Monday, Dec. 10, 2007 | 7:06 a.m.
Clark County Commissioners Chip Maxfield and Bruce Woodbury are calling for formal guidelines regarding how commissioners can spend their discretionary office funds.
In the meantime, Commissioner Susan Brager plans to reimburse the county for most of her spending.
Those developments come after a Sun story last month highlighting how commissioners spend the $15,000 they get each fiscal year showed that the three commissioners who took office this year were significantly outspending their colleagues.
Since July 2006 most commissioners spent only $1,000 to $2,000 on items such as county cell phones, travel and official portraits.
However, Commissioner Lawrence Weekly, who took office in March, spent more than $22,000 on things such as a senior luau, a Mother's Day celebration, pool passes and Pop Warner football uniforms.
Weekly defended the spending as "constituent outreach" and said it was his way of giving back to the community. Taxpayer advocates, however, questioned whether such spending might benefit a commissioner's political campaign more than county residents.
Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani, who took office in January, also used significantly more of her office's discretionary fund than the commission's veteran members, spending $8,700 on things such as Halloween parties at community centers and sending a youth dance team to Disneyland for a national competition.
Brager, who also took office in January, spent about $2,200 on formal portraits, a cell phone and two luncheons for town board members.
The spending angered some county residents and Carole Vilardo, president of the Nevada Taxpayers Association, called for a formal policy on how the money can be used. There is no policy now.
That could be changing, though.
Maxfield asked county staff last week to look into guidelines for how the money can be used.
"If we don't have a formal policy, maybe we should, to make sure we are being fiscally responsible with the taxpayers' money and to make sure we are using it for the benefit of the community at large," he said.
Former Commissioner Myrna Williams, who lost to Giunchigliani in a tough primary battle last year, once suggested that the county provide scholarships for pool passes at the Cambridge Recreation Center, Maxfield said. However, other commissioners didn't think it was an appropriate use of county money, so Williams used her sway as a commissioner to raise money from the private sector to support the scholarships, Maxfield said.
"There are a lot of letters I get about worthy needs, but if I tried to meet all of them and all seven of us did that, it would drain the county budget pretty fast," he said.
Vilardo said she hopes commissioners step up and do what's right.
"There obviously are legitimate uses for having discretionary funds," she said. "But to make sure there is no appearance of a misuse of the funds, I think the public has to have some guidelines they can look at and know the funds are being spent according to those adopted policy guidelines."
Such guidelines should be adopted at a public meeting so the community can provide input, she said.
Brager, meanwhile, said last week that she plans to reimburse the county for $1,729 that she spent on a cell phone and formal portraits. She'll use campaign money to do so, she said.
She said she didn't realize how much the portraits cost until the Sun requested the information.
"The pictures totally offended me," she said. "I am going to reimburse the whole dollar amount."
Giunchigliani said she thinks her constituents agree with her spending choices, but added that she supports looking into a more formal policy.
"It should be dedicated solely to constituent needs," she said. "If there is a way to craft that, I think that is appropriate."
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