LOOKING IN ON: CARSON CITY

Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2006 | 7:14 a.m.

CARSON CITY - A $40 million tax refund approved by the state for Southern California Edison is on hold.

The Nevada Supreme Court last week agreed to consider the appeal of Attorney General George Chanos that the Nevada Tax Commission violated the open meeting law in awarding the refund.

Dino Dicianno, executive director of the tax commission, said the refund will not be made until the Supreme Court rules. That decision is expected early next year.

Dicianno told the Legislative Interim Finance Commission that Nevada Power Co. and Sierra Pacific Power Co. have filed an appeal, also seeking a refund of sales tax on coal mined in Utah and used at the Valmy power plant in Northern Nevada.

The tax commission, in a closed meeting in May 2005, voted to refund the sales and use taxes paid on coal from Arizona that was shipped from 2001 to 2003 to the Mohave Power Generating Plant near Laughlin. Chanos said his appeal is not about the $40 million but rather about the right of Nevadans to know what the tax commission is doing.

"This is about Nevada's open meeting law," said Chanos, who will leave office Jan. 1.

From 1997 to 2005, the commission met in private to consider cases when asked by companies or individuals involved, an arrangement that conflicts with the state's open meeting law.

It will be up to the high court to decide whether individuals' and companies' preference to have their tax cases heard in private is a permissible exception to the open meeting law, or whether those matters, too, must be reviewed in public sessions.

While this month's elections gave the national Democratic Party reason to celebrate, the Independent American Party in Nevada also came away a winner, with two of its candidates winning partisan races for the first time since the party began running candidates in 1970.

Cel Ochoa won the contest for constable in Searchlight, defeating Republican Diane Kendall. Jackie Berg was elected clerk-treasurer in Eureka County, beating Republican Karen LaBarry and Libertarian Elizabeth Smith.

Janine Hansen, the IAP's executive director, said the party's previous triumph was Bill Wilkerson's 2004 election to the Elko County School Board in a nonpartisan race.

The party also gathered enough overall votes on Nov. 7 to qualify for the ballot in 2008, Hansen said. That requires a party to win more than 1 percent of the vote in a statewide race.

Hansen, a candidate for secretary of state, captured 6.7 percent of the vote in that race and other candidates also won more than the required 1 percent.

A technician at the state's mental hospital in Las Vegas has been fired for punching an aggressive patient thought to be wielding a knife.

And a correctional officer is going to serve a 20-day suspension for inadvertently allowing an inmate to hide in the back of his vehicle and escape from a prison in Carson City.

In the case of the mental patient, State Hearing Officer Daniel Hussey upheld the dismissal of Marlon Hernandez.

Last May a patient at the Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health Service with a history of violence became angry, broke a plastic piece off a scale and waved it like a knife.

After Hernandez, a mental health technician, forced the patient to the ground, other staff members helped subdue the man.

When the patient refused to put down the plastic item and threatened to kill him, Hernandez allegedly hit him from one to three times, according to other staffers' testimony.

Hernandez claimed he did not strike the patient, saying that when he tried to grab the weapon, the staff may have mistakenly thought he was hitting him.

In the prison case, George Ramm, a driver-warehouse worker, left a prison industries truck unattended inside the Northern Nevada Correctional Center while he went to the restroom.

In his absence, inmate Jody Thompson, serving a term for a Clark County robbery, sneaked into the back of the truck and escaped when Ramm later made a stop in rural Nevada. Thompson was later captured in Las Vegas.

State Hearing Officer Bill Kockenmeister ruled that "significant security violations" led to the escape.