A relaxed Raggio content with low-key role in Legislature

By David McGrath Schwartz

Sunday, Dec. 12, 2010 | 2 a.m.

State Sen. Bill Raggio’s committee assignments for the 2011 Nevada Legislature might generously be called average — for a freshman lawmaker.

The longest-serving state senator in Nevada history, Raggio has been toppled from leadership and stepped down from the Senate’s most influential committee, Finance. Instead, he’ll serve his final session on the third-tier committees, Education, Health and Human Services, and Government Affairs.

But even if it looks bad on paper, he will still be a player, given his decades of experience and deal-making acumen. Plus, he is now free of the constraints of leadership and wrangling an unruly Republican caucus, freer to speak his mind and, apparently, unwilling to blithely follow Gov.-elect Brian Sandoval.

This is Casual Friday Raggio — serving his last term because of term limits, unhappy with his party’s direction and unshackled from the forced cordiality of legislative leaders.

“I feel a great relief,” Raggio said. “I’m pretty much my own person. I’ll continue to speak out, and say what I think.”

And what he says sounds an awful lot like indirect criticism of Sandoval — the man whom Raggio helped persuade to leave the federal bench and run for governor, not to mention land him a nice interim job at Jones Vargas in Reno, where Raggio is a partner. (Their offices are next door to each other.)

“I don’t agree with their concept on the budget,” he said of his Republican Senate colleagues, which by association includes Sandoval. “I think you start with the essential needs — the critical needs — and find a way to fund them.”

Sandoval has promised not to raise taxes, but refused to detail what he will cut to accomplish that. His staff says he won’t reveal his plan until Jan. 24, when he delivers a State of the State address and releases his budget.

Sandoval has suggested dumping on local governments the responsibility for some state services, and allowing the cities and counties to raise taxes to fund them.

“I understand his commitment to no tax increases, but if you’re going to do that by shifting costs to local governments, I’m not sure it’s consistent” ideologically, he said. “Somebody is going to have to pay for those services.”

Raggio says he supports Sandoval. But at the same time, Raggio’s position outside leadership has freed him to criticize some of the governor-elect’s policies and their potential long-term effects.

Raggio points to Nevada’s favorable rankings for its tax burden on businesses. “If it was just taxes, businesses would be flowing here,” he said. “They’re looking at other things — educated workforce, what amenities there are for workers, higher education, or K-12, where we stand in cultural matters.”

Even though Raggio won’t be on the Finance Committee, which with Ways and Means will shape Sandoval’s proposed budget, his influence will be felt. He is the most knowledgeable man in the state on the budget. He was, after all, the 20-year-chairman of the Finance Committee.

Raggio is proud of his record in that post, since Nevada’s government is miserly compared with its neighbors and the nation.

But he was never the type of Republican who wanted to shrink bureaucracy so small it could be drowned in the bathtub, as some on the right say. “Lean, not mean,” was his mantra.

The Republican Party, and his caucus, have grown more conservative.

So although he thinks government services can’t be cut significantly more without affecting the state’s most vulnerable citizens, he won’t stand in the way as Sandoval, and his Republican colleagues, attempt it.

After a postelection caucus coup ousted Raggio for Sen. Mike McGinness, Raggio went one step further and said he would not sit on Finance.

“The caucus has its general concept of what they’re looking for in the budget,” he said. “Frankly, I don’t think I was in line with that. I don’t want to be an impediment to what the caucus wants.”

Casual Friday Raggio, giving his colleagues and the governor enough rope so they can hang themselves.