Jim being Jim

Fri, Aug 28, 2009 (3 a.m.)

Gov. Jim Gibbons bashed the Legislature’s Interim Finance Committee and Controller Kim Wallin last week over stimulus funding.

In a hyperbolic news release, the Republican governor says both the Democratic-controlled committee and Wallin, also a Democrat, are obstructing the release of stimulus money.

Once again, Gibbons is making accusations he cannot back up and is trying to create a partisan issue where none should exist. The issue is not Republican versus Democrat. It is Gibbons and his incompetence.

The simple fact is that the governor is angry because the committee didn’t give him his way. Gibbons wanted to hire a stimulus czar to oversee the federal money coming to Nevada, but instead of rubber stamping the request, the committee voted to move oversight into Wallin’s office.

The Interim Finance Committee doesn’t trust Gibbons — for good reason. Gibbons has been a disaster in office, and the committee was trying to provide proper oversight and accountability given the governor’s track record. For example, earlier this year Gibbons proposed a state budget that gutted higher education. The proposal was so bad that even his fellow conservatives wouldn’t support it. But instead of working with the Legislature to find an alternative, Gibbons blamed Democrats and vetoed a record number of bills.

When it came to stimulus money, Gibbons originally talked about rejecting it, parroting the Republican Party line. Gibbons is not a fan of government spending, much less many of the programs the stimulus will go toward, but he had a change of heart when the stimulus money saved the state from massive budget cuts.

There is certainly a need for better oversight of the money. Nevada has been criticized by a national watchdog group because it has not been transparent about its use of the money. The state Web site dedicated to detailing stimulus spending doesn’t provide much information.

Ironically, Gibbons had a person assigned to track stimulus spending, but she was chased out in his most recent purge of his staff.

Given all of that, a principled conservative would welcome additional oversight and accountability of the stimulus money. Gibbons has no care for such matters. He just wants to try to salvage his dismal approval ratings by being the one who hands out the big checks for programs he doesn’t even support. Disgusting.