LOOKING IN ON: CITY HALL

Dan Kulin

Sunday, July 30, 2006 | 7:39 a.m.

Early in every Las Vegas City Council meeting, council members approve a long list of routine items deemed unworthy of any special attention.

They are known as consent agenda items, and typically include approvals for weekend festivals, road or sewer contracts and new business licenses.

At almost every meeting, though, at least one of the 50 or so items on the consent agenda seems anything but routine.

Most land purchases or sales, for example, appear on the consent agenda, including May's $5 million purchase of the Monterey Villas apartments, one of the city's worst slums. A decision last month to allow top city staff to OK larger contracts without a council vote - raising the limit from $25,000 to $1 million - also initially appeared on the consent agenda, as did a plan to spend $7.5 million for architectural and other services for the preservation of the old downtown post office.

Although those items seem substantial enough - in terms of the dollar amount or policy involved - to have kept them off the consent agenda, city leaders and academics do not see anything nefarious in how they turned up there.

Las Vegas City Manager Doug Selby noted that the entire meeting agenda is made public days before each meeting and is available at City Hall and on the Internet, allowing time for people to decide whether some consent agenda items deserve more attention.

Council members, in fact, often pull items off the consent agenda to hold an open discussion on the matter. The Monterey Villas and contracts policy change were removed from the consent agenda after media inquiries.

"There are no hard and fast rules," Selby said about how he decides what ends up on the consent agenda. "It's just our perception of whether the council wants discussion on it."

Selby acknowledged that the Monterey Villas purchase was not routine, but he said sometimes with agendas being so long - most include more than 100 items - he doesn't catch everything.

"There's no effort to conceal anything," Selby said. "It's all right there in the open and on the Internet."

The consent agenda is intended to be a time saver, and nothing else, Selby said.

Lee Bernick, chairman of UNLV's Public Administration Department, said while "maybe sometimes things are put on the consent agenda (that) they would rather not debate in public," in general consent agendas are good for government.

"They save a lot of time," said Bernick, a former school board member from Greensboro, N.C. "They get rid of the noncontroversial things to get to what the public is interested in faster."

Councilman Larry Brown said the council acts as a "check and balance" against something nonroutine slipping through.

For the past month, Michael Hyams has managed to avoid being served with a lawsuit from the Las Vegas Centennial Commission over missing money from last year's centennial celebration.

The commission is essentially an extension of the city, and so the city attorney's office is handling the lawsuit, filed in June in District Court.

Hyams and his Merrimar Corp. are being sued for $20,000, money that city officials say Hyams was given to reserve television airtime to promote the city's 100th birthday celebration. The TV time was never bought, officials said.

The Merrimar partners include Hyams, Merrill Osmond, of the singing Osmond family, and Osmond's son-in-law, Kade Hallows.

In e-mails to the Sun, Hyams has denied any wrongdoing, without directly addressing what happened to the $20,000.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman turned 67 last week, and his presents were far from extravagant - especially for someone who rules from a throne (a wood and leather replica of a throne owned by Bavarian King Ludwick in the mid-19th century, given to the city by the World Market Center).

Goodman said he received a suit, a tie and a barbecue, plus a cake from Las Vegas' Freed's bakery. The cake came with a crown, albeit one made of sugar, which was apparently enough to satisfy Goodman's royal wishes.

Goodman will appear in an upcoming movie called "The Grand," which will star Woody Harrelson and Jason Alexander, plus an episode of the HBO hit "The Sopranos."