Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Jon Ralston blames Gibbons and his incompetent leadership for looming special session

CARSON CITY - If there is a special session, it will be no mystery who caused the overtime: Gov. Jim Gibbons.

At the end of many Legislatures, dithering lawmakers are the obvious culprits for any delays. But this year, unlike in any session I have seen, the governor has almost single-handedly caused this Session of Waste.

Before anyone fires up his e-mail to send missives of outrage, I acknowledge that in various specialized areas good bills will pass and bad bills will not. Too often the good that lawmakers do is interred with sine die; the evil they do lives on for a biennium or longer.

But the big picture this session is as bleak as any in some time - including the horror of 2003 and that monstrous tax increase. And the guilt reposes almost entirely on the doorstep of the Governor's Mansion.

The utter lack of leadership Gibbons has displayed is breathtaking. Start with the Seinfeld campaign that elected him - and you must start there. Start with his clear lack of understanding of state issues and his panacea of "no new taxes." And start with his election being based on more people voting against Dina Titus than for him.

I, like others, gave Gibbons a chance to put that pathetic campaign behind him - to even put the Mazzeo-nanny-Trepp problems behind him, to discard his image as a shallow, ethically challenged politician - to give him a chance to lead. And yet, except for keeping that silly promise that any power-lusting politician could make without regard to consequences, the governor has been an abject failure.

Take the two most celebrated issues of the session, and probably the most important ones confronting Southern Nevada: education and transportation.

On education Gibbons' version of leadership has been to propose a budget that barely covers growth and has what he called "a single bold stroke" of empowerment schools, which he immediately made clear he did not even understand. He then dismissed any notion of funding all-day kindergarten, which he appears to understand equally well, and allowed Democrats to eviscerate the funding for his empowerment plan - and then bragged about the so-called compromise!

This is leadership? No, this is incompetence.

If that's not enough, his Education First initiative, passed in 2004 and 2006, has created an end-of-session bottleneck and proven to be just as empty as a bipartisan chorus of critics said it would be. It has not stopped any end-of-session horse-trading, and it has not ensured children will be better educated.

On transportation Gibbons had been laughably inept. He began by dismissing the work of a very credible task force comprised mostly of conservatives. He then floated substance-free notions - this may be his one true talent - such as the proverbial public-private partnerships and some lunacy about water rights under highways being some wellspring of cash to build roads.

This is leadership? No, this is incompetence.

And now, with the session winding down, with no hint that any plan was coming, with no attempt to first educate the public and lawmakers why this is a fine idea, Gibbons drops a bomb about diverting room taxes and stealing general fund money (without replacing it) to pay for roads. Forget the issue that this was as clear an example of a governor being manipulated by a special interest - Gondolier Numero Uno Sheldon Adelson. The real story here is that the governor said nothing in his campaign or his State of the State address about such a plan, so it was obviously spoon-fed to him.

He also proposed it way too late to give it a fair hearing and there's still no bill! Even if this were the greatest idea in the history of Nevada - and I assure you, it is not - there's simply no time to vet its efficacy and consequences.

Instead, Gibbons has created the necessity for an 11th-hour attempt to cobble together a tax package that can pass because his is stillborn. And so he has caused the likelihood of a thrown-together, poorly thought-out plan being passed by lawmakers who, unlike him, really want to get something done and not just fulfill an empty pledge.

I don't completely absolve lawmakers - they should have proposed their own package much earlier, although Democrats did put forward programs on education and transportation. But unless the coming special session is one that produces real ideas and long-term solutions, Gibbons should reimburse the treasury for the expense.

Maybe Warren Trepp could help.

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