Gibbons ready to tear at legislative patch

By David McGrath Schwartz

Sunday, Aug. 9, 2009 | 2 a.m.

As governor, what do you do when a legislative committee, controlled by Democrats, gives you conniptions, moving staff positions out of your office and delaying the spending of stimulus dollars?

Step one is to take your case to the public and accuse Democrats of playing partisan games to pressure them to change their ways.

Next, you think about the nuclear option — challenging the constitutionality of the committee in court.

It’s something Gov. Jim Gibbons says he’s considering.

The Legislature’s Interim Finance Committee has been around since 1969, composed of about one-third of the lawmakers. It meets about every 45 days when the Legislature is not in session.

The meetings are usually mundane, with the committee tweaking budget accounts formally passed by lawmakers in the past session.

But it also performs a vital government function, allowing flexibility in budgets in a state with a Legislature that passes spending plans two years at a time and meets for only four months every two years.

The questionable constitutionality of the Interim Finance Committee has been an open, if uncomfortable, secret of Carson City for decades. Imagine a third of the U.S. Congress meeting during the August recess to change department budgets.

But the rancorous relationship between the Democrat-controlled Legislature and Republican governor has brought those questions into the open.

After last week’s vote by the committee to delay a plan to spend $10.5 million weatherizing homes and to take a stimulus coordinator out of the governor’s office, Gibbons said he’s willing to test it.

“I question whether the IFC is constitutionally legal or not, let alone whether the actions (it’s) taken are legal,” said Gibbons, a former assemblyman.

Asked whether he’s willing to challenge it, he said: “I’m damn well willing to challenge it. I’m damn well willing to stand up and say ‘enough is enough.’ We’re all in this to help the people of Nevada. We’re not here to help somebody’s pet project, union agenda or the whim of some legislator.”

There are two possible grounds for a challenge, according to state government observers. The first is the more immediate: Did the Interim Finance Committee exceed its statutory authority with some of its actions last week?

Those who say no argue that the committee can approve or reject spending plans brought by state agencies.

But when it took the governor’s proposal to create a stimulus coordinator in his office and put the position under Controller Kim Wallin, a Democrat, did it go too far? Was it, in effect, legislating?

The bigger issue, the one that could upend state government, is whether the committee is constitutional.

Sen. Bob Coffin, D-Las Vegas, said he has long had concerns about it. Without a full meeting of the 63 legislators, a resident of a district without a senator or assemblyman on the board is not represented, the argument goes.

“The system creates a sort of superlegislator,” said Coffin, who has served on the committee for 23 of his 27 years in the Senate.

(The committee’s members are legislators who sit on the Assembly Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees.)

If a court dissolves the IFC system, it could grind state government to a halt. There would be no mechanism to move money among accounts or accept federal funds.

“The IFC has allowed us to avoid special sessions for budgetary purposes since its creation, up until this last biennium when we had a historic recession,” said Lorne Malkowich, director of the Legislative Counsel Bureau.

Without the committee, Coffin said, “we’d muddle along” — a special session of the full Legislature every month or two — until the next session in February 2011.

On Friday, Dan Burns, Gibbons’ communications director, would say only that “steps are being taken to determine if the IFC’s action — that will do nothing but delay and harm the people of the state — are legal and constitutional.”

He left details of what action Gibbons would take an open-ended question — just like the status of the Interim Finance Committee.