Rogers not sold on Gibbons

Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2005 | 8:02 a.m.

Christina Littlefield

Gubernatorial candidate and Congressman Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., spent 45 minutes with university Chancellor Jim Rogers on Monday morning trying to convince the multimillionaire media mogul that he wasn't the "neoconservative" everyone made him out to be.

He may have been wasting his breath, as Rogers confessed on the phone that he "didn't even know what a neoconservative was until he (Gibbons) left and I looked it up."

But Rogers, always a straight-talker, said his fear of Gibbons has always been that he'll be cheap with education.

The chancellor, owner of Sunbelt Communications, described Monday's conversation as cordial and somewhat reassuring in that Gibbons said he would support state spending on projects such as an academic medical center.

But Rogers said he still isn't sure where Gibbons stands on the so-called taxpayer bill of rights, a proposed constitutional amendment that would cap the annual growth of government spending by a certain percentage. Rogers believes that would hurt education funding immensely and said he will watch it "like a hawk."

For now, his political action committee will remain out of action, Rogers said, until the gubernatorial candidates finalize their positions and there arises something worthy of combating.

In the meantime, Rogers began running 15-second public service announcements on his television stations throughout the state highlighting things he thinks the public should know about education. Those include the fact that the Community College of Southern Nevada is the third largest community college in the country and the fact that the Desert Research Institute brings in $45 million in research to the state each year.