Politicians meet in Las Vegas for symposium on ethics

Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2007 | 7:14 a.m.

For several months last year an Interstate 15 billboard trumpeted the benefits of juice - with a wink and a nod to Las Vegans who know it isn't just for breakfast anymore.

Retired ethics professor Craig Walton says the sign, which was just south of Moapa on the way into town, went something like: "Welcome to Las Vegas - where Juice is what it's all about."

Nothing, Walton sighs, could be truer.

The names given to the scandals aren't very telling - Operation Yobo, Airport Gate, Daiquiri Gate - and give only a vague notion of what these scandals involved. Sometimes, though, it's enough just to know that something was so damning that some reporter or prosecutor gave it a nickname.

Even with that, even with the hollow sound of those names ringing through the halls of our public offices, even though candidates must know that the FBI, somehow somewhere, is listening, it goes on.

Not without reason, in Walton's view. "There is a hell of a lot of money to be made, and it's a boom climate, and if you've got the chutzpah to go out and do what's got to be done, you probably will."

Walton, a UNLV philosophy professor for 34 years, helped found the Nevada Center for Public Ethics two years ago, just as the FBI was beginning to release information about Operation G-Sting, during which four Clark County commissioners took money and favors from a strip club owner in return for rulings favorable to the strip club industry.

Walton hosted a public meeting Saturday at the Clark County Library on Flamingo Road. Among the 100 or so in the audience at the morning gathering were reporters, UNLV students and, without affiliation but in larger numbers, concerned citizens.

They were all there to listen to, and to grill, three state lawmakers - Assemblymen Joe Hardy, R-Boulder City and Marcus Conklin, D-Las Vegas - along with state Sen . Steven Horsford, D-Las Vegas. Each was picked to represent his party and legislative body. Mitch Fox, emcee of public television's "Nevada Week in Review," asked questions before a brief question-and-answer session with the audience.

Each man said heartening things about his disgust with public graft.

"Ethics is what you do when other people aren't looking," Conklin said.

"Could I go to jail for this?" is the question Hardy asks himself when faced with an ethical dilemma. "And if someone begins their answer with 'Well...' "

The audience chuckled at that.

Not because it was funny, necessarily. But because in recent times, prison for public officials has become all too common. Aside from the G-Sting scandal, the list of scandals big and small are practically a Nevada tradition. G-Sting, though, takes the center stage, both for its size and the depth to which it showed officials will go for money.

Walton suggests that ethics, or lack thereof, is societal. He readily admits that every community suffers through the graftwork of some public official, at some point in time. The difference is, some communities tolerate - or foster - more serious scandals than others.

"I think all over America, there are places where there is a fairly well-shared sense of who we are and what we can put up with and, in those places that have little tolerance, you have relatively good government," he says. "But in another place, you might be attracting those from the other end of the spectrum."

The meeting Saturday focused largely on the 11 ethics proposals that Walton's Center for Public Ethics hopes will get more than just lip service in Carson City when the state Legislature begins its 120-day session Feb. 5. Paramount, he says, is one proposal to eliminate the word "willful" from ethics laws, so that lawmakers can't weasel out of a scandal by saying they "accidentally," not "willfully" broke the law.

How does Walton think he'll do?

"I'm not going in hopeful," he says, pointing out that there was one glaring, but very important, omission from that Saturday meeting at the library: Each body and party in the Legislature was represented, except from the Republican side of the Senate, which has a majority and most of the power in the statehouse.

"I don't know what that means," says Walton, who adds that he tried over and over to get someone from the Republican Senate at the meeting.

"I hope it means nothing."