Columnist Jeff German: Amodei’s judgment questioned

Wednesday, June 1, 2005 | 11:03 a.m.

If the 11th-hour wheeling and dealing over neighborhood casinos at the Legislature has taught us anything, it's that lawmakers are practicing two sets of ethical standards.

There's the do-the-right-thing standard followed by Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, who abstained from voting on the neighborhood casino bill Friday night because his law firm lobbied for it.

And there's the do-what's-best-for-me standard practiced by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Mark Amodei, who voted for the measure even though his law firm also lobbied for it.

The measure in question is Assembly Bill 485, which passed the Senate Friday with an amendment that hurts the ability of residents to fight the spread of neighborhood casinos.

AB485 is being pushed by gaming giants Station Casinos and Boyd Gaming, which are no strangers to neighborhood casino fights, and Focus Property Group, an aggressive developer of master-planned communities. If this measure gets through both houses, it will allow future casinos to be built only in master-planned communities.

As I reported Friday, Amodei's role in pushing the bill through the Legislature has raised plenty of ethical concerns.

Last month his Judiciary Committee voted 6-1 (with Amodei in the majority) to send AB485 to the Senate floor with an amendment that eliminated the state appeal process for neighborhood casino projects.

Amodei cast his vote after Mark Fiorentino, his law partner in the high-powered firm of Kummer, Kaempfer, Bonner & Renshaw, testified in favor of the amendment. Fiorentino, a registered lobbyist, represents Boyd Gaming and Focus Property Group.

Now, it turns out, that if it weren't for Amodei the bill, in its current form, would have died on the floor of the Senate.

Not only did Amodei vote for AB485, but he ended up becoming the 11th, or majority, vote that allowed the measure to move back to the Assembly for final approval there.

The bill passed with a new amendment that brought back the appeal process, but basically neutered it. The new wording changes the process from a special state panel that had real power to overturn locally approved casino projects to an arbitrator who has little authority to reject the projects on their merits.

"This does nothing to help the citizens," says Lisa Mayo-DeRiso, an anti-neighborhood casino activist. "It's just a bunch of words on a piece of paper."

Amodei insists that he sought the advice of the Legislature's legal counsel before he voted and was told that he didn't have a conflict of interest.

But Craig Walton, emeritus professor of ethics at UNLV, isn't so sure about that.

"This makes me very uneasy," Walton says. "To a fair-minded outsider, that can't look like independence of judgment."

While Raggio was "cautious and prudent," Walton adds, Amodei was careless and needlessly exposed himself to criticism."

The sad thing, however, is that the public may end up suffering the most from Amodei's questionable judgment.

"In the absence of hearing his reasons for voting," Walton says, "it looks as if he went with his commitment to his firm over the public's interests."