Three commissioners face ethics hearing

Jeff Schweers

Thursday, May 28, 1998 | 10:03 a.m.

Three Clark County commissioners will face an ethics hearing during the last week of June on charges they used their influence to help friends obtain potentially lucrative concession leases at the new 'D' terminal at McCarran International Airport.

The dates were set Wednesday after the state Ethics Commission voted 3-1 to move forward on a complaint against Commissioner Lance Malone that he voted to award a lease to his wife's friend, Gay Reber.

The panel also voted later to subpoena Malone's brother and sister-in-law, Mark and Melody Malone, to find out more about their application for an airport concession lease. They also subpoenaed Tammy Starring, who won a food and beverage kiosk lease.

Ethics Chairwoman Mary Boetsch stressed that the decision to hold a hearing on the merits of the allegations "is not a determination that Mr. Malone did anything. It's just that we're moving forward."

Boetsch said the commission felt that because of the media attention and the public policy issues involved that the process of selecting airport concessionaires warranted further inquiry by the Ethics Commission.

But Jud Allen voted against the motion to move forward because he saw a correlation between the evidence presented by Malone and that which was given two weeks earlier by Commissioner Lorraine Hunt that helped clear her of a similar complaint.

"We said there was no ethical violation with Hunt, and I thought Malone gave similar testimony," Allen said. "I was just being consistent."

The hearings for Malone and fellow commissioners Yvonne Atkinson Gates and Myrna Williams will be scheduled for June 23, 24 and 25 in Las Vegas.

Malone's lawyer, Don Campbell, said the decision should not be interpreted as any judgment of wrongdoing on the part of his client, "but to get the facts out and better assist the commissioners with respect to disclosure and non-disclosure."

The complaints filed against Williams, Gates and Malone accused them of using their positions to help get friends concession leases and failing to disclose those relationships when voting on the leases last August.

Malone said he did not know that Reber was the same friend of his wife's, and that he had no close personal relationship with the woman whom he voted to grant a food kiosk lease.

The same Gay Reber played in the complaint dismissed against Hunt because Reber's husband and business partner was the son of a man with whom Hunt had real estate investments.

Williams was accused of not disclosing her relationship to Judy Klein, a close friend who collected campaign checks for Williams, Hunt and Gates when she worked as an assistant to local attorney Frank Schreck.

Klein and her partner, Vicki Richardson, won two coffee kiosk locations.

Hunt successfully convinced the ethics panel that she was not a close friend of Klein's, even though Hunt sang at the other's bridal shower and wedding and knew her since 1980.

Gates has conceded that Michael Chambliss was paid for working on her 1996 re-election campaign, but that their 17-year relationship was of a business and political nature.

Chambliss, who had an airport concession prior to Gates election to the County Commission, won a food concession lease at the new airport gates.