Adamsen man of contrasts

Erin Neff

Monday, April 26, 1999 | 11:24 a.m.

In his mayoral campaign, Arnie Adamsen is fond of saying, "I don't believe in sound bites, just sound policy."

But those who spend any time with Las Vegas' longest-serving city councilman hear a sound bite for every situation.

"How's the campaign?"

"I'm so busy, my Mom should've had triplets," Adamsen said from January to March.

Recently, in the final weeks before the May 4 primary that pits him against eight other candidates, Adamsen has been saying, "You know how I say I'm so busy my Mom should've had triplets? Make it quadruplets."

In part because of his quirky cliches and his 12 years of studying every city issue, Adamsen would be tough to clone.

Twice this year he's been the lone opposing voice on a controversial issue before the council -- most notably the Billy Walters golf case.

You would be hard pressed to find any elected official nationwide whose office is packed with items as diverse as his: The decorations range from an electric meter lamp to a certificate for climbing the Great Wall of China.

Yet for his decade-plus experience in city politics, Adamsen remains remarkably skittish around reporters and, at times, his constituents.

He is probably the only member of the National League of Cities who shares the monogram AAA with dozens of family members. A simple question like, "What's your middle name?" draws an incredulous, "You're not going to print that are you? You can't."

Recently Arnold Alfred Adamsen bounded into his City Hall office fresh from a prospective endorsement meeting with the Culinary Union.

As he removed his jacket to expose an AFL-CIO denim shirt, the 49-year-old former craps dealer said, "You can't tell anyone I wore this."

Seated behind his 10th-floor desk sprinkled with mementos of his numerous official city trips to Asia, Adamsen pulls out a Marlboro and begins tapping it nervously.

"Do you mind if I smoke?" he said.

When no objection was raised, he added, "But promise you won't tell" three times before spraying an air freshener to mask the odor.

The skittishness that accompanies Adamsen's private dealings -- he has said all reporters "are out to Pearl Harbor me" -- disappears in debates, where responses roll off his tongue as if he were reading them from a TelePrompTer.

"I have something money can't buy," he says at some point during each candidate forum. "Experience."

He's right.

Not even seasoned criminal defense attorney Oscar Goodman or longtime developer Mark Fine, the other top contenders in the mayoral race, can match Adamsen's knowledge of city issues or his rote recitation of a mind-numbing number of statistics for each topic.

His ability to rattle off the city's percentage of sales tax revenue for several years, the number of downtown jobs and the amount of money leveraged from each city expenditure seem inconceivable knowledge for the kid from Correctionville, Iowa, population 912.

Adamsen was raised on a farm near that town 30 miles east of Sioux City. His wealthy grandparents lost everything during the Depression, and the family's once cushy existence became a fight for life.

He grew up poor and with five siblings and was 5 when his father drank himself to death.

Adamsen said his mother was an irresponsible drunk who ignored the children after she remarried. As a result, Adamsen was raised by his paternal grandmother until he was 14, and she developed Alzheimer's disease.

He went with one of his brothers to the Iowa State Juvenile Home while one older brother entered the Marine Corps, one joined the Navy and his sister was taken to an orphanage. His other brother had been killed in a drunken-driving accident around the time his father died.

A ward of the state until he was 18, Adamsen made the best of his high school days, graduating as senior class president and co-valedictorian of the 100-student Hoover High School.

Although he was awarded an Upward Bound scholarship to the University of Northern Iowa, Adamsen lasted just one year.

"I had been in a regimented environment for so long, I just couldn't handle having to regurgitate what some professor wanted me to know," said Adamsen, who to this day is unwilling to wash dishes because it reminds him of his years of chores at the juvenile home.

"I realize today how important that degree is," Adamsen said.

After he dropped out of college, Adamsen followed the girl who would become his wife to Virginia where she was stationed at Langley Air Force Base.

But dispatches from a friend in Las Vegas got his attention. "I had a friend who was a 21 dealer at the Frontier, and he made in a week what I was making a month," Adamsen said.

In 1976, Adamsen's fiancee, Pat, was transferred to Nellis Air Force Base, and he followed her to Las Vegas. He worked at the Las Vegas Club dealing craps for four years, then moved to the Strip for a boxman position at the Flamingo Hilton's craps tables.

He married Pat 24 years ago today.

