Nevada’s bumper crop: Lobbyists

Sunday, June 17, 2007 | 7:01 a.m.

CARSON CITY - A day before the end of the 2007 legislative session, a raven-haired lobbyist stood in the cool breeze of a Carson City spring day in the Lobbyist Pose - cell phone glued to her ear and a thousand-yard stare right through anybody coming her way.

Ms. No-Nonsense is a 40-something who looks a decade-something younger. She does not suffer fools. With a huge list of clients, she rarely cracks a smile, preferring to use that energy to type on a laptop or pull another lobbyist close to cut a deal.

She is not known for being loud. Until this very moment.

"You know what?" she says, her anger clear, her voice rising. "The governor can sign it or not! I don't (expletive) care! Just make sure he sees it!"

Nevada has all kinds of lobbyists. (Think: guy with pork chop sideburns and silver hoop earrings.) For the male of the species, it's a black or otherwise dark, dark suit. For women, typical attire is a tight-skirt-and-blouse power suit or below-the-knee dress .

The look is often tailored, and expensive. A lobbyist with big clients can make $10,000 to $15,000 a month, per client, over two years.

They crowd the corridors of the Capitol and halls of the Legislature, identifiable by the blue badges they are required to wear.

Eight-hundred-eighty-two of them registered this year, a Nevada record. That breaks down to 14 lobbyists for every one of the state's 63 legislators.

Those numbers alone don't tell the story, however.

Clive Thomas, a University of Alaska political science professor, says Nevada is one of four states most dominated by special interests. That's because of a number of factors, including the existence of a small number of powerful industries that contribute heavily to economic growth and to political campaigns. The state also has weak political parties that don't act as a check on special interests, so those interests tend to dominate state government, Thomas says.

During the 2007 legislative session, lawmakers had a staff of 27 nonpartisan researchers and analysts they could turn to for answers to the often complicated issues they galloped through in their four-month , every-other-year session .

It's normal in Nevada for lobbyists to write many bills and to serve as the primary source for many more. Sure, lawmakers have those bills vetted by their nonpartisan staff. But staff is responsible for accuracy and legalities, not original ideas and nuances.

"What we sell, for lack of a better word, is knowledge of the people and the process that make up state government," says Josh Griffin, one of the youngest and, arguably, most successful lobbyists in the state. "There are all kinds of associations and businesses affected by that process, and our job is to help understand those who might be affected."

Griffin is son of a former Reno mayor and served one term as an assemblyman. He and his partner , Tim Crowley , have some of the biggest clients in the state: MGM Mirage, the Nevada System of Higher Education and Clark County, to name a few.

Griffin sees his profession in a noble light. "Very few of us bring a strong political bias to the job," he adds. "We have them, sure, everybody does. But you're not advocating your own belief system."

Others see themselves in more of a shadow.

This is how one paid lobbyist, who had drunk himself into the kind of inebriation that takes effort to reach, described lobbyists while sitting on a stool at Mo and Sluggos, a Carson City watering hole that would fill with karaoke-singing lobbyists on Wednesday nights :

The man was talking with envy about another lobbyist competing for clients. "Oh, he'll pat you on the back and tell you what a good guy you are," the lobbyist said. "But he'd sell his mother just like the rest of us."

For Nevada's part-time lawmakers, the key is understanding a lobbyist's motive and, according to state Sen. Bob Beers, R-Las Vegas, remembering the ones who lie.

"You generally sort out the group into those who don't lie, and those who sometimes will," said Beers, who calls lobbying "the third-oldest profession," behind prostitution and teaching.

"You take their information and run it through the historical-reliability-of-data filter. And then you run it through your own internal understanding-of-the-world filter, and then you file it away under that bill. And then when the time comes to make a decision, you weigh all those pieces of information and make your decision."