Website asks Deane to resign

Friday, Sept. 5, 2003 | 9:34 a.m.

A Las Vegas resident running an Internet consulting business is taking a shot at bringing down Clark County Recorder Fran Deane, urging her to resign.

Laura Steil, who runs the business with her family, has put www.recallfrandeane.com on the Internet. The website asks visitors to "contact Fran Deane and ask her to save the taxpayers of Clark County thousands of dollars by resigning her position."

A recall effort, if it received the more than 70,000 signatures needed to qualify for a special election, would cost the county between $500,000 and $1 million, Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said.

Lomax said he has not received the paperwork needed to launch a recall effort on the recorder from anyone.

Steil said that like Deane she is a registered Republican, but she said she was motivated by the news coverage of the recorder's office. Her website lists seven issues that prompted Steil's effort, including Deane's disconnecting of public telephone access to her office in March, abortive efforts to establish a for-profit company to provide Internet access to recorder documents, obstruction of a contract to provide free Internet access to the same documents and other issues.

"Everything she's done with that office -- she's making it into a farce," Steil said. "She's made a hostile work environment. This is not what she was elected to do."

Deane has denied that she created a hostile work environment and has said she is guilty of no wrongdoing as an elected official. She also said that she has vastly improved the office, which she said was left in a shambles by her predecessor.

Steil said she does not know Deane personally and has not had business that has taken her to the recorder's office since Deane was elected.

"That doesn't matter," she said. "This comes down to a how-she-handles-the-job issue."

Steil said it will cost her more than $100 monthly to keep the website up.

"We'll keep it up until she's out of office," she said. "We don't like what she's doing."

Deane said she hasn't seen the website and would not comment on the contents, but she has no intention of resigning. She has said previously that she would only leave her elected office if a majority of those in the real estate industry asked her to.