Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2005 | 8:02 a.m.
The 40-minute spectacle that played out Tuesday at the Grand Central Parkway theater of the absurd, complete with pumpkin pies and patronizing Clark County commissioners, was a Kabuki-like charade.
The county commissioners may have been talking about a police contract and manipulating a hoary process to scuttle it. But the discussion behind the discussion was much more elemental and far-reaching. It was about power, about money and about control.
That is, who will have the power to control Metro's budget, who will have the money to fund government services and who will control the county. This is not just about this Metro contract, but the next one; this is not just about this collective bargaining event, but the next one.
This is about laying down the law by changing the rules. It was ruthless and efficient -- no doubt Harry Reid, the king of such tactics, was proud of his little prince, Commission Chairman Rory Reid.
As they voted to boot Tom Collins from Metro Fiscal Affairs, an anachronistic body that usually rubber-stamps police raises, the commissioners sounded like Marc Antony at Caesar's funeral. They respect Collins, they said, without a hint of respect. Then all six voted to deliver quite the unkind cut -- putting Reid the Younger in Collins' place on the fiscal panel to create a presumed three votes to kill the contract next week.
For his part, Collins was a tragicomic figure as he held up pumpkin pastries to try to demonstrate that Young should be able to bake his pie and cut it up, too. "That's his job, not our job," the plain-spoken cowboy declared, feeling a little like Gary Cooper in "High Noon" but not quite so lucky. Sorry, pardner, but a 6-1 vote to yank you from an appointment is not a sign they care what you think.
The hearing was the culmination of weeks of a superb spin campaign by the county with Manager Thom Reilly acting as an ex-officio member of the Review-Journal editorial board -- the paper helped immeasurably -- and he is surely being seen as the Iago of the piece by Young as commissioners strangled the contract.
Reilly, as activist a manager as any in the valley's history, has made a cause out of reducing government salaries and he clearly has the support of his board -- or at least a majority -- for this crusade. Other government contracts now could be held to similar scrutiny, and other unions will have to be much more aggressive.
Young and the police union never really made their case that Metro has the lowest paid workforce of any law enforcement agency here or that its health benefits are the lowest, too. In fact, the county, by disingenuously brandishing a 17 percent increase (pay only) for firefighters over four years (as opposed to 26 percent for Metro -- pay and insurance benefits) and by creating fears about the hiring of new officers, dominated the playing field. It was no contest.
But the numbing numbers aside, this was as much about a broken process as anything. Commissioner Lynette Boggs McDonald pointed out that the county funds 70 percent of the police budget and has 40 percent of Fiscal Affairs' votes. And why do we need Fiscal Affairs, no matter how it is constituted?
Why not, as some mentioned, just let the sheriff control his own money and decide how to allocate it?
Commissioner Bruce Woodbury brought up another subtext here and that is the impact on local governments of two initiatives that could dramatically change the state and the valley -- the Prop 13 rollback and the Tax and Spending Control for Nevada initiative. The veteran commissioner pointed out how governments have to prepare for a brave new Nevada world where hundreds of millions in anticipated revenue could be lost.
"The same old way of doing things has to change," Boggs McDonald intoned.
On Tuesday, it did.
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