A wise legislative move

Sunday, Aug. 9, 2009 | 2:08 a.m.

Gov. Jim Gibbons had wanted someone to be assigned to his Cabinet to oversee federal economic stimulus money earmarked for Nevada. It is easy to see, though, why the Nevada Legislature’s Interim Finance Committee overruled the governor last week by assigning that position to state Controller Kim Wallin’s office.

Since Gibbons took office in January 2007, he has repeatedly failed to show the capacity to lead.

That was made painfully obvious this year when the Republican governor made little effort to work with the Democrat-controlled Legislature on ways to address the state’s massive revenue shortfall.

He simply dumped into legislators’ laps a proposed budget for the next two years that was laden with draconian cuts in higher education, and then crawled back into his cocoon.

He hasn’t written any significant initiatives to help boost Nevada’s ailing economy. He has high staff turnover. He issues public statements that are bizarre.

State Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, D-North Las Vegas, told the Las Vegas Sun’s David McGrath Schwartz: “Unfortunately, there are a lot of distractions in the governor’s office — whether it’s the transiency of staff, or the personnel matters that distract the governor. What the public needs is leadership.”

Is that ever the truth.

Witness how Gibbons has reacted strangely to stimulus money. His administration initially wanted only a minor share of the money earmarked for transportation to be spent in Southern Nevada, home to the vast majority of Nevadans. He also wrote a letter to President Barack Obama stating that Nevada might reject some stimulus money that requires matching state funding while complaining the state wasn’t getting its fair share of the stimulus package.

Go figure.

Unless Gibbons undergoes a miraculous transformation and displays leadership qualities no one has yet seen, legislators should be praised for taking action to limit the amount of damage he can wreak on the state. Given his track record, allowing his office to oversee stimulus money could have proved disastrous.