Getting input from others

Sunday, March 8, 2009 | 3:06 a.m.

The decision by Gov. Jim Gibbons and his administration to act in isolation as they drew up his proposed state budget for the next two years, as if sitting around a table in a hermetically sealed glass bubble, would have made for a terrific science fiction episode on television in the 1950s.

No matter how hard members of the public would have tried to bang on the glass from the outside to get heard, they would have been ignored by the governor.

This is precisely how Gibbons operated in the run-up to this year’s session of the Nevada Legislature. As reported by David McGrath Schwartz in Wednesday’s Las Vegas Sun, groups with a vested interest in the budget — law enforcement agencies and the gaming industry among them — weren’t consulted before the governor made specific proposals that affect them.

Law enforcement wasn’t informed when Gibbons announced that he wanted to consolidate police training under the Nevada Public Safety Department by eliminating the Commission on Peace Officers’ Standards and Training. Sheriffs and police chiefs reacted by protesting that proposal in Carson City last month.

The governor sought no input from the Nevada Resort Association on his plan to require casinos to pay taxes on credit issued to gamblers rather than pay those taxes when the loans are repaid. But that plan was scuttled once the gaming industry learned about it and raised objections.

These examples point to a serious problem with the way Gibbons governs the state. When a governor acts in isolation on budgetary matters, there is no way for him to judge the true effect of his decisions. Go-it-alone decision-making often leads to dire consequences, especially when budget cuts are proposed.

A governor should gather as much input as possible from a variety of perspectives in order to make informed decisions. This doesn’t mean that a governor should always be swayed by that input. But Gibbons would find that he would get a lot more cooperation from others if he instituted an open-door policy.