Mayoral race goes global

Wednesday, April 21, 1999 | 10:07 a.m.

For his second-straight political campaign Arnie Adamsen is having to defend trips he made to Asia to lure businesses here.

The latest attack is in the form of a 30-second television advertisement from fellow mayoral candidate Mark Fine. But the chairman of the Korean Association of Las Vegas, which has endorsed Adamsen, is angered by the ad and believes it will solidify support for the Las Vegas city councilman in the local Asian-American community.

Fine and Adamsen are two of the nine mayoral candidates who are squaring off in the city's May 4 primary.

The ad, which began airing Friday, shows Adamsen straddling a cartoon airplane from Las Vegas to South Korea and back, with cash falling from the plane on the return trip.

"Arnie Adamsen's dirty little secret," the announcer says. "One to two trips a year to Asia in a program that costs city taxpayers $500,000. The results are called 'feeble,' 'meager,' 'scant' for Las Vegas but not for Adamsen.

"He uses the trips to raise thousands in foreign political donations. Koreans contributed to his campaign, and he got Korean businesses sweetheart land deals from the city. Arnie Adamsen ... now you know the truth."

The fuss is over Adamsen's long-standing support of the international Sister Cities program, a cultural exchange partnership Las Vegas first entered in 1987 with An San, South Korea.

Adamsen defended the program Tuesday, saying it has helped Las Vegas companies Unitel and Oxford Marketing Corp. generate a combined $25 million in business. He also took credit for helping convince Japan Airlines to begin non-stop flights from Tokyo to Las Vegas last year as part of an Asian trade mission headed by then-Gov. Bob Miller.

"The futurists are saying that the 21st century is going to be the century of the Pacific Rim," Adamsen said. "There will be huge trading blocs formed so you will have to join them rather than compete with them. Everybody is going global.

"If you're not global in five years, you'll be out of business."

Korean-born architect Steven Kwon, chairman of the Korean Association of Las Vegas and a Sister Cities supporter, added that the program has helped Las Vegas shed its image as a gaming-only city in the eyes of Asian officials.

"Mark Fine is very, very negative," Kwon said. "This is just a dirty campaign. A lot of people are working hard to make an image change in our city."

Fine sees it differently. The developer said the Sister Cities program doesn't have a clear mission and hasn't produced enough economic benefits to make it worthwhile.

His ad makes a passing reference to a $140,000 loss that the city sustained last year when it was forced to buy back 8 acres in the Las Vegas Technology Center from South Korean company Continental Electric Wire because of a collapsed deal. Adamsen tried to broker the deal.

"I'm not sure what the mission of Sister Cities is," Fine said. "If the mission is economic development, it's a failed program. Maybe we ought to give more physical resources to the Nevada Development Authority. Trying to bring economic development to the city takes a lot of effort.

"I don't see any professional effort designed to follow up on the Sister Cities program."

Adamsen took heat for the Sister Cities program during his successful City Council re-election bid in 1997 when the issue was raised by challenger Sue Brna. She argued that Adamsen should have been spending more time solving problems in Las Vegas than wooing businesses from Asia.

Adamsen conceded that he collected about $2,000 in campaign contributions that year from Korean businessmen at a local fund-raiser. But he said that unlike federal campaigns, which prohibit foreign contributions, there was nothing illegal about the donations to his race.

Still, Kwon said that when a visiting delegation from An San met with Adamsen earlier this year, the councilman turned down their offer of a campaign donation.

Adamsen said he believes the ad will come back to haunt Fine.

"He has infuriated the Asian-American community," Adamsen said. "They are hot. They say it smacks of racism."

Like Brna, Fine said Adamsen is so caught up with the Sister Cities program that he has ignored other issues, such as growth and traffic.

"Where are his priorities?" Fine said. "We don't have the luxury to have Sister Cities programs when we have other issues here that need to be addressed."