In the early 1980s, Adamsen worked nights and took care of his two young children during the day as Pat attended classes at UNLV.

Their quiet middle-class life in Las Vegas changed with one piece of mail: a Nevada Power Co. bill.

Pat Adamsen was furious over what she believed was a billing error and grew even more angry when she says she was treated badly by customer service. The Adamsens decided to fight the company -- taking the "Mad as Hell" line out of the movie "Network" and "putting the tiniest ad in the paper."

"The phone started ringing round the clock -- even at 4 in the morning -- and we had to unplug it at midnight so we could sleep," Adamsen said of the response to his ad.

The Citizens Against Rising Energy held protests and candlelight vigils to oppose a new billing system that charged consumers for their estimated -- not actual -- energy use.

"People were getting power bills for two-, three-, four-thousand dollars," Adamsen said.

In six weeks, the Adamsens collected 46,000 signatures on a petition, and Nevada Power was forced to start a consumer-advisory council and give Adamsen a seat on it.

The 1981 grass-roots fight resulted in legislation to fix the billing problem and led to Nevada Power's stature today as one of the most consumer-friendly utilities, Adamsen said.

Buoyed by his success, Adamsen began "to believe that one person can make a difference."

His love of animals -- he currently has two dogs and a cat -- led to his co-founding of the Animal Foundation.

He ran unsuccessfully for the Nevada Assembly in 1984 as a Democrat and claims he lost, in part, because of to network television's pronouncement of Ronald Reagan's victory when the East Coast polls closed.

From 1985 to 1987, Adamsen campaigned for a number of Assembly and Clark County Commission candidates and pounded the pavement for Ron Lurie's mayoral campaign.

By this time, Adamsen had left the casino industry and started work as a loan agent at the former Nevada Savings & Loan, where he became the first loan agent to register $2 million in mortgages in a month.

His years of campaigning for other candidates paid off in 1987 with a two-year appointment to the City Council from Ward 2 to fill the vacancy left by Lurie's election to mayor.

But Adamsen's commission-based income dropped from $58,000 to $35,000 because of the amount of time he was spending at City Hall, he said. He left Nevada Savings and went to work as an executive for Stewart Title in 1989, the same year he won election to the council.

Adamsen campaigned that year on a pledge to seek increased police foot patrols and to fight a proposal by the state to build a facility on West Charleston Boulevard to house the criminally insane.

At about the same time, Lurie appointed Adamsen as something akin to an ambassador for the city's fledgling Sister Cities program.

Adamsen began traveling as the city's representative to South Korea, China, Thailand and the Philippines to lure high-technology businesses and bolster Asian tourism to Las Vegas.

But despite his successful re-election campaigns in both 1993 and 1997, Adamsen's foreign travel began to raise eyebrows.

During the 1997 campaign -- which he narrowly won despite raising 10 times the combined amount of his opponents -- council hopeful Sue Brna argued that Las Vegas was growing so rapidly that it didn't need to recruit foreign businesses.

"I know my opponents are going to use Sister Cities against me," Adamsen said months ago when weighing a decision to run for mayor.

Fine was the first to do so during the current campaign, calling the $500,000 Sister Cities program and Adamsen's use of some taxpayer money for his travels as a "dirty little secret."

But Adamsen defends the 11-year-old program, claiming it takes time to build enough of a rapport with businessmen in other countries to encourage their investment.

"My opponents are going to kick my teeth in on it," Adamsen said.

Several proposed investments by Asian countries have fallen through over the years, including a South Korean company's pullout from the Las Vegas Technology Center. Continental Wire America Co. was expected to create 50 jobs. Instead, the souring Asian economy forced the company back home. Las Vegas had to buy back the space in the Technology Center at a $140,000 loss.

Although Adamsen is the Sister Cities program's staunchest supporter -- and was recently named Asian Chamber of Commerce Elected Official of the Year -- the political fallout has been costly.

After the 1997 campaign when the foreign travel issue was first raised, Adamsen saw some of his power on the council erode. He lost his mayor pro tem position to political newcomer Michael McDonald.

Adamsen shrugs off that perceived political loss, saying only that "Each council member wanted to rotate into mayor pro tem. It was somebody else's turn."

He also downplays conventional wisdom that he wouldn't be an effective mayor because of his strained relationship with McDonald. "That has nothing to do with it," Adamsen said. "The mayor is the mayor and each council member is only one vote."

