Thursday, Sept. 2, 2004 | 11:06 a.m.
The Senate 6 race, along with debates for Senate Districts 1, 4 and 5, will ' tonight at 9 on KLVX Channel 10.
Tax issues were front and center Wednesday in two heated Republican primary debates.
The two candidates in Senate District 5 have been flooding constituent mailboxes with jabs at each other, but they met for the first time in person Wednesday to appear on "Face to Face With Jon Ralston."
A third-party group funded largely by the gaming industry has made its presence felt in a big way, sending out one mail piece after another and running television ads that call Sen. Ann O'Connell, R-Las Vegas, "the politician taxpayers can't afford."
The group cites a bill O'Connell co-sponsored that would have raised service and property taxes by an estimated $1.6 billion over a two-year budget.
O'Connell's challenger, Republican Joe Heck, said he hasn't cooperated with the Citizens for Fair Taxation.
"I have no knowledge of who that third-party campaign is being waged by and for," he said in the debate.
Still, Citizens for Fair Taxation has recently put out two mail pieces that don't just attack O'Connell -- they advocate for Heck and show posed pictures of him.
Heck said Wednesday he doesn't think O'Connell is a tax-and-spender. And he said he is not a puppet for the gaming industry, as O'Connell's campaign mail pieces have said.
More than 70 percent of his contributions come from family, friends and other non-gaming interests, he said.
O'Connell, meanwhile, continued to defend her co-sponsorship of the tax bill, saying she and others wanted to study other tax proposals beside the gross-receipts proposal put out by the governor's tax force and supported by the gaming industry.
"The bill was never intended to do anything but give an alternative to the only bill we had on the table," she said.
When Ralston said the move appeared to be a political game, O'Connell said, "I would have done the same thing if the circumstances were the same."
But, she said, "Looking in hindsight, it was a mistake."
Heck called last year's budget shortfall a "blip" and said he doesn't think taxes should have been raised so much, especially since the state now has a surplus.
"The Legislature and the government is just like any other business," Heck said. "There's always some waste to be cut."
O'Connell promised to propose tax cuts if she returns to Carson City. And she said she would push for a cap on property taxes that might align with a proposed 6 percent cap supported by Clark County Assessor Mark Schofield.
In a debate sponsored by KLVX Channel 10, Sen. Ray Rawson, R-Las Vegas, went on the offensive against Assemblyman Bob Beers, R-Las Vegas, who is challenging him in Senate District 6.
Rawson asked Beers why he has given $3,000 in donations to the ACLU of Nevada. The ACLU has sued the Boy Scouts and supported "homosexual values," Rawson said.
"When we contribute to an organization like that, they use that money to support their goals," Rawson said.
Beers said he made the contribution after the nonprofit group defended him when he was fined $5,000 for putting out a mail piece. That fine was later revoked, thanks to the ACLU's legal support, Beers said.
Rawson also questioned a Beers vote to raise the Legislature's salaries by 15 percent, saying it was "preposterous" to raise salaries for citizen lawmakers when the Legislature was pondering huge tax increases.
Beers, who has hinged his campaign on his work to stop tax increases last year, said he tried to kill a bill that would pay a commission to study pay increases but lost his battle in a committee.
Instead, he said, he proposed putting that money toward a pay hike and close the issue.
Beers continued to assail Rawson for voting for tax increases, including last year's $833 million increase, which he called "the most extreme tax-and-spend hike in America."
He questioned a comment Rawson made to him in a previous debate when Rawson said the only reason he is running again is because Beers would cut funds for dental school programs. Rawson recently retired as a dental professor at the Community College of Southern Nevada.
"There was a time when I thought Bob Beers would be a natural heir to my seat," Rawson said.
But Rawson said Beers' behavior in the last session was divisive.
"He holds himself out to be a leader against taxes, but it's all or nothing essentially for Bob," Rawson said. "It's 'my way or the highway.' "
Beers criticized Rawson for not signing on to a lawsuit that challenged a Nevada Supreme Court decision that said the Legislature could pass a tax increase without a two-thirds majority, as is mandated in the state constitution, because school funding was being held up.
Rawson said he didn't support the lawsuit because Republican leadership already had decided not to raise taxes unless they could secure a two-thirds majority, which they did.
But Beers said it was up to Republicans to uphold the two-thirds requirement.
"To me, this gets to a core Republican value," he said.
Early voting continues through Friday, and the primary election will be held Tuesday.
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