Columnist Jeff German: The anger directed toward the county and the R-J over the failed police deal

Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2005 | 8:58 a.m.

Jeff German's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday in the Sun. He ' om.

None of the key players came away smiling from Monday's Metro Fiscal Affairs Committee meeting.

With a new campaign season approaching, the panel's 3-2 vote rejecting a four-year contract for police officers is stirring up the kind of political unrest we haven't seen in Southern Nevada for a long time.

"This is horrible for the entire community," said Dave Kallas, executive director of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, the union that represents the cops. "Now we have officers out there who should be focusing on their job worrying about whether they'll be able to pay their medical bills."

Nobody was more visibly upset than Sheriff Bill Young -- who had pleaded passionately with the committee to approve the contract, which guaranteed the cops a 25.6 percent hike in wages and benefits over the next four years.

"I will never stop fighting for a pay raise for my officers," Young told me, as he angrily left the meeting.

Young said the contract battle has strained his relationship with the county -- which, with the help of some unprecedented back-door politics, mustered up the votes on Fiscal Affairs to kill the deal.

Though the popular sheriff wouldn't say who specifically in the county has drawn his wrath, he suggested that he would be limiting his dealings with the manager's office in the future.

Young has told those around him that he believes County Manager Thom Reilly went behind his back to the fiscally conservative Las Vegas Review-Journal last month (while the sheriff was out of town on vacation and unable to respond) to rally opposition against the contract.

The R-J, which took delight in editorializing against the pay raise and skewing news stories against it, as well, received some well-deserved heat for its efforts from Kallas at Monday's meeting.

At one point Kallas referred to the R-J as the "county's newsletter," and another time he called it the "local version of the National Enquirer."

Even one of the Fiscal Affairs Committee members joined the bashing.

Without naming the newspaper, Las Vegas Councilman Larry Brown who, along with fellow Councilman Gary Reese, voted for the contract, said he was amazed at the amount of "misinformation" that had been disseminated in an effort to sway Monday's vote.

Kallas, meanwhile, said the PPA, traditionally a politically active union, intends to keep up the fight.

"We've just begun to educate people on what's really occurring here," he said.

PPA lawyers are preparing to file separate complaints with the state against the county, stemming from the unprecedented Fiscal Affairs ouster of County Commissioner Tom Collins, who supported the police agreement. Collins could only watch the vote from the audience Monday with some 150 mostly off-duty cops.

One PPA complaint, I'm told, will accuse the County Commission of violating the state's open meeting law and the other of interfering with the collective bargaining process.

Both complaints, along with the now-looming fact-finding and binding arbitration process, have potential to fan the flame of political discontent within the valley into the 2006 campaign season when several county commissioners are up for re-election.

And, as Kallas suggested, it could get ugly.

"As police officers," he said, "we are charged with enforcing the law every day. When we see somebody who breaks the law, it's our job to make sure they're held accountable."