Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Gibbons’ new chief of staff lends prudence to thorny job

Sun Topics

When Gov. Jim Gibbons announced June 27 that he was replacing his top two staffers, the only surprise was the timing — the middle of the day during a special session.

The choice, Josh Hicks, his general counsel, was not.

The special session was to be the start of the rebirth of Gibbons’ administration. And critical to that was elevating Hicks to chief of staff.

For months, allies had been calling for Gibbons to make a staff change, and many had suggested promoting Hicks.

Now Hicks enters what might be the toughest job in Nevada — turning around the administration of a governor with a 21 percent approval rating who has messy personal problems and is facing the steepest slide in state revenue since the Great Depression. Not to mention his boss is often inconsistent on many policy stands and has trouble staying on message.

Hicks enters with a decidedly nonpolitical background, viewed by many as part of an attempt to elevate the level of professionalism in the office.

For the first 18 months, Gibbons had been working with a bifurcated management team. Mike Dayton was Gibbons’ chief of staff, and worked out of Las Vegas. Dianne Cornwall worked in Carson City. And though her title was chief operating officer, there was a constant power struggle between the two.

Both Cornwall and Dayton had been on staff with Gibbons when he was a congressman. And one frequent criticism is that Gibbons acted as if he were still in Congress — unused to the magnifying glass that comes with being the state’s leader.

Hicks has spent the past six years in state government.

Hicks is a native son of Reno — his great-grandfather moved here from Basque Country. He comes from a political family — his father is a prominent gaming attorney in Reno, his uncle a federal judge — but he does not have the ease in front of the camera or the ideological bombast of a natural politician.

He’s 35, and has a youngish look offset by graying hair. He speaks quietly, and has the demeanor of someone who you doubt knows how to yell.

“The governor has other people he can go to for political advice,” Hicks said when asked what he brings to the administration. “I’ve seen how the operation of government runs day to day.”

After graduating from law school at Santa Clara (Calif.) University, Hicks served as clerk for then-Nevada Supreme Court Chief Justice Deborah Agosti and then for a federal court judge. He joined the attorney general’s office, where he was the deputy attorney general, first serving the Tax Commission and then the secretary of state.

He joined the administration as general counsel after Gibbons was elected.

Robert Uithoven, Gibbons’ campaign manager and now an adviser to the governor, called Hicks a good ambassador for Gibbons.

“I think the most important thing is he always tries to maintain relationships,” said Uithoven, who went to high school in Reno with Hicks. He said Hicks’ nonpolitical nature is a good fit for the governor.

“I think the governor needed someone a little less political and more thorough as far as vetting issues, statements from the governor, taking a real judicial look at short-term and long-term issues (go),” he said.

During the 2007 legislative session, Hicks was the liaison between legislative leadership and the governor, and often testified before committees, representing the governor’s views. Assembly Minority Leader Heidi Gansert, R-Reno, said, “He’s very thorough in his analysis, very fair, and weighs the pros and cons.”

Still, his is a tough job.

Mike Hillerby, who served as Kenny Guinn’s chief of staff when Guinn was governor, called the chief of staff position “the sharp point where policy and politics collide.”

“You have to navigate your governor’s policy agenda through a political process,” Hillerby said.

Hicks, Hillerby said, “has a huge challenge in front of him ... One of the areas (is) he has to get out and reconnect with people throughout the state, let them know that there’s someplace to call for a final answer on where the governor is, how he’ll respond to a proposal.”

For Gibbons, just about everything except his stand on new taxes has been subject to change, going back to the Sierra-UnitedHealth merger and whether to eliminate cost-of-living increases and close down Nevada state prison during the special session.

Hicks said he is most proud in helping the governor handle budget reductions, pointing out that legislative leaders had followed Gibbons’ lead on the $1.2 billion in cuts.

“The governor immediately recognized the situation we were in and started working on it, even though we were criticized by some,” Hicks said.

He pointed to cuts by former Gov. Bob Miller during the early 1990s.

“The state went on then, the state will go on after this as well,” he said.

Despite the promise that Hicks offers Gibbons a new start, he’s not completely polished yet.

On the night of the special session, Gibbons was surrounded by reporters and columnists firing questions. Hicks was standing quietly off to the side. Then his cell phone rang. The ring was the opening cackle to a heavy metal song by Black Sabbath.

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