Scherer challenges Del Papa for attorney general’s job

Thursday, Oct. 22, 1998 | 12:11 p.m.

CARSON CITY -- Former Las Vegas Assemblyman Scott Scherer has been piling up endorsements from law-enforcement groups in his run for state attorney general but he faces incumbent Democrat Frankie Sue Del Papa, who has never lost an election.

Scherer, 36, has focused on changing the direction of the office -- getting it back to basics. Its consumer-protection programs are not working that well and the office staff has grown faster than most others in state government, said Scherer, associate general counsel for International Game Technology.

Del Papa, 49, said the growth mirrors the population increase in Nevada and that the consumer-protection programs under her direction have saved taxpayers millions of dollars.

Also on the ballot are Las Vegas attorney Joel Hansen, a member of the Independent American Party, and Kent Cromwell of the Libertarian Party.

During her eight years as attorney general, Del Papa has expanded the office with the budget jumping from $8.2 million to $21.6 million. She became involved in such issues as teenage smoking, teenage pregnancy, senior abuse and dying with dignity.

If re-elected she would become only the third attorney general to serve three terms. She is the first woman to hold the job. Prior to becoming attorney general, she was the first female elected secretary of state. She served one term on the University Board of Regents and was student body president at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Del Papa gained her law degree from George Washington Law School.

While attorney general, she applied to become chancellor of the state university system but then withdrew. She formed an exploratory committee to run for governor this year but then backed out, saying she could not raise the money that Republican Kenny Guinn amassed. She was mentioned for jobs in the Clinton administration but bowed out of consideration.

Scherer was a supervising deputy attorney general, served two terms in the Assembly in 1991 and 1993 and later became a member of the state Ethics Commission. He has practiced law for 14 years.

Scherer is a graduate of John Hopkins University and gained his law degree from the University of Washington.

He has been gathering endorsements from law-enforcement agencies and from such unlikely allies as the Nevada State AFL-CIO and the State of Nevada Employees Association. Del Papa was criticized by union officials for not supporting the strikers at the Frontier hotel-casino. And she sided with Gov. Bob Miller in 1991 in an unsuccessful attempt to stop pay hikes for state employees during a downturn in Nevada's economy.

Del Papa has been a leader in efforts to reform the state and federal law to cut down the number of frivolous law suits by prison inmates. She has worked against the sale of cigarettes to minors and the unit that fights fraud in workers compensation has received national recognition.

She tangled with the Nevada Supreme Court in the highly controversial case over the discipline of former District Judge Jerry Whitehead. Although she lost, she gained public support. Her office defeated efforts by former Sen. Don Mello to gain a 300 percent increase in his pension and beat back a suit by the nursing-home industry for more than $15 million in state payments.

She's been criticized for losing suits that cost the state millions of dollars when they might have been settled for less money. She tried to remove the Lincoln County Commission for its support of a nuclear waste facility in that county. For that effort, she was censured by the Assembly and Senate.

Scherer suggests there's too much fluff and not enough substance in the Del Papa programs. He cites a national evaluation that Nevada doesn't do well in consumer protection in insurance. In his Assembly service, he authored a law limiting campaign contributions and also one to establish the fraud unit for the former State Industrial Insurance system.

He said he wants to stop the high turnover in the staff of the attorney general's office and wants to speed up the handling of death-penalty appeals. Del Papa's office has been criticized twice by district judges in Carson City for permitting death-penalty appeals to linger for years.

Scherer is proposing a training program for judges and attorneys. Those lawyers assigned death-penalty cases would have to pass the course.

"Ineffective assistance of counsel is a reason usually cited in most death-penalty appeals," he said. This training could eliminate most common errors made by both lawyers and judges and reduce litigation.

Hansen, 54, is making his third run for public office. He was a candidate for attorney general in 1994 and for the Assembly in Las Vegas in 1992. He wants to create a "taxpayers' advocate" to protect citizens against abuses of the Internal Revenue Service and pledges to help ranchers, miners and others who are battling regulations by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.

He worked his way through law school at the Utah attorney general's office and later went to work for the Clark County district attorney's office, then entered private practice in Las Vegas in 1978.

Cromwell, 50, is retired after working as a dealer in the casino business in Northern Nevada since 1972. A resident of Palomino Valley north of Reno, he has become a perennial candidate, running unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives each twice and controller once. He said the major reason for his candidacies is to keep the Libertarian Party on the ballot.

He is a graduate of the University of California, Riverside, with a degree in economics.