Columnist John Ralston: Orwellian business as usual at City Hall

John Ralston

Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2005 | 10:01 a.m.

Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face with Jon Ralston on Las Vegas ONE and also publishes the daily e-mail newsletter RalstonFlash.com. His column for the Las Vegas Sun appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997 or through e-mail at ralston@vegas.com.

All deals with Las Vegas are equal. But some are more equal than others.

Whether the latest deal is Waltersgate, where crimes of the past are now visiting the present council, or whether this is a routine tale of juice in Las Vegas, where nobody plays the game better than developer Billy Walters, the culture of corruption remains imbued on Stewart Avenue.

The names of the various pigs and men may change -- or not. But it's often hard to tell who are the masters and who are the servants. What is immutable, though, is the depraved indifference to taxpayers, evident in last week's vote to give Walters carte blanche to make a fortune on a parcel near the city's wastewater treatment plant.

This stretches back many years from the Good Old Boys Inc. land deal of a decade and a half ago, where a mayor and city manager did business with city supplicants; to a time a few years back when the planning director was in business with a prominent developer; to today, where mayoral sons are welcomed to lobby before the council, to do business with a councilman who solicits opportunities from city-regulated companies and to invest in downtown land.

It is all insidious and sleazy. And the language used by the man who has presided over the latest corrupt era, Mayor Oscar Goodman, is nothing short of Orwellian.

Confronted with evidence of questionable behavior eight years ago by the same public works director, Dick Goecke, who recommended the current deal -- evidence some of the council members and high-level staffers had seen long before last week's vote -- Goodman brushed it off and said of the Jan Jones era: "Where there's smoke, there's fire, and it doesn't pass the smell test ... The question is whether a prior administration and council did their job."

No, the much more pressing question is whether the current administration and council did job in charging Walters only $7.2 million to have a deed restriction lifted and thus enabling him to develop the parcel, now worth as much as $56 million, as a residential enclave.

As Jones pointed out during an interview Tuesday on "Face to Face," Walters surely would have paid much more for the chance to develop that land with housing. And why wouldn't the city have made Walters responsible for mitigating any odor problems for houses that will be adjacent to a wastewater treatment plant? The minimum cost will be $5 million and it could be much more, making the deal a net loss for taxpayers. This does not, to quote Goodman, pass the smell test.

Jones also pointed to an arbitrary method the city used to value the land -- why do appraisals if you are going to use a multiplier that makes the deal much more favorable to the developer?

Sure, Jones' motivations can be questioned. She either should have known more or did know more when Walters got his first deal, which city memos and Metro assert were unethically and perhaps criminally helped along by Goecke.

Yes, sour grapes make a fine whine. But Jones' points surely will be echoed by anyone with common sense.

Ultimately, the questions of Waltersgate become very familiar: What did they know and when did they know it? Why was all of this information suppressed, covered up or ignored? Why was it not even mentioned before the vote?

Whether anything criminal occurred -- and I don't see it now -- this is all about the Goodman Era, where, in his words, the city should do "anything that's legal" and it is akin to "playing Monopoly with real money." And guess whose money? Yes, it's an animal farm down on Stewart Avenue. But the lambs being led to slaughter are the taxpayers.