Friday, Dec. 12, 2003 | 5:17 a.m.
Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the Ralston Report. He can be reached at (702) 870-7997 or at [email protected].
WEEKEND EDITION December 13 - 14, 2003
IF YOU WANT TO send a gift to your favorite friend in the university system this holiday season, please don't send one of those fruitcakes -- they already have plenty.
Not all of them are on the board of regents, although they have their share. The nuts in this confection are running the asylum known as the University and Community College System of Nevada, a place where legislators who need jobs get them, where an assemblyman's wife and young friend can get satisfaction and where four-year degrees already are offered in pettiness, prevarication and pusillanimity. All of this while those responsible for system oversight -- the regents and Chancellor Jane Nichols -- cover up, cover their tails and run for cover.
Last week the regents -- or at least half of them -- showed that any inculcation is futile as they fail to learn from their mistakes. The same seven out of 13 who three weeks ago voted without due process or logic to fire Community College President Ron Remington and cashier lobbyist John Cummings (over whom they have no authority) upheld their decision.
This could be more about process than action -- but we don't know. Remington may well be an absentee landlord who left too much to the discretion of Cummings, a political schmoozer extraordinaire willing to do whatever it took to increase the community college's political clout -- the same modus operandi he had when he was the head of the teachers union.
But the regents have based their actions on a so-called report prepared by private investigator Jeff Cohen. But this document, which I have obtained, is not a report under any reasonable definition -- be it a college term paper with facts and analysis or my daughter's third-grade homework that is supposed to have a beginning, middle and end.
Cohen has merely collated 1,026 pages of raw data -- an amalgam of interviews, newspaper clippings, memos, Nevada Revised Statutes and legislative minutes. It is disjointed, occasionally incomprehensible and bereft of any synthesis.
But it is thick. And this faux heft is what the opportunistic regents apparently were looking for last month when they decided they would mimic Cohen's work by choosing form over substance.
Nichols, who unfathomably was allowed to sit in on those closed sessions last month after being accused of interfering in the firing of Williams' friend, Topazia "Briget" Jones, has yet to satisfactorily explain her behavior. She seems content to allow Remington's reputation to be shredded even though she expressed absolute confidence in him on "Face to Face" just a couple of weeks before the November meeting. And remember Nichols also rubber-stamped a $49,900 payment to Williams' wife after Zelda Williams overheard a racial epithet -- a settlement that Attorney General Brian Sandoval later criticized and he refused to allow the state to reimburse the college.
According to a letter in the Cohen collation, Sandoval wrote to Nichols earlier this year raising questions about why she didn't settle for the $5,000 that had been recommended because "Ms. Williams' claim had little merit and the chances of the state's success at trial were very good."
Like it or not, Nichols now seems to be sending this message: If you are a legislator, just bring me your lawsuits, your friends, your yearning to be hired.
This is not to say that the Cohen collation does not have some value, including some unintentional hilarity in the Jan. 9 hiring memo for Jones in which she is unfortunately referred to as "Topazia Bigot Jones."
Many memos show Jones' supervisors were concerned about her work and work ethic, including one penned in late August: "My staff had overheard Briget working on projects for Mr. Williams during the workday, and faxes for Mr. Williams have been sent to and from our office regularly ... (staffers) do not understand how (Jones) could have been hired full-time without a search." Gee, I wonder.
One late-August memo from Assemblywoman and CCSN employee Chris Giunchigliani raised questions about Jones being given whistleblower status by Nichols when the state law does not give an administrator such authority without a hearing. In his interview with the chancellor, Cohen raises the issue of Cummings being Giunchigliani's supervisor: "Then it appears that the vice chair of the Ways and Means Committee works with or is supervised by the community college lobbyist?" Indeed. And yet Nichols, who readily acknowledges in the report that she is responsible for all lobbying activities, seems fine with that arrangement.
There is much more, none of it presented in a logical and distilled way that could have allowed the regents to reach any conclusions without asking more questions of Cummings, Remington and, yes, Nichols.
One longtime political observer compared the regents' refusal to budge after the public obloquy to the Legislature in 1989 ignoring an outcry and voting twice to raise their pensions 300 percent.
"These regents may be worse because after hearing the real truth in the press for two weeks and seeing the flesh and bone of real people today, they still told them to eat cake," the insider opined.
And it may be worse for the regents because this is going to end up in court and perhaps cost the taxpayers a fortune. So if you still can't think of a gift for your favorite university system official, especially the chancellor and the regents, the best present you can give them, the one they may need the most, is the name of a good lawyer.
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