Brian Greenspun on growing up and paying our public servants

Sunday, Feb. 4, 2007 | 7:46 a.m.

What do we want to be when we grow up?

As parents, we ask our children and their friends that question often - not that we want to pin them down at an early age, but rather so that they can pin themselves down long enough to focus on what their futures might look like.

The same holds true for young cities like Las Vegas. People have been asking that question for as long as I can remember - what does Las Vegas want to be when it grows up? - and as far as I know, we are still looking for the answer.

The good news is that in some areas of community development - our tourism industry, for example - the answer is constantly changing, so we can assume the correct answer is an industry never too complacent to change or too afraid to continue the course. In most cases, the answer to the industry question has been driven by market forces and consumer demand.

In the affairs of state, though, where consumer demand - that should be read as the public's best interests - should be paramount, what we want to be and what we have become can be vastly different things.

I am thinking specifically about this latest flap in the Clark County Commission in which a vote taken last month on a contract at University Medical Center is on the agenda for a new vote.

Why? Because one of the commissioners voted for the item when it appears clear that she should have recused herself because of a potential conflict of interest.

While this matter - the commissioner was Yvonne Atkinson Gates - is on the top of my mind, it is only illustrative of what the problem is. Believe me, I can point to dozens of conflict issues - most of them far worse in the public's perception - that arise every month in which commissioners and city council members should not involve themselves but, for a variety of reasons, do.

So, what do grown-up cities do when it comes to conflicts of interest? Most of them have very strict conflict rules that the public and the elected officials have learned to live with in the conduct of the community's business. We have similar rules and we are learning to live with and up to them as time goes by.

The mistakes we make in enforcement and, for the most part, interpreting them is part of the maturation process. The problem, though, arises when the public perception is that elected folks are dishonest when such matters are brought to their attention rather than what is really happening - they just didn't know, didn't care or didn't pay attention.

None of those are excuses but, by the same token, they should not be contributors to the voters' ofttimes misperceptions of official honesty.

So, here's a thought. It is not new. It has been shot down every decade for the past 40 years or so that I can remember. But, maybe, it is valid today now that we are really growing up into the kind of city that we would all like to be a model for the rest of the country.

We have always prided ourselves on our ability to attract mostly well-meaning public servants who work at those jobs on a part-time basis. That allows us to live a charade that lets us think we have citizen commissioners who have real jobs in our community. So we pay them far less for what would be full-time public office commitments in others cities our size.

The fact is that our public servants - commissioners or councilmen - work full-time hours at their elected positions because that is what the jobs require. On top of that they have other jobs that help them make the kind of living that the American Dream promises.

And therein lies the danger and the difficulty. Therein lies the reason for conflict-of-interest laws and the reasons for public discouragement every time an elected official seemingly runs afoul of them.

So why not do what many grown-up cities do? Spend the money it takes to hire these commissioners on a full-time basis. Don't let them have outside employment and you avoid the need for almost all of the conflict-of-interest laws on the books.

To do this, though, we have to be willing to pay these people handsomely. After all, in almost all cases they are responsible for the care and feeding, policy-making and execution of those policies for hundreds of thousands of citizens and hundreds of millions - and even billions - of taxpayer dollars. Whatever we pay in salary and benefits pales in comparison to the cost of enforcement of conflict laws that are always being redefined and, more importantly, creating a loss of voter confidence in the government's ability to act in the public interest.

Take the personal financial needs out of the equation and you have taken a huge potential for problems, hard feelings, misunderstandings and whatever else happens short of law-breaking. It may be that we have been penny-wise and pound-foolish for far too long.

We are big enough and wealthy enough as a community to afford to pay people for doing this hard work. The question remains: Are we mature enough to be able to make such a change? Put another way, now that we are almost grown up, what kind of community do we really want to be?

We should, at least, have the debate.