Columnist Jon Ralston: Business folks take on the teachers

Sunday, Aug. 6, 2000 | 8:58 a.m.

Jon Ralston, who publishes the Ralston Report, writes a column for the Sun on Sundays and Wednesdays. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997 or by e-mail at ralston@vegas.com.

If the Nevada State Education Association thought the business community's response to the union's profits tax petition was a front group with an appealing name and a few mailers, I have news: This is not your father's Chamber of Commerce.

In fact, this is a chamber with a politically savvy former county manager as its president (Pat Shalmy), a tireless, committed woman as its chief operating officer (Kara Kelley) and, of all people, a former teachers union strategist as the overseer of an incipient campaign (John Cummings).

No one -- not even the chamberites -- thinks the teachers will have any trouble qualifying the petition drive -- they should have the 44,000 signatures long before Nov. 14, maybe even by the end of this month. One teachers union consultant recently predicted that the petition will be qualified within a fortnight.

So the chamber operatives figure the battle will be fought in Session '01 and probably on the ballot in Campaign '02. But the business doyens plan to begin laying down some cover fire this summer to show the teachers they take their bottom lines very seriously.

Sources report that the Nevada Pro-Education Alliance (Question: What's in a name? Answer: A lot of spin.) will begin a media campaign this summer designed to undermine the teachers plan to tax businesses and gaming profits by 4 percent. The TV and radio campaign will be augmented by a mail piece that follows the theme of the multimedia effort.

Cummings, who used a 1990 business tax initiative as his entree into the political world, is trying to revive his political life on the other side now. A decade ago, he played brinkmanship with the business folks and the governor, then Bob Miller. Cummings eventually "surrendered" on that tax petition, but only after Miller promised to propose a business tax in the Legislature. Miller followed through, and thus the state's minuscule and somewhat misguided (a head tax?) business levy was born.

Cummings knows how the teachers union leadership thinks, what their arguments will be and, the chamber folks who hired him hope, how to beat them.

The theme of the TV-radio campaign is three-pronged:

There will be a pitch in the ad and through the mail for signatories to the petition to remove their names, bolstered by the argument that they were misled by the union. But that's an upstream swim, and most chamber insiders know it. Nevertheless, taking a page from the gamers, who are trying to suppress signatures in rural Nevada, the chamber will make a heavy TV and radio buy in the cow counties to try to win hearts and minds.

Both the gamers and the chamber know that with 13 out of 17 counties needed to qualify a petition, the rurals have the most potential. The difference, though, is that the gamers are up against state Sen. Joe Neal, who has a cause but no money, while the chamber is up against the teachers, who have a cause and the resources to get it done.

By the time Election Day rolls around, the chamber group is expected to spend several hundred thousand dollars on the campaign. Their goal by then, and afterward, is to make NSEA look like an avaricious pack out to bolster their own bottom lines while painting the business community as altruistically trying to further the cause of better education.

Now that would be a neat role reversal. Perhaps the kind only a teachers union operative turned business community spinmeister could pull off.