Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2007 | 7:02 a.m.
Jim Gibbons delivered his first State of the State address as governor on Monday night - and he delivered a dud. Not only was the speech uninspiring but it also revealed that it just might be impossible to find out what Gibbons' core convictions are.
We learned Monday that Gibbons, the Republican candidate who vowed to bring leaner government to Carson City and who had harshly criticized then-Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn for raising taxes in 2003, is offering a nearly $7 billion budget that is about 18 percent more than what the Legislature approved in 2005.
If the business tax and the more than $800 million in new revenues that were a ved in 2003 were so terrible, then why not reduce state spending by a similar amount or more? The answer, of course, is that those taxes helped fund all the vital services that Nevadans rely upon and demand from their government.
Gibbons' view of smaller government instead appears to be marginally reducing the business tax, giving a $28 million tax break to 55,748 businesses and eliminating the $1,750 excise tax for each bank branch. So much for Gibbons taking a meat cleaver to the budget. He reminds us of President Bush, who wants everybody to believe he is a conservative yet is the same man who has increased spending to budget-busting levels and handed out needless tax breaks to his friends and contributors.
Despite the fact that Gibbons wants to spend more, his priorities in spending show little foresight. One of the most glaring examples involves education. Currently, 53.7 percent of the existing general fund budget is devoted to education, but Gibbons' plan, if approved, would reduce education spending to 52.6 percent. In light of how poorly Nevada fares in nationwide rankings involving academic achievement and education spending, it absolutely makes no sense to reduce education's share of overall spending.
It also is revealing that Gibbons won't fund all-day kindergarten, despite overwhelming evidence that this is an essential building block in a child's education. Of course, if he were to fund all-day kindergarten, then that would mean taking the money from somewhere else, such as not giving bankers a tax break. Gibbons has clearly shown us where his priorities are.
Also telling, although not a surprise, is that Gibbons doesn't have a realistic plan for dealing with the looming transportation crisis. One of the reasons is politics. Gibbons' political career has featured many fights against tax increases, no matter how warranted they are. Gibbons repeated his no-new-taxes vow during his campaign for governor, a situation that now has the potential to especially hurt Southern Nevadans.
That is because Gibbons reiterated Monday that he won't follow the recommendations of Guinn's blue-ribbon task force, which called for a gas tax increase to help fund $3.8 billion in desperately required road projects planned from 2008 to 2015, with the bulk of those being needed in Southern Nevada.
Instead, Gibbons said he will see if there are any public-private partnerships to pay for new road improvements. The governor was vague as to what that would entail, although there has been some speculation that this might include toll roads. Gibbons also has suggested previously that the state could sell to private companies the water rights from land that the Transportation Department currently owns, but we haven't heard anybody credible say this could somehow raise hundreds of millions of dollars, let alone billions of dollars.
The fact is we are already experiencing terrible traffic congestion here, and Southern Nevadans need this situation addressed immediately. We can't hold out for some pie-in-the-sky solutions.
It is not as if overnight the people of this state suddenly discovered that we have a mediocre educational system in desperate need of more funding, a health care system where hundreds of thousands go without health insurance and a state transportation system mired in gridlock.
This state has some serious issues facing it, ones that require vision and political courage. Based on what we heard Monday, we are concerned that such vision and political courage aren't going to come from the governor's office. That is why it will be crucial in the coming months for members of the Legislature to come together in a bipartisan way and forthrightly deal with the pressing issues facing this state today and in the years ahead.
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