxpayer-savings priority.
No. In Clark County, elections are administered by the Registrar of Voters, not the County Clerk. This initiative is about transparency for the Clerk's services, marriage, business, notary, and records, not elections.
Then the public deserves to see it. Honest numbers are the whole point. Publishing performance, good or bad, is what turns improvement into a measurable promise instead of a slogan.
The portal is designed around NRS Chapter 239: it respects what records are public, flags what is confidential, and tracks requests against the response timelines the law sets out.
Yes. Machine-readable open-data feeds, aligned with Clark County's open data portal, let journalists, researchers, and watchdogs analyze trends directly instead of re-keying numbers from PDFs.
An opt-in anniversary program with perks and keepsakes that brings couples back to Las Vegas, and strengthens a $2.2B economy.
Read the deep-dive → Initiative 02A secure online application plus free hotel kiosks, instant, identity-verified marriage licenses any hour of any day.
Read the deep-dive → Initiative 03A smart online filing tool with e-signature and an immediate digital certificate for fictitious firm names (DBAs).
Read the deep-dive →Clark County Clerk, Official Site
Source: www.clarkcountynv.gov/government/elected_officials/county_clerk →
Clark County, Open Data Portal
Source: www.clarkcountynv.gov/government/departments/information_technology/open_data.php →
Nevada Public Records Act (NRS Chapter 239)
Clark County Clerk, Records Requests
Figures are drawn from public Clark County, Nevada Secretary of State, and Las Vegas tourism sources and are presented for context. Proposals describe Dr. Shaw's goals for the office and are subject to applicable Nevada law and county processes. Paid for by Friends of Howell Shaw.
Live wait times. Public dashboards. Open records. Real accountability, in real time. Chip in to put transparency on the ballot in 2026.
