Editorial: Leadership training is necessary

Friday, Aug. 6, 2004 | 4:50 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

August 7 - 8, 2004

Las Vegas Councilwoman Janet Moncrief is the latest area elected official whose name is now associated with either lawbreaking or ethical violations. She was indicted last week on felony charges related to her 2003 campaign for the City Council. She defeated Michael McDonald, whose own ethical violations while serving on the council contributed to his loss. A grand jury on Friday returned a five-count felony indictment against Moncrief. Four counts were for filing false campaign finance reports and one was for perjury. She is one of more than a dozen local elected officials who in recent years have either been indicted or found guilty of violating ethics laws.

During Moncrief's campaign it was clear that she had almost no knowledge whatsoever of public affairs. During television and newspaper interviews she candidly admitted that she knew hardly anything about how the city of Las Vegas was managed or very much at all about the issues confronting it. Moncrief, a nurse, expressed confidence that she would gain expertise as a public official as time went along. We were not alone in being alarmed at the choice facing voters of Ward 1 in the 2003 municipal election. Either vote for someone who knows virtually nothing about city affairs, or vote for an incumbent with ethical violations on his record.

A logical question facing Southern Nevada voters these days is: What can we do to get higher quality people to seek public office?

As with many social problems, education is a good place to start when looking for answers. We believe that many candidates would take advantage of a program to prepare themselves for public office if one were available.

Close to what we have in mind is a program run by Marlene Rebori, who is the community and organizational development specialist for Cooperative Extension in Western Nevada. She has a six-week program that focuses on government, ethics, the open-meeting law, community vision, group decision-making and other knowledge that would be invaluable for public officials. She has classes, with a maximum of 24 students, in Carson City and Washoe County. She is in the third year of this program, which now is targeted toward people already serving on public boards. She hopes the program will evolve to include people who have an interest in running for public office, which is exactly the type of program we would like to see developed in Clark County.

Cooperative Extension in other states has a leadership program aimed directly at people who have achieved success in their community but are not serving in public capacities. The program in New York, for example, which draws upon the resources of Cornell University, is nationally known for being outstanding. The whole focus of the program is to encourage people to run for public office, and to give them the type of solid, nonpartisan grounding in public policy and decision-making they need to succeed as an elected county, city, school, town or village official.

We would like to see Cooperative Extension, through its land-grant university -- the University of Nevada, Reno -- develop such a program for Southern Nevada. This would not be the whole answer to weeding out candidates who run for personal gain, or who get into office and find themselves at the mercy of lobbyists and beholden to special interests because they lack understanding of their responsibility to the general public. But with dozens of graduates a year from a program such as this, voters would surely have more quality choices than have been available in past elections.

We've talked with extension officials who are enthusiastic about starting such a program here. They tell us that Cooperative Extension develops new programs by first establishing a need. We believe that would be the easy part.