Where I Stand—Brian Greenspun: No political courage

Thursday, June 7, 2001 | 8:28 a.m.

Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

IT WASN'T QUITE a return to my roots, but it was close enough.

My first home after leaving Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital -- we call it University Medical Center today -- was clean, green Boulder City. In fact, many of the new arrivals to the Las Vegas Valley gathered in the city by the dam because there was, like most other places, a post-war housing shortage.

While I didn't remember much of those very early days, my parents were quick to tell me that their time in Boulder City produced some of their most outstanding memories. As a result, I have always had a soft spot in my heart for anything having to do with my first home.

I now have yet another reason to think kindly about Boulder City. It is called Cascata and it is a golf course that belongs to the folks at Park Place Entertainment. Normally, Monday mornings are reserved for work, so when my friend, Mark Dodson, invited me to play it was easy to justify any twinge of guilt that could have negated the split-second timing of my answer. Of course I said "yes."

I mention my good fortune in having been able to play yet another outstanding golf course, not so much to keep a leg up on my golfing friends who constantly hold their golf conquests over my head -- although that thought did cross my mind -- but as a lead-in to one of my good-old-days stories.

Besides Mark, I played with Jon Jaggers and Jimmy Newman, both avid golfers and two of the most knowledgeable gaming people in this town. They not only have experience but longevity, which in the gambling business speaks volumes about ability.

I won't bore you with the details of the game itself because, truth be told, the only beauty to be found that day was in the course and its natural surroundings. Everything else about the game started with ugly and got worse from there.

The interesting part of the game, as is usually the case, was the 19th hole. Some call that drinks in the clubhouse, I called it lunch.

Life gets busy and the opportunities to sit around with old friends and visit for a few minutes become rarer and rarer. So, when I had the chance to visit with Jimmy and Jon about the good old days and their impact upon the good new days to come, it was an easy decision.

When Jimmy Newman moved to Las Vegas in 1948, there were barely 18,000 people living in Clark County. It was, as he described it, a small town in which everyone knew everyone else and not much happened that escaped even the least informed citizen.

What we reminisced about was the community-minded spirit of those who were struggling to make Las Vegas the tourist mecca of the world as well as a world-class community in which to live and raise families. It was, as you can imagine, a task of Herculean proportions and one that had not been done before, in large part because the two goals could be perceived as mutually exclusive. They are, which is why our success in doing so is that much more baffling to the naysayers who knew it couldn't be done.

I remember commenting about the lack of political courage exhibited by Nevada's legislators in refusing to deal with the revenue needs of this state in a responsible way. Everyone, from the governor on down, took a duck when it came to making the hard decisions that would have set our state up on an even keel rather than deferring an ever-growing problem to the next legislative session.

It is an easy and politically painless decision to not raise taxes to pay for stabilized teacher salaries, books, medical care and other quality-of-life choices that the people of this state prefer, but the politicians prefer not to suggest this before the next election.

If leadership is about selling the public on the merits of a better life and the need to pay for it, then refusing to discuss the matter evidences in my mind the exact opposite. And so went the discussion.

That's when my gaming friends recounted the countless times when Las Vegas needed a new park, a church or some other public need, and the money was raised. Most of the time it wasn't done through increased tax levies. Rather, the hat was passed amongst the gambling establishments, and the money came rolling in.

Those were simpler times, to be sure, and cannot be recaptured in the more modern ways of the 21st century. But they did evidence something very important about what was then a young and growing community.

When it came time to buy the schoolbooks, build the libraries and pay the teachers, the good people up and down the Strip knew the value of building a good and solid community. They reached into their pockets to make sure it would happen.

Today, the opposite appears to be the case. While most people would agree on the needs for significant quality-of-life expenditures, the answer is to reach into someone else's pocket. A stark contrast to the days when building a good life meant taking responsibility for it in the most direct way.

With the business community and the gaming interests pointing fingers at each other in a way calculated to maintain the status quo while the Legislature was in session, the "leaders" of this state managed once again to put off the tough decisions. By doing so, though, they have made the next decisions that much harder to sell.

As good as those early days were, though, I don't yearn for them. After all, there was no Cascata back then. But, there were good people willing to stand up and be counted for the betterment of this community.

I don't yearn for them, either, because I know there are so many more people who live amongst us today. The difficulty appears to be -- with a few notable exceptions -- our collective ability to find them and elect them to high office.