Jon Ralston hopes this trek through the weeds leads to an ’09 clearing

By Jon Ralston

Sunday, Dec. 7, 2008 | 2 a.m.

When lawmakers meet in Carson City starting Monday, they will approve a patchwork of financial gimmicks to arrive at a number ($337 million) to fill a hole and then run home and hope for the best.

In other words, they will do what has been done in Nevada for decades to advance the cause of sound, thoughtful fiscal policy: Nothing.

The special session is a microcosm of what lawmakers always do when confronted with budget problems. They think of the number to hit, not the policy that makes sense. They cobble together unrelated, sometimes contradictory mini-solutions. And then they scurry out of the capital and are shocked, shocked when they return to find that Band-Aids didn’t fix the disease.

The major difference this time — and more significantly for the regular session to come — is that while their nostrums are panicked reactions designed to minimize the pain, the witch doctor overseeing this triage effort still has only a three-word incantation: No new taxes (on the remote chance you have forgotten).

Asked by reporters Friday about the possibility of tax increases during the regular session, Gov. Jim Gibbons blithely declared he is “not in a tax-increasing mood,” that he can cut a third of the budget and that he would veto any increase passed by the Legislature in Session ’09.

Gibbons stuck to his narrow view of the world, a world that apparently is immutable despite changing circumstances obvious to everyone else, on the same day the most stubborn of all special interests, the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, acknowledged in a message to members that revenue “will need to be raised if this crisis continues.”

The governor, unless he can find some mood-altering drugs by next year to bring him out of the hallucinatory confines of Gibbonsworld, is about to find himself a very lonely man. That’s because Republicans in both houses quietly have been discussing the impossibility of cutting $2.4 billion out of the budget for fiscal 2010-11. Said one influential Republican legislator, “The state needs additional revenue and we have to deal with it.”

This veteran GOP lawmaker believes Gibbons simply is “setting himself up for a veto override.” And this lament from the loyal Republican: “He is handing the governorship to Rory Reid (the county commissioner mulling a bid in 2010).”

Gibbons would deserve kudos for steadfastly adhering to a campaign promise except for one tiny fact: The promise is inane. It’s one thing to say, “I am generally opposed to tax increases, as I think most Nevadans are. But, as Bill Raggio and others tell me, it is silly to have pledges like that because they are sound bites without substance, slogans not a philosophy.”

But that’s not what he said. Thus we have this: A man leading the state as it teeters on a fiscal precipice wanting to charge forward with a mindless rallying cry.

So with Gov. Irrelevant out of the way next year, reasonable people, from the lawmakers to the special interests, can look at the overall problem of spending and raising money (yes, both) and try to work toward a long-term solution.

(Another potential future governor, Speaker Barbara Buckley, has been the only lawmaker to provide a truly compelling overview — and many non-Democrats believe this, too — of the state’s long-term fiscal problems. If you haven’t seen her PowerPoint, go to: www.nv2020.com.)

No one — even unrealistic media rock-throwers — believes legislators can or should attempt to solve the historical problem this week. This is about using highly questionable — financially and legally — methods to ensure the state can pay its bills until lawmakers return to Carson City in February.

The real, substantive discussion comes starting next year — or so we hope. But the tone for the regular session could be set this week.

If the Republicans believe the Democrats are shutting them out or setting them up on partisan votes, the results will be ugly and carry over to Session ’09. If the Democrats seem closed to any talk of accountability and reform, the Republicans will be much more reluctant to participate.

If the budget crisis here is the perfect storm of years of neglect combined with a national recession, the political dynamics in Carson City might, conversely, have cleared the skies. My sunny view comes because of Raggio’s post-election statements about the devastation to the state with more cuts, the third of lawmakers free to be bold because of term limits and the majority, perhaps even two-thirds of the Gang of 63, who can make Gibbons a spectator.

Nothing is special about what will happen this week. Let’s hope next year is a different story.