County may adopt tougher ethics rules

Dan Kulin

Friday, Nov. 14, 2003 | 11:20 a.m.

Clark County would move a step closer to expanded and stricter ethics rules under recommendations scheduled to go to the county commission Tuesday.

The proposals include a broad 12-month ban on lobbying by former elected officials and an ethics education program. The proposal also calls for limiting the value of gifts commissioners can accept, and the plan would let the state ethics commission be the final arbiter in ethics cases.

The commissioners could decide Tuesday to have a resolution or ordinance written to formally adopt some or all of the recommendations, which came from an Ethics Task Force two months ago.

The recommendations went to the Nevada Ethics Commission for review.

A formal county vote on the recommended changes could come in January or February, County Assistant Director for Administrative Services Jim Spinello said.

County leaders said the push to improve the county ethics policies is not related to the criminal charges stemming from allegations that Commissioner Mary Kincaid-Chauncey and former commissioners Dario Herrera, Lance Malone and Erin Kenny took bribes from local strip-club owner Michael Galardi. Kenny and Galardi have agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with federal prosecutors in the investigation. Herrera, Malone and Kincaid-Chauncey have vowed to fight their indictments.

"We started this whole ethics task force back in April before anybody knew what 'Operation G-Sting' was," Commissioner Rory Reid said, referring to the nickname for the public corruption probe. "We did it because we thought the county ethics rules could be improved. I think with what's going on at the county we have to do what we can for people to have more faith in our government."

Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury said the changes suggested by the ethics board staff were "minimal."

Woodbury said the ethics recommendations do not apply to situations such as those affecting the indicted officials.

"In any walk of life, you're going to have criminal statutes," Woodbury said. "That should go without saying -- you don't violate the law."

Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates, who ran into conflict-of-interest problems in 1997 over concession contracts at McCarran International Airport, heralded the new rules but said they would not serve as a cure-all for every potential conflict of interest.

"I love them. I think they are great," Atkinson Gates said. "But you can't regulate every action."

Richard Morgan, ethics task force chairman and dean of the Boyd Law School at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said he hopes the recommendations were "a good step in the right direction ... to healing the commission" after the indictments were announced last week.

But Morgan he said he doesn't think the new rules would have prevented the alleged influence peddling by strip clubs.

"These rules are designed to help people who want to act in good faith ... They're not an antidote to public corruption," he said.

Morgan said he didn't think any of the task force's recommendations were "particularly controversial," but noted that some may require cooperation from the Nevada Ethics Commission as well as the Legislature.

An example, he said, was the recommendation that the state ethics board be the agency to enforce any guidelines the county adopts. No specific agency oversees the existing county ethics rules.

"We recommended against creating a new level of bureaucracy and think the state agency can do this job," Morgan said.

E. Lee Bernick, also a member of the task force and chairman of the department of public administration at UNLV, said the tenor of the task force's recommendations was to "push for more disclosure."

The county task force proposals include:

This proposed rule would address the ambiguity that arose when Kenny lobbied her former colleagues early this year on behalf of developer Jim Rhodes' controversial effort to build thousands of homes next to the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation District. Kenny left office in January, and claimed the cooling off period did not apply to the Red Rock issue.

Kenny argued that the specific matter she was lobbying on did not come before her while she was on the commission, although general measures to restrict development near Red Rock did come before the board.

The task force has also recommended county officials meet with Nevada Bar Association officials to try to craft a policy that would prevent what officials describe as manufactured conflicts.

Spinello said that an example of such a conflict would be if a developer hired a lawyer in a commissioner's law firm in order to create a conflict of interest for that commissioner to prevent them from voting on the matter.

Morgan said the task force members sought to develop new rules that would bring about the highest level of disclosure while still allowing the elected official to decide whether they should participate in an official matter.

"The fact that a relationship exists doesn't say you need to stay out of it," Morgan said. "Then you let the voters decide at the next election whether their judgment was correct."

Nevada Ethics Commission Chairman Thomas Sheets, who reviewed the recommendations from the county task force, applauded the proposed new rules.

"I think Dean Morgan has done a wonderful job, and we stand ready to work with them and assist them in any way we can," Sheets said. "How can you not support something that is intended to give the public more confidence in the government?"

Sun reporters

Jennifer Knight, Timothy Pratt and Launce Rake contributed to this story.

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