Columnist Jeff German: Political corruption to continue till system overhauled

Friday, Sept. 5, 2003 | 5:18 a.m.

WITH AN FBI investigation into political corruption in high gear, a special Clark County task force meets Tuesday to approve recommendations to toughen the ethics code for elected and appointed officials.

In May, after the corruption probe became public, the County Commission called back the 10-member task force of prominent citizens in an effort to restore the public's trust and confidence in county government. The names of several current and former commissioners had surfaced in the probe.

After four months of hearings and research, the panel is looking to plug loopholes in the current code and provide more guidance to officials. A one-year cooling-off period for lobbying the commission after an official leaves office is being strengthened, and the panel is recommending a strict gift policy with penalties.

There also are recommendations to clear up confusion over when an official should abstain from voting because of a conflict of interest and to force county officials to attend regular ethics seminars.

Many of these measures will indeed create more awareness about ethics and improve the system. But they won't fix the system.

For that to happen, we have to reduce the ability of elected officials to profit financially from the public offices they hold -- which means a complete political overhaul.

We need a full-time, not part-time, system of government in Clark County and the city of Las Vegas. We need to pay our elected leaders full-time salaries and prohibit them from accepting consulting fees or any other income from special interests bent on weakening their loyalty to the voters.

We also need to reduce the influence of special interests over the election process -- which means wholesale campaign finance reform, maybe something similar to Arizona's new "Clean Elections" system that allows candidates to receive public funding when they run for office.

Arizona's campaign reforms, which have been in existence since 2000, have dramatically reduced the amount of money special interests contribute to that state's political process and, according to some recent reports, the process is functioning very well.

Richard Morgan, who chairs the county's ethics task force, agrees that an overhaul of our political system would be a good thing.

"That's certainly an alternative that other communities have gone to," said Morgan, who is dean of UNLV's Boyd School of Law. "It would lessen the potential for conflicting interests and the potential corruption that flows with it."

But Morgan and his panel weren't asked to look at ways to overhaul the system. They were asked to patch it up.

And though I don't wish to trivialize their hard work these past four months, I find their recommendations rather superficial when you consider the work that really needs to be done to restore the public's confidence in government in Southern Nevada.

It makes little sense to provide guidelines for ethical conduct in a system that encourages corrupt behavior. A better approach would be to remove the incentives that tempt politicians to enrich themselves.

At some point we're going to have to realize that this community, with more than 1.5 million residents, has grown up. We no longer can afford to have part-time leaders and all of the conflicts that come with them.

We deserve leaders who have the independence to tackle the serious growth issues we're facing and do what's right for everyone -- not just the special interests who dangle large sums of cash over their heads.