Columnist Jeff German: Past deal raises questions

Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005 | 9:42 a.m.

Jeff German's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday in the Sun. Rea lasvegassun.com.

It is an irony that is too sweet to ignore.

The county's effort to kill a tentative agreement giving police officers a 25.6 percent salary and benefits increase over the next four years has reminded me of another pay hike debate not too long ago.

This debate, however, was far less acrimonious because it was about giving raises to the county commissioners.

On July 1, 2003, after receiving authorization from the Legislature, the commissioners voted themselves an eerily similar 26.6 percent pay increase.

The raise was spread out over two years, and only those who had just been re-elected, four of the seven commissioners, were eligible to begin receiving the extra cash. The others had to wait until their re-elections.

"If it was good enough for the commissioners, why isn't it good enough for the cops?" asks Dave Kallas, executive director of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, which represents about 2,400 Metro officers.

One veteran commissioner who received the pay hike, Bruce Woodbury, thinks it's unfair to compare the two increases.

Until 2003, Woodbury says, the commissioners had gone without a raise for eight years. The cops get one every year under their collective bargaining agreement.

But Woodbury also believes the county will be taking too extreme a measure this morning if it removes Commissioner Tom Collins from the Metro Fiscal Affairs Committee solely because he supports the police raise. The plan is to replace Collins with Commission Chairman Rory Reid.

"It's obviously a radical move," Woodbury says. "I think it's unprecedented."

Without Collins, one of two county commissioners on the five-member panel, which oversees the police budget, the county should have a majority to shoot down the agreement when it comes up for a vote on Monday. That would likely lead to fact-finding and, if necessary, binding arbitration.

Woodbury isn't alone in worrying about the bad precedent that could be set today.

"Where do you draw the line the next time they're uncomfortable with the position of one of their colleagues?" Kallas asks. "They say they're supposed to be voting the will of the commission. But the people they truly represent are the voters."

Craig Walton, president of the Nevada Center for Public Ethics, a local government watchdog group, also has concerns.

"It's scary," Walton says. "Are we going to be removing people every time it looks like they're voting the wrong way?"

Walton says it's not unreasonable for the commission to expect its members to follow its will on such independent boards.

But if that's going to be the case, he adds, the commissioners should at least have a written policy in place for future guidance.

"Right now it looks like an arbitrary and Band-Aid approach," he says. "They should discuss this in the open and define the duties of someone who sits on these boards."

Collins, meanwhile, believes the county will be making an expensive mistake if it bounces him from Fiscal Affairs.

"I'm on this committee because I've got more experience in collective bargaining than any of them," he says. "The bottom line is that, if we go to arbitration, it's going to cost us much more.

"The arbitrator isn't going to be listening to the television stations and reading the newspapers. The arbitrator is going to be looking at what the other cops in the community make and how deficient health insurance is for the (Metro) cops."

In the end it's going to come down to what's fair for the officers.

If Collins is right, it will be the ultimate irony in this debate -- one the taxpayers won't appreciate.