Editorial: City, county are back in full swing

Friday, Oct. 5, 2001 | 9:06 a.m.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President Bush has worked overtime trying to persuade the American public that it's time to get back to "business as usual." Unfortunately, consumer confidence is still down and businesses continue to trim back their operations and lay off employees. But if the president is looking to find a place that finally has returned to its old form, and promote it as an example of a nation back in full swing, he only has to turn to our local governments in Southern Nevada. The Las Vegas City Council and the Clark County Commission once again are comfortably settling into name-calling, petulance and awarding government contracts to politically connected Las Vegans.

Ah, yes, the soothing strains of normalcy.

The County Commission kicked things off on Tuesday when it voted 4-3 to reject a zoning and annexation pact between the city and the county, an agreement that could have eliminated much of the inconsistency in zoning that currently exists between the two bodies in the northwest part of the valley. The underlying reason for scuttling the deal was payback for the city's secret attempt to annex an 80-square-mile parcel of federal land located in the county and for the city's successful effort in the Legislature to make it easier for the city to annex land.

In response, city council members didn't lose a second in racing to trash the county commissioners who had questioned the city's annexation maneuvers. Representative of the city's response on Wednesday was this statement from Mayor Oscar Goodman: "The comments that (the commissioners) exhibited are the rawest form of paranoia, and the last time I saw it, the mental guidelines said that's a real sickness." Let's just say that the increasingly thin-skinned mayor is becoming something of an expert himself on the topic of paranoia.

Just so people don't get the wrong idea -- that this is only about personal animosity between two sets of warring politicians -- the Las Vegas City Council also demonstrated it was capable of using questionable judgment without any help from the county commissioners. The City Council decided to award sports bettor and golf course operator Billy Walters the contract to operate a new municipal golf course in the northwest. The council turned down its own staff's recommendation that it select the bid of a Texas-based golf company, Evergreen Alliance Golf, a proposal that the company said could have saved the city $7-8 million less in management fees over the next 10 years.

Who knows, maybe once the rest of the U.S. economy gets word that local governments in Clark County are back to their old shenanigans, it will produce just the kind of confidence-building spark to persuade consumers and business owners that good times are just around the corner.