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February 12, 2012

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Lobbyist knows local government from the inside

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Sam Morris

Terry Murphy served for a year as head of a key department of Clark County.

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Monday, Nov. 23, 2009 | 2 a.m.

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For more than a decade Terry Murphy has been one of the Las Vegas Valley’s go-to people whenever businesses or organizations need someone to deal with local governments for them.

She started her consulting company, Strategic Solutions, in 1997, after spending five years working her way up to the director position in Clark County’s Department of Administrative Services, then spending a year in charge of that department.

That stint as a county employee allowed her to get the inside view of how things get done in Southern Nevada, but her outside view began almost two decades earlier.

She arrived in Nevada from Brooklyn in 1979. The desert was the new home of her pipe fitter father and housewife mother. Murphy, then 19, intended to stay only a few months.

“When I got here, it was only 400,000 people and I thought, ‘This is one godforsaken desert.’ ”

But she wound up enrolling at UNLV and earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology.

And she began making the connections that would prove so valuable in a city where knowing the right people is the best currency.

While earning her bachelor’s degree, she tutored the UNLV basketball team that made it to the 1987 NCAA tournament Final Four under coach Jerry Tarkanian.

In 1989 she worked for the Southern Nevada Homebuilders Association, supported by the developers who transformed the city from a burg to a megalopolis, when a little-known creature would start to dominate development concerns: the desert tortoise.

“It was just about to be listed (as a threatened species) and nobody knew it was going to be a problem,” Murphy said. “They told me to look into it, and I suddenly found myself in the middle of a very large issue critical to the economy and to the state.”

She became the epicenter of negotiations between business, government and environmentalists — names she still keeps in her Rolodex.

The culmination of all her contacts, access and experience is a client list that now includes such heavyweights as Wynn Resorts and Station Casinos.

Behind the scenes she lobbies county commissioners or city council members on behalf of those clients. Most of the valley’s people in power have known Murphy for decades and consider her a straight-shooter.

But that doesn’t mean Murphy has been immune to the historic economic downturn. She had to lower her rates.

“It’s just the way of the world right now,” she said. “You either adapt or you leave. And I’m not leaving.”

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