Rogers dares utter dreaded ‘income tax’

Joe Schoenmann and Ed Koch

Thursday, April 26, 2007 | 7:02 a.m.

CARSON CITY - University Chancellor Jim Rogers has uttered the "T" word, and Nevada may never be the same.

For perhaps the first time in state history, a leading public official has called for the state to impose personal and corporate income taxes.

"We have no corporate income tax, as such," Rogers said in an interview Wednesday. "We have no individual income tax ... So everybody in the state is paying no taxes. And it just doesn't work."

Rogers said he doubted his comments would make an impression with state lawmakers.

"It's going to have to damn-near be a tragedy for anything to change," he said. "The fire rules don't get made till the building burns down."

Rogers' comments come at a critical time for the university system. The system has launched initiatives to upgrade academics and research capabilities. Rogers' pet project is the consolidation and expansion of the state's health science system.

Those undertakings require major infusions of state money when revenue projections are falling below expected levels.

While offering $95 million to pay for capital improvements in the health science system, Gov. Jim Gibbons found no money to expand medical education and nursing programs housed in the new facilities. Rogers had sought $73 million to improve medical education but pared it to $56 million at legislators' requests.

Rogers first issued his call for the new taxes Tuesday on the Nevada Public Radio show "State of Nevada." His comments circulated over the Internet, although by Wednesday afternoon, few state legislators were aware.

"Nobody wants to get in the middle of this thing," Rogers said in a coffee shop across the street from the Capitol.

As chancellor, Rogers also has tried to persuade Nevadans to donate to higher education, but he remains frustrated by the response.

He said he has talked to billionaires in town about giving, and nothing is more frustrating than when "I get 15 excuses why they can't. We have too many damn people who've made an awful lot of money here and don't want to share it."

Rogers himself has made a fortune through his majority ownership of Sunbelt Communications, which operates television stations in the West, including KVBC in Las Vegas. Over the years, he has given well over $200 million to various universities, including UNLV, and charities.

Rogers said on the radio show that he would gladly pay corporate and state income taxes.

"Everyone wants to pick on the gaming people every time that there's a taxing issue," he said. "But I think the corporate tax needs to be spread among all of the companies.

"We have no problem, our company would have no problem, of paying a reasonable corporate income tax ... I personally would have no problem paying a higher income tax" than people who earn less, he said.

The prospect that Rogers will get his wish appears faint. Nevadans voted in landslides in 1988 and 1990 in favor of Question 9 to write a ban on personal income tax into the state Constitution.

"Historically, in Nevada, income tax proposals have been poison," said Guy Rocha, the state archivist. "He is going after the sacred cow. The last place Chancellor Rogers is likely to find additional revenues is in a state income tax."

The Legislature has the power to amend the Constitution by vote in two successive sessions, although doing so could mean political suicide. Voters could amend the Constitution by passing a ballot issue in two elections.

But as Nevada historian Michael Green said, the "no tax" mantra is embedded in the state's psyche.

In 1935, after Hoover Dam was built and casino gambling legalized, Gov. Richard Kirman, a conservative Democrat and banker by profession, championed the "One Sound State" taxation initiative.

To attract investment and wealthy residents, Kirman made it public policy that Nevada would have no state income tax or sales tax. Nevada was marketed as the "cyclone cellar to the tax weary," Rocha said.

Kirman was followed into the Governor's Mansion by fellow conservative Democrats Ted Carville and Vail Pittman and Republican Charles Russell, who firmly entrenched the no-income-tax policy and minimized tax overhead, Rocha says.

The state added a gaming tax in 1947 and a sales tax in the 1950s to support infrastructure and education.

Carole Vilardo, president of the Nevada Taxpayers Association, said Wednesday that she strongly doubts voters would change the constitutional prohibition passed about two decades ago. "The odds of repealing the existing prohibition are slim to none," she said.

Reporter Christina Littlefield in Carson City and librarian Rebecca Clifford contributed to this story.