Jon Ralston on Gibbons’ State of the State address, replete with procrastinations to avoid tough decisions

Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2007 | 7:09 a.m.

Under the constraints of a State of the State address, which essentially is a laundry list of budget items, Jim Gibbons' was not one of the worst nor was it one of the best.

It was ordinary.

But here is the news: The budget that Gibbons presented Monday was not only similar to the one left behind by Kenny Guinn, but it also is essentially the same spending package, with a few changes around the margins, that would have been presented by a Gov. Dina Titus.

Gibbons may have told Nevadans during the campaign that he was going to save us money. But while he may save some businesses and banks a little cash, he spent every dime available - $1 billion of new spending and almost a 20 percent increase over Guinn's last budget - and gave not a penny of the nearly half a billion dollar surplus back to the populace.

His tax cuts for businesses and banks will not even save them much money, much less us - the tax cuts are less than 1 percent of the overall budget. And speaking of 1 percent, that's about how much of the lower education budget, which is $3.63 billion, the governor's murky Empowerment schools plan, which is $60 million, represents. This is dramatic, radical, even significant? I don't think so.

Gibbons has not changed the way the state does business, has not reinvented a budget process that has existed for decades, as he promised to do earlier this month. But he has redefined the label "fiscal conservative" in the Nevada political lexicon: The term apparently means someone who increases spending by 10 figures but conservatively doles out givebacks to his corporate patrons.

Titus might have put a few million dollars into all-day kindergarten, might have proposed a few more programs and probably wouldn't have thought a coal plant was the cutting energy edge. But she would not have raised taxes - no one would with that kind of surplus - and would have spent just as much as Gibbons and no more.

The Gibbons speech, like many other States of the State but more so, was a series of inchoate ideas and obvious procrastinations to avoid tough decisions - empowerment schools, public-private partnerships to solve traffic woes, a public benefits study panel and more study of all-day kindergarten.

This budget is not a sea change; it is barely a rivulet change.

This governor's $7 billion is little altered from Guinn's $7 billion and would be much the same as Titus' $7 billion. Or, if they had the chance, any of the rest of the Gang of 63 mini-governors sniping right now.

Gibbons' budget shows why all of these labels - from fiscal conservative to liberal spender to the inane RINO (Republican In Name Only) - have become meaningless in Nevada. Every budget is a record spending budget and the only question every session is whether the economy is purring enough to postpone the decision to tax.

No governor, except for Guinn, has been willing to raise the philosophical divide that really splits this state. Not North/South or Democrat/Republican. But whether it's time to start spending enough to make a dent in the infrastructure gap - schools, roads, social services - or start cutting wasteful programs that have sprouted with the phenomenal growth.

Gibbons' plan doesn't even begin to address it. And all of those folks who lambasted Guinn for being a RINO - including, at least obliquely, Gibbons - now say the new governor is the real deal, a fiscal conservative who will save us money? Please.

Whether it was his tax cuts for businesses or his empowerment schools, Gibbons was full of miniature proposals for mammoth problems. Only those with a facile, narrow-minded approach think empowerment schools will fix what ails the public schools system. One percent of the budget? What about per-pupil funding? What about attracting good teachers?

There are no major changes to the Band-Aid biennial budgeting that we have seen session after session for decades. Gibbons could have changed course, could have sparked the debate that is much more important for the state's future than whether a principal can decide which teacher to reward or whether we should pay a toll on U.S. 95.

To borrow a line from the State of the State: That's not radical. That's responsible.