Columnist Jeff German: Lawmakers butting in on talks

Friday, Feb. 28, 2003 | 11:24 a.m.

Jeff German's column appears Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays in the Sun. Reach him at german@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4067.

This is not the best time for county commissioners and other county officeholders to be seeking large pay raises for themselves from the Legislature.

There are plenty of economic reasons to argue against giving them more money.

But it was disturbing to see Democratic members of the Assembly's Government Affairs Committee this week use a pay raise bill as a hammer over the heads of the commissioners to move along stalled contract negotiations between the county and some 8,000 of its union employees.

It almost makes you want to root for the commissioners in their quest.

At a hearing on the bill in Carson City, Assemblymen Wendell Williams of Las Vegas and Tom Collins of North Las Vegas made it clear that the commissioners should settle the contract if they wanted to see more cash in their own pockets.

Collins even suggested removing the commissioners from the bill unless they played ball with Local 1107 of the Service Employees International Union, which is seeking a 3.9 percent cost-of-living raise. The county has offered 2 percent, which puts the sides about $12 million apart.

Clearly Williams and Collins were pandering for the politically active SEIU, which stacked a hearing room in Las Vegas to observe the committee discussion in Carson City via teleconference.

Getting the gullible committee members to do their bidding was smart strategy on the part of SEIU leaders, but it was bad policy for the Legislature.

Williams and Collins should know better than to let themselves be pawns in these high-stakes negotiations.

By state law, independent procedures, such as mediation, fact-finding and binding arbitration, are available when negotiations involving public employees reach an impasse. This is the system the Legislature itself set up to keep the talks free of political interference.

Imagine if the commissioners caved in to the Assembly Democrats and gave the SEIU the millions in taxpayer dollars it wanted just to earn themselves a pay hike. How would the public view that?

There would be recall drives left and right.

The county, it turns out, has good reason to take a hard line in the negotiations because it's facing uncertain fiscal times. The Regional Justice Center boondoggle and University Medical Center continue to drain financial resources.

And there's a good chance the Legislature will put the county deeper in the hole if it shifts some local government tax revenues to the state to ease the state's economic burden.

Some might say this also is an argument not to give the commissioners a pay raise.

State lawmakers surely will take that into consideration as they decide whether to pass the bill that would increase the salaries of the commissioners.

But lawmakers shouldn't muddy up the debate by tying it to the county's negotiations with its employees.

They have no business intervening in the contract talks.