Debates lively and frequent in Senate District 5 race

By Erin Dostal

Saturday, Oct. 30, 2010 | 2 a.m.

The candidates in state Senate District 5 have at least one thing in common: They like to debate.

The pair have verbally clashed twice with Sun columnist Jon Ralston as moderator, trading heated barbs about the economy and education. In particular, they butt heads about how to spend responsibly, and what do to about the state’s budget deficit.

Republican Michael Roberson, 40, a small-business attorney, paints his opponent, Democratic incumbent Joyce Woodhouse, 66, as having voted to spend irresponsibly during her one four-year term in the Senate. Woodhouse was elected in 2006 after retiring from a 40-year career in public education. For 17 years, she was a first-grade teacher.

Along with the campaigns in Senate Districts 8 and 9, this one is important because if Democrats pick up two more seats, they will have a two-thirds majority that can control the budget, have veto power over the governor and possibly determine redistricting.

Democrats hold a slight edge in District 5, where 46,910 of the 117,593 registered voters are of that party, 45,280 are Republican, and 19,025 are registered as nonpartisan.

Roberson’s philosophy for solving the state’s budget woes: Don’t raise taxes. It hurts small businesses.

“The first thing we need to do is stop making this worse,” Roberson said of the deficit. “The knee-jerk reaction is to raise taxes … I think it will prolong the recession in Nevada.”

Because Woodhouse was in office when the recession hit, Roberson blames her and others in the Legislature for the severity of the economic crisis — they, after all, raised taxes on businesses.

Woodhouse said her deficit-solving plan is twofold. First, she said, the state needs to cut or consolidate services. If that’s not enough, she would consider raising taxes. “Cuts come first,” she said.

“Nevada has a tendency to Band-Aid problems,” she said. “We have done that the past four to five years.”

Woodhouse’s plan to attract business is to aggressively pursue green energy, health care and biotechnology businesses.

Those businesses would generate revenue that could be pumped into higher education, which, in turn, would provide more educated workers for those industries. It’s win-win, she said.

“The No. 1 way to attract business is to have a world-class education system,” Woodhouse said. “Economy and education go hand in hand.”

The District 5 race, which encompasses much of Henderson, including Green Valley, has seen some of the most inflammatory campaign literature in Southern Nevada. In one ad, sponsored by the state Democratic Party, Roberson is accused of wanting teachers to have concealed weapons in kindergarten classrooms. In another, released by the same group, he’s accused of wanting to investigate women who had miscarriages.

The state Democratic Party is not directly affiliated with Woodhouse’s campaign. In an Oct. 18 debate on “Face to Face With Jon Ralston,” Roberson asked Woodhouse to denounce the ad about miscarriages.

The claims, Roberson said, are based loosely on a survey he filled out for Nevada Concerned Citizens on which he described himself as “anti-abortion.”

“I had nothing to do with them,” Woodhouse said. “They’re not good political pieces, I agree with that. But they are a follow-on based on what Mr. Roberson put on those questionnaires.”

Roberson’s campaign has taken the offensive, calling Woodhouse a “loony liberal liar” and trying to pin the state’s economic woes on her decisions.

Roberson and Woodhouse say they want more money spent locally on schools, meaning districts could decide how to best spend the money allotted to them, rather than having to comply with state demands. Roberson, whose wife is a teacher, advocates merit pay for educators to motivate high performance.

Roberson earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and a law degree from the University of Kansas. He moved to Las Vegas in 2000 after working for political campaigns in Washington, D.C., during the late 1990s. Roberson is an attorney with the law firm Kolesar & Leatham.

Woodhouse moved to Clark County 44 years ago from Montana, where she grew up. She was the director of the School-Community Partnership Program from 1985 to 2006, a group that created business partnerships to bring money and programs into public schools.