CAMPAIGN AD REALITY CHECK

Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2006 | 7:21 a.m.

What the ad says

Announcer: While Mayor Jim Gibson was paid more than half a million dollars as CEO of the monorail, the wheels came off and it's costing us millions. We can't let him do to Nevada what he did to the monorail. He got the money and we got taken for a ride.

What the ad's trying to do

This 15-second spot has a simple message for voters: Gibson took half a million bucks and taxpayers got the shaft.

What's accurate

The mayor did not make $500,000 as the monorail's CEO. But the Titus camp added up perks and extras to arrive at that figure.

It's hard to make a direct connection between taxpayers and the monorail because the project is privately funded. But public money is involved. The monorail got built using the state's bonding authority and won state and county tax breaks.

Assessor Mark Schofield says the tax breaks for the monorail's stations alone - which are exempt from property tax - cost taxpayers $3 million a year in lost revenue.

Saying the wheels came off is a clever play on words. Not only have parts fallen off the train, the ridership numbers have consistently been below projections, and the trains are still running in the red.

What's wrong or misleading

It is a tad unfair to hold Gibson responsible for the monorail's troubles and to say this is how he would run the state. The monorail was conceived and erected long before Gibson became CEO in January 2004. And questions about its viability and the juice factors to cut costs came up long before he took over for the late Bob Broadbent.

But Gibson had been a board member for some time before he became CEO, a much more lucrative position. And many of the system's more embarrassing gaffes occurred after he took over. Gibson tries to portray himself as Mr. Fix-It, as if he righted the monorail and put it on course. But when he left a year ago, it appeared as if he was either bailing out or being forced out to make way for new leadership.