Woodbury decides to run for another term

Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2003 | 11:12 a.m.

Longtime Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury announced Monday that he will seek re-election next year.

There had been speculation that the Boulder City Republican's hearing problems would keep him from seeking another four-year term.

But Woodbury put that talk to rest during a panel discussion on ethics, politics and public service at the Boyd Law School at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas on Monday. Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson and Commissioner Rory Reid, both Democrats, joined Woodbury for the discussion hosted by the Dallin H. Oaks Society, a student group.

Woodbury, a lawyer, was appointed to the County Commission in 1981 and elected to his first full term in 1982. His current term expires in January 2005. In his two most recent races, he won re-election with 63 percent of the vote in 2000 and with an overwhelming 81 percent in 1996.

He has served two terms as chairman of the County Commission, in 1989-1990 and 1999-2000, and he is the current chairman of the Regional Transportation Commission.

Woodbury's supporters had worried that his long-standing and worsening hearing problems might stop a re-election bid next year. But earlier this year Woodbury received a cochlear impact, a device that interprets and transmits sound as electric signals to a hearing-impaired person's brain.

Since then he has appeared to have an easier time tracking conversations over the phone and during commission meetings.

"I'm still struggling, but it's much better than what it was," Woodbury said.

Woodbury's discussion at the law school focused on two issues: ethics and honesty in government and the pace of growth in the community.

Woodbury told the group of law students and faculty at the Boyd school that issues of integrity, values and honesty have again taken the center stage in Las Vegas. He referred to the possible indictments of a sitting commission member, Chairwoman Mary Kincaid-Chauncey, and of three former commissioners, Erin Kenny, Dario Herrera and Lance Malone, in the FBI's ongoing investigation into corruption involving Las Vegas topless clubs.

Malone has already been indicted on a related charge stemming from a parallel investigation in San Diego.

Woodbury said he and the commission went through a similar experience in the mid-1980s. Five Nevada politicians, including two county commissioners, two state senators and a Reno city councilman, either pleaded guilty or were convicted in an FBI bribery probe dubbed Operation Yobo.

"It's really not a fun thing to go through because it really raises the level of cynicism by the public," Woodbury told the audience of about 50 people.

Woodbury joked that Reid, who teamed up with him to back a review of county ethics policies led by Boyd Law School Dean Richard Morgan, had an easier time because of the unfolding strip-club scandal.

Woodbury told Reid: "Three of your predecessors are about to be indicted, so how hard is it to look good?"

The ethics task force led by Morgan has turned over its recommendations to the Nevada Ethics Commission for review. Among the recommendations are that former commissioners, department heads and county managers would not be able to lobby the commission on any issues for a year, and that the state ethics board levy fines against scofflaws of county ethics rules and forward complaints to the Nevada attorney general.

Woodbury said despite the occasional black eye, the issue of honesty in government is not just important to many politicians and lawyers, but central to public service.

"You have to have the values and the integrity or all the rest of it is meaningless," he said.

"Rules are necessary, but in the end it's all about personal integrity and values and the desire to do what's right."

Woodbury said the impact of growth on the community would be a major theme for his re-election. Woodbury has been a cautionary voice among Southern Nevada's political leaders, many of whom are reluctant to call for growth limits in a community where development is the second major industry.

"I'm not as fond of this explosive rate of growth as some people," said Woodbury, who noted that he lives in Boulder City, a town unique in Southern Nevada for having limits to the number of new houses allowed each year.

He said growth brings economic benefit, "but you have to balance that with what it's going to do to our quality of life in many areas."

"Of course the drought that we're going through right now puts a new urgency to all these concerns about growth," Woodbury said. If new water-use restrictions give way to even stronger restrictions in response to the four-year drought, limits to new growth will probably be needed, he said.

Reid also talked about ethics in government. He said the three months of work by the ethics task force produced a timely product, "but we did not time it that way."

Reid said the cynicism he sees in the public about politicians comes primarily not from scandals but from a lack of involvement in the political process. He noted that only about 25 percent of the eligible public bothers to vote in presidential elections anymore.

"If that trend continues, we're not going to have many people voting in the future," he said. Reid urged the students to vote, to run for office, to back political organizations or contribute financially to political groups.

"If people continue to be unwilling to participate in the election process, we are going to get what we deserve," he warned. Reid said the students in the audience, many of them law students, have a vested interest in the political process.

"You've got to get involved in the political process because it's going to have a direct impact on your practice, on what you do," he said.

Gibson, whose father and grandfather were elected leaders in Southern Nevada, turned the conversation back to growth. He said Henderson had gone from a population of 64,000 in 1990 to about 240,000 today.

"No growth" or "slow growth" policies would, however, hurt the people living in his city because they would affect the amount of sales tax revenue returned by the state to Henderson, he said.

The distribution of that revenue is in part set by the percentage growth in both population and assessed property values in the community, Gibson said. Unless the state law is changed to modify that equation, Henderson would suffer from slower growth -- and that might mean cutting police, fire or other essential services.

He also noted that state law does not give the Henderson government the ability to deny zoning applications in an effort to slow the pace of development.

"The Legislature is really the only body that can help us address the growth problem in any meaningful way," he said.

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