Seen by many as an elected official who has paid his dues, Adamsen was hoisted into the front-runner role by the political establishment when former Clark County Commission Chairman Jay Bingham, citing health problems, withdrew from the race.

Adamsen has garnered six key endorsements -- including firefighters, police and the Culinary Union -- and seems to have practiced the past 12 years for this campaign even though recent polls show him trailing front-runner Goodman by anywhere up to 10 percentage points.

"I'm just running on the record of my accomplishments and my vision for the next century," Adamsen said.

In the early 1990s, Adamsen promoted the Parents on Watch program after his then-teenage son, Arlan Andrew, was robbed of lunch money while walking to school.

Since then Adamsen has called himself "Mr. Traffic Signal, Mr. Crossing Guard and Mr. Flashing Lights" for his efforts to add more Safekey after-school sites and school-crossing guards.

In addition, Adamsen has long championed a proposed high-speed train from Las Vegas to Southern California as a member of the California-Nevada Super Speed Train Commission.

He also wants to see a local monorail system that connects downtown with the suburbs and McCarran International Airport.

Having fought against the proliferation of billboards in the city, Adamsen backed an ordinance prohibiting billboards from advertising tobacco products near areas where children gather -- despite being a smoker himself and lighting up illegally in City Hall.

When other mayoral candidates float public safety or economic ideas, Adamsen has a story and a statistic to back up how he's already handled the issue.

He once alerted Metro Police about a graffiti outbreak in the Peccole Ranch residential community that resulted in the arrests of several teenagers and likely helped him win the Peccole homeowners' endorsement this year.

Yet in his heart, Adamsen remains a consumer advocate and public safety supporter.

When he first moved to Las Vegas, he was one of a growing number of citizens band radio users who patrolled the city and reported accidents or criminal activity to police.

"We were the eyes and the ears of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department," Adamsen said.

Adamsen gained the Culinary Union support in part by refusing to cross a union picket line at the MGM Grand hotel-casino and appealing to the then-owners of the Frontier hotel-casino to end a lengthy strike at that property.

He sponsored ordinances tying trash collection rate increases to the consumer price index, winning him praise from senior citizens.

"I'm so glad Arnie's there fighting for us," said Regina Hauck, an activist in Sun City whose homeowner association has endorsed Adamsen. "I can't imagine City Hall without him."

But City Hall could lose Adamsen if he loses the election. Because of an ordinance passed earlier this year, he will be forced to resign his council seat if he does not become mayor.

What will he do?

"Go make money," he replied immediately. "Devote 100 percent of my energy to improving my standard of living."

Adamsen calls Stewart Title the "Switzerland of real estate transactions" and claims there is "a Chinese Wall" erected in the office to keep any of the company's business separate from Adamsen's public dealings.

"I have nightmares that there's some vote I took that I should have abstained from," Adamsen said. "I wake up in a cold sweat thinking my opponents have found something and are going to use it."

Such fears aside, Adamsen is already expecting that the primary won't produce a clear winner.

If no candidate receives 50 percent plus one vote, the top two vote-getters will meet in the June 8 general election.

Adamsen is hoping the support from his ward will catapult him into the runoff and that voters will give him the nod in the general election.

Ward 2 -- which includes Sun City and Peccole Ranch -- has the largest number of registered voters citywide.

Adamsen said he thought voters would favor his ideas and shy away from Goodman because of his representation of some of the nation's most notorious reputed mobsters.

Yet some people who have watched Adamsen in person during candidate forums say he comes across as cocky and "wishy-washy."

"He seemed to try to weasel out of the tough questions," said Jonathan Pierson, who attended a recent candidates' night at Sun City.

Still Adamsen believes he has the right mix of solutions for the city on a number of issues. He favors using the vacant Union Pacific property adjacent to downtown for use as an entertainment and retail center.

"Excitement and sales tax," Adamsen calls it.

Adamsen would like to see more gaming on Fremont Street from the Experience down to the Showboat.

"I'm fond of saying, 'that's a dream,' " he said.

A fan of technology and player of civic-building computer game "Sim City," Adamsen said he might try to finally earn a college degree by taking courses over the Internet.

In what?

"International business," Adamsen said, "but don't print that, my opponents will eat me alive for that."

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