Approval of Metro Police contract violated new state law

By Joe Schoenmann

Thursday, May 27, 2010 | 2 a.m.

Metro Police’s Fiscal Affairs Committee signed off Monday on a one-year contract for police officers. In doing so it appears to have broken a new state law that requires a public hearing before public-employee contracts are approved.

“We screwed up,” said Steve Sisolak, one of two Clark County commissioners on the board that oversees the police department’s budget. “I think we have to bring it back for a vote.”

County Counsel Mary-Anne Miller agreed that the committee didn’t include the matter on its agenda or allow time for public comment as now required.

The law, passed by the 2009 Legislature, was one of several changes to collective bargaining sought by Senate Republicans and the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce in exchange for supporting a tax hike.

The law states: “any ... collective bargaining agreement or similar agreement between a local government employer and an employee organization must be approved by the governing body of the local government employer at a public hearing.”

Told of this week’s Fiscal Affairs vote, Steven Hill, chairman of the chamber’s state policy task force, said it sounded like a simple oversight.

“The changes put into law were to provide a little more light on the process and provide information so taxpayers have the ability to weigh in,” he said. “I doubt they tried to intentionally violate the law.”

Sheriff Doug Gillespie and other Metro administrators could not be reached for comment.

The chamber has waged a campaign against what it views as excessive public employee compensation and attempted to influence the discussion through a series of studies. By coincidence, it released a report Wednesday making recommendations to local governments on how to implement the 2009 law, addressing in particular another part of the bill that requires local governments to report the fiscal effect of a new union contract.

For example, at Monday’s Fiscal Affairs meeting, Karen Keller, Metro’s executive director of finance, spent about a minute talking about the concessions made by the police union as part of the bargaining agreement.

Hill said the law requires more than that.

“They should go through every section of the contract and tell us if there were changes, whether they had a fiscal impact, and if they did, ‘here are some examples,’ as a way of explaining,” Hill said.

The idea, he said, “is that the media and citizens can look at that information and get a fairly easy-to-understand view of what changed and what are the ramifications.”