Stop and smell the legislation

BY CRAIG WALTON

On April 5, the Assembly committee hearing ethics bills considered Assembly Bill 530, which came from the Clark County Ethics Task Force in 2003. Via video link at the Grant Sawyer Building, I was to explain some of the bill's hot spots -- putting cronyism under the same standard as nepotism, for instance, and deleting a clause that served as a sort of ethical "get out of jail free" card.

We were told to be there about 3 p.m., when the committee started in Carson. By 4 p.m., still no video link. Finally, we got one, and when it was my turn to speak, I was asked to state my name and start.

One and a half minutes into speaking, I was asked, "Are you for it or against it?"

I said "For it" -- and was cut off, the committee chair saying she was "losing her committee." I had no chance to answer questions that had been raised, or to share what led Clark County to need this bill.

The reasons for such haste were two: One, due to lack of video links, we started late and due to conflicting meetings, legislators left and cut the hearing short. Two, the Legislature is having to push all bills to an "up or dead" vote by April 15, to get them to the other chamber and finished within the 120-day limit. Hundreds of bills must be rushed through in the next few days!

Why? Because we wanted a 120-day session, but the bills were not all drafted until March 29, and there are not enough staff to run this roundup fast and perfectly (I've been mis-scheduled and given wrong information twice by good people scrambling to make it happen). And the elected members probably cannot read and understand, much less question and listen to all speakers on all the hairy bills within this frenzied time limit.

Representative government depends on Assembly and Senate members being able to listen and to question, and ditto for the citizens who try to take part. If we are to respect our laws, we must feel we have been heard if we tried to be heard. But we do not have the staffing or the time to make this happen. And we do not even have enough video links to allow more than three committee hearings to be open to 78 percent of Nevadans. As many as seven hearings can be running at one time, but only three can be linked to Southern Nevada.

We need to provide the time and staff and video links to let Southern Nevadans take part, to let testimony be heard instead of cut off, and to let our elected representatives read, listen, ask, think and act with enough time for good decisions.

Nothing can be done about 2005 -- the legislators and staff are striving heroically, and will do all they can. But we need a post-mortem of this mess afterwards, so we can make good changes instead of repeating it in 2007.

CRAIG WALTON IS AN EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF ETHICS AND POLICY STUDIES AT UNLV AND PRESIDENT OF THE NEVADA CENTER FOR PUBLIC ETHICS. ITS WEBSITE IS WWW.NEVADA-ETHICS.ORG.