Monday, Oct. 23, 2006 | 7:34 a.m.
Campaigning for the university Board of Regents often involves blank stares.
"Most people have no clue what it means" to be a regent, says Jefferson Lee, a candidate for the open seat in District 1.
They grasp it, he says, when he compares regents to Clark County School Board members - but that regents oversee higher education statewide.
The 13-member board oversees Nevada's two universities, one state college, four community colleges and the Desert Research Institute. The Nevada System of Higher Education enrolls more than 100,000 students and has an operating budget of $1.6 billion.
Two seats in Clark County are up for election - with Lee fighting Cedric Crear for retiring Regent Linda Howard's open seat representing North Las Vegas, and incumbent Regent Mark Alden seeking re-election against competitor Troy Wade in Henderson.
Regents serve six-year terms and are paid $80 per meeting.
Lee and Crear attended college on tennis scholarships.
Lee, 42, went from Huntington, Ind., to Palm Beach Atlantic College in Florida, earning a bachelor's degree in clinical psychology. Crear, 37 and a Las Vegas native, earned a bachelor's degree in microbiology at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
Both candidates then went into fields unrelated to their degrees.
Lee worked a series of jobs in law enforcement, including juvenile corrections and security work, then construction, and for the last decade, he was an airline ground operations supervisor. A job with Delta brought him to Las Vegas six years ago. He recently quit because of management disputes and is looking to work in the gaming industry.
Lee has lost three campaigns for elected office, all against incumbents. Locally, he ran for Clark County School Board in 2004 and Las Vegas City Council in 2003. He says he'll run for office again if he loses, because he likes to "keep his hand in politics" and believes in civic service.
If elected, Lee wants to start a program in which community college students mentor high school students to promote their interest in college. He also wants to clean up problems at UNLV, such as the cheating scandal at the "orthopedic school." (It was at the School of Dental Medicine.)
After deciding he didn't want to be a doctor like his father, Crear entered a management training program at Station Casinos and was promoted to director of marketing before leaving the company. Following a failed run for the state Senate in 2004, Crear opened his own advertising agency, Crear Creative.
Crear, if elected, plans to lobby the Legislature to endow the Millennium Scholarship program to help Nevada students pay for college - a program that is currently funded with tobacco settlement money - and to address funding inequities at the Community College of Southern Nevada.
Crear received a $2,500 campaign donation from the company of Chancellor Jim Rogers, the father of Crear's childhood friend. Lee said the donation was a conflict of interest because if Crear is elected, he would be one of Rogers' bosses.
Rogers' company gave $5,000 to Alden - the incumbent in District 4 - but he encouraged Alden's competitor - old friend and Nevada Test Site administrator Troy Wade - to run for the office as well.
Wade had persuaded Rogers to donate $3 million to his Atomic History Museum project in honor of Rogers' father, Frank, who was instrumental in creating the Test Site.
Alden, 62, has been a CPA for more than 30 years with a bachelor's degree in accounting from UNR. First elected to the Board of Regents in 1994, Alden calls himself the "senior regent from the South." Before almost every vote he announces that he has "carefully read all of the agenda materials," and even fellow regents say he is one of the few who do.
Currently chairman of the budget and finance committee, Alden casts himself as the board watchdog. Indeed, when regents in 2003 split in firing the CCSN president, Alden filed open meeting law complaints against his own board.
Alden has been prone to outbursts while serving on the board. In December, for instance, he resigned from his committee assignments after remarking that he didn't believe he was part of the "in" club of the board. He withdrew his resignation 48 hours later.
Alden's top priorities as a regent are to promote Nevada State College as a less expensive way of training professionals and for the state's universities to become more selective. He also wants CCSN to offer more technical training.
Wade came to Las Vegas in 1958 to work as a miner at the Nevada Test Site. He worked his way up to assistant secretary of defense programs for the Energy Department, overseeing a $7 billion budget, 50,000 people and three national laboratories.
Wade, 72, never finished his mechanical engineering degree at the University of Colorado. But with the experience he gained at the Test Site, he has worked as a university consultant and a visiting professor at George Washington University. He chairs the Nevada Alliance for Defense, Energy and Business, a trade group linking the Test Site and Yucca Mountain to area businesses, and is chairman of the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation.
If elected, Wade wants to help UNLV and UNR advance their research efforts and for the colleges to do more planning in order to meet the state's needs.
"My big concern is the gap between the university system and the needs of the students of the community," Wade said.
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