Columnist Jeff German: Mandalay’s Sloan charts new course

Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2005 | 11:02 a.m.

Technically, you could call Mike Sloan a casualty of the mega-merger between MGM-Mirage and Mandalay Resort Group.

He's among the senior Mandalay executives leaving to pursue other interests.

But Sloan, one of the casino industry's premier political operatives and fund-raisers for the past 20 years, isn't fading away from the political scene.

Sloan says he plans to do some consulting for the casino industry and other clients.

"I'm not going to disappear," he says. "I still intend to be active doing what I've done all my political life."

For most of his political life, Sloan has been regarded as a staunch Democratic supporter, joined at the hip with the likes of Sen. Harry Reid, the Senate's new minority leader.

But in recent years, with Republicans controlling Congress, Sloan has also found himself helping Republicans raise money.

His former law partner, gaming attorney Frank Schreck, credits Sloan with spreading the industry's influence in Washington through his prolific fund raising.

"I don't know of anybody who has the same skill set of being able to understand politics as well as him," Schreck says. "He sees issues very clearly."

He's also likely to see a lot of business as a free agent.

Sloan says he's still looking for an office, but he's already lined up some high-powered clients whose names he's not ready to disclose.

Harrah's Entertainment -- which will become the world's largest gaming company when its mega-merger with Caesars Entertainment wins regulatory approval -- is at least keeping up the perception that it's concerned about helping addicted gamblers.

In its latest quarterly newsletter, the National Center for Responsible Gaming (NCRG) in Washington says Harrah's Senior Vice President Jan Laverty Jones has joined its executive board.

The NCRG is an attempt by the Washington-based American Gaming Association to show the country that the industry is dedicated to funding problem gambling research.

We'll know how serious Harrah's really is about wanting to take care of this problem when it writes its first check to a fund in Nevada to treat addicted gamblers.

Hopefully, that will happen this year -- on the day the governor signs into law a bill creating the fund.

After all of the anti-Yucca Mountain rhetoric over the years, Attorney General Brian Sandoval may have summed up Nevada's staunch opposition the best this week.

In one long breath, Sandoval told the Senate Finance Committee Monday why Yucca Mountain, 90 miles from Las Vegas, is the worst place in the country to store the nation's deadly nuclear waste.

The location, he said, is "literally a volcano that sits on an earthquake fault, above an aquifer, next to the Nevada Test Site, next to one of the nation's largest organic farms, next to the state's largest dairy, adjacent to ... the United States' fastest-growing metropolitan area, next to one of the busiest Air Force bases in the country."

That says it all.