AG’s office rules on pay issue

Jeffrey Libby

Friday, July 27, 2001 | 11:27 a.m.

Boulder City Council members will keep their current pay, according to a four-page opinion issued Thursday by the state attorney general's office.

The nonbinding statement from Senior Deputy Attorney General Kateri Cavin should end legal questions that have lingered since Boulder City residents in the June election approved two competing ballot questions by large margins.

It may not end questions as to whether the will of voters has been upheld.

The ballot questions originated from a divided council. Both initiatives proposed amendments to the charter that would prevent the City Council from voting itself raises without first standing for re-election. But they differed on changes to council pay.

Question One would have cut the council members' pay in half by eliminating health and auto benefits. Question Two left current pay intact.

Question Two passed with 70 percent of the vote. Question One also passed, but received only 61 percent of the vote.

The opinion from the state upholds an initial ruling by City Attorney Dave Olsen that said the ballot question receiving the most votes should be enacted.

Olsen based his decision on a state law that says when two competing measures receive a majority of votes, the measure receiving the most votes prevails.

The same day Olsen issued his opinion, he stated his intent to request an opinion from the state.

Some have questioned whether it was clear to voters when they cast ballots that the two measures were in direct competition.

Former Councilman Bill Smith, who led a petition to get Question One on the ballot, argued after the election that if the two questions were in direct conflict, voters should have been directed to vote for one or the other, but not both.

Clark County Registrar Larry Lomax, who oversees municipal elections, said Thursday that at the time of the vote, City Clerk Vicki Mayes -- like Olsen and apparently like many voters -- could not say definitively whether only one question could be upheld.

But Lomax asked, too, why Smith and others who criticized the ballot as confusing didn't come forward before Election Day. Sample ballots are mailed three weeks before elections, Lomax said.

Mayes and Smith could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Smith has said, however, that the decision to uphold only the question that received the most votes would ignore the will of the people, pointing out that 61 percent voted to eliminate auto and health benefits.

But in Cavin's opinion from Thursday, she notes that 70 percent of voters chose to keep current wages. They could have made that choice, she writes, by reading the arguments for passage of Question Two in the sample ballot.

Voters could not have made a decision to keep current wages by reading Question Two alone. Wages aren't addressed there.