Columnist Jon Ralston: Double dipping not surprising

Friday, Oct. 24, 2003 | 5:46 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 ralston@vegas.com.

AS THE MEDIA salivates, opportunists slobber and politicians spin, I feel mostly sad as Double-Dippinggate stretches inexorably onward.

Sad that all public employees who serve in Carson City now are seen as eager to slurp concurrently from two government troughs, that they are a band of insatiable thieves who cannot curb their appetite for taxpayer money.

Sad that members of the African-American community, reflecting the chasm that continues to separate the white-dominated media from the valley's minorities, are playing the race card in a story that already has been shown to be color-blind.

Sad, most of all, that in the inevitable feeding frenzy, as usual, context is swallowed whole and we are left with only morsels of what should be an important but what remains an inchoate debate: Who should be allowed to serve in a citizens' Legislature?

Sure, it's great political theater to watch chest-beating local governments get tough with employees bearing legislative titles -- employees they once considered invaluable assets and whose double dipping they either willingly condoned or willfully ignored. And it's the standard trajectory of such scandal stories to be at the "who knew what and when did they know it" stage as the buck seems to stop nowhere and scapegoats are everywhere.

But where are we going with this, beyond serving the political ends of Republicans who see an opportunity because most of these public employees are Democrats?

The slope will continue to get more slippery as the story continues to advance with punishments meted out, wrongful termination lawsuits filed and campaign brochures written. Before it ends, careers will be in tatters, leaders will be tested and racial tensions will be inflamed.

Many provocative questions, though, remain far from resolved as the name Topazia Jones seems to have been left behind -- the media are not good at multitasking -- as Double-Dippinggate becomes the focus. Among them:

Even after these questions are answered (or not), the overall issue raised by this cacophony is whether this can help effect needed change in business as usual.

There are very compelling legal arguments that say public employees should not be allowed to be state lawmakers. Although those behind an initiative to ban public employees from Carson City have gained sustenance from these revelations, they are motivated mostly by spotlight envy and partisanship.

But has anyone bothered to consider that when you only pay legislators $6,800, the quality of legislating is not strained and they will need to find ways to supplement their in-session income?

I am not suggesting that local government employees should be working their day jobs, too, while trapped in the endless night of the Legislature. Nor do I believe that the public isn't rightly skeptical when these double dippers claim they assiduously worked on weekends and during their free time, or that voters shouldn't be outraged when they discover legislators claimed sick leave while they were making us sick by taking 157 days to do what the Constitution mandates they accomplish in 120.

No, but if we value our state lawmakers at $6,800 for two years of work, we will, session after session, get what we pay for. And less.

The other related issue is that if taxpayers are fretting about their dollars flowing to public employee malingerers in Carson City, it could easily be argued that is far from the most egregious ethical breach in the Legislature.

How much do you think it has cost taxpayers over the years allowing lawmakers to serve on boards of private companies -- casinos, HMOs, banks -- and who then legislated based not on their constituents' interests but on their private commitments?

During the tax non-debate, lawmakers with private sector jobs either publicly or privately argued how the policy would affect their businesses, putting second (at best) how it would affect their constituents.

Say what you want about how their experiences in the real world enhance their abilities once they become lawmakers. I could argue just as persuasively that employees of local governments know much more about how the system works and thus can be much more effective as state lawmakers.

This is all about an individual's integrity and personal responsibility, whether he is an employee of Clark County or on a bank board. No matter the ultimate outcome of Double-Dippinggate, so long as this state continues to pay its legislators a pittance and decides that citizen lawmakers are a lesser evil than full-time pols, stories about financial conflicts, misplaced loyalties and outright venality will never go away.