Governor, it's time to go

After 15 months in the statehouse, it's unmistakably clear that you don't have what it takes to be Nevada's chief executive.

Your administration is marred by lies, incompetence and bad decisions. You've failed every major test of leadership, bungled every crisis. Under your tenure, the state is less safe. The phrase most commonly used to describe you -- by friends and enemies alike -- is this: "There's no there there."

Can this state, can any state, long endure with an utter lack of leadership and vision?

For the good of Nevada, for the health and safety of its people and for its future, governor, it's time for you to go.

Let's set aside whatever happened in the life of James Arthur Gibbons before midnight on Dec. 31, 2006. Set aside the back-bench career in Congress, characterized by repeated failures to land plum committee assignments. Set aside the fact that running for governor was Gibbons's publicly stated second choice, after he was passed over -- yet again -- for the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee.

Set aside the infamous "liberal, tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, hippie, tie-dyed liberals" speech plagiarized from the then-Alabama state auditor. Set aside Gibbons's urging that those same liberals be used as human shields.

Set aside his remark that anybody opposed to the open and gross corporate underwriting of inaugurals "must be a communist." Set aside his attempts to let mining companies buy publicly owned land (cheaply) or his downplaying the negative health effects of mercury (yes, mercury) in an article co-written with former colleague U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif.

Set aside -- especially -- the infamous Chrissy Mazzeo incident in which Gibbons allegedly tried to sexually assault a drunken cocktail waitress after a boozy night out. (Set aside his ridiculously unbelievable account of that night, too, or the swift closure of the case by Las Vegas police and the Clark County district attorney.)

And set aside, finally, the FBI investigation into whether Gibbons sold his congressional office to at least two Northern Nevada defense contractors for cash, casino chips and a celebrity Caribbean cruise. (The matter is still pending.)

Set aside all of that. This is an indictment of Gibbons as governor.

Count One: Lying to and misleading the public

Gibbons's administration was literally born in a lie.

Instead of waiting until the usual swearing-in on the first Monday in January -- which just happened to be New Year's Day in 2007, Gibbons elected to summon the chief justice of the state Supreme Court, William Maupin, to the living room of his Reno home so he could be sworn in precisely at midnight. He even hurried his wife along with a curt, "Any time, Dawn."

Maupin started reading the oath a few seconds before midnight, and, according to one Gibbons aide, the governor finished swearing to uphold the constitution at 12 seconds after the witching hour.

Why stay up late instead of waiting to be sworn in with the rest of the state's newly elected constitutional officers? Here's what he told the public in a statement:

"'Nevadans should be assured that their leaders are in place, ready for any emergency,' stated Gibbons. 'These highly experienced and qualified individuals are now on duty to provide that assurance.' Although state agencies know of no credible threat, recent world events and New Year's celebrations raise the potential for problems during Nevada's first government transition since the terror attacks of 9-11. Governor-elect Gibbons chose to assume office as soon as possible to fill these key positions in state government."

(The key positions, director of the Department of Public Safety and director of Homeland Security, would be filled by Phillip Galeoto and Larry Martines, respectively. Galeoto, particularly, would raise eyebrows, as he'd left the Reno Police Department under a cloud. [See sidebar.] Martines stepped down in July, and Galeoto quit in February.)

The thing is, Gibbons was lying. His swearing in had nothing to do with public safety, threats or the off chance that Osama bin Laden was waiting for the "first government transition" in Nevada to stage an attack. It was all about undoing the work of another man, now-former Gov. Kenny Guinn.

Count Two: Instigating a constitutional crisis

Gibbons had been making noises after his election but before his inauguration about "reviewing" the appointments of Guinn, with whom Gibbons had been feuding since 2003. (That year, Gibbons used his traditionally nonpartisan address to the Legislature to attack Guinn for proposing a tax increase of more than $800 million. Guinn never forgot the slight and even skipped his successor's swearing in.)

Before he'd left, Guinn had appointed his old chief of staff, Keith Munro, to the Gaming Control Board, effective at midnight on Dec. 31. The control board is a critical regulatory agency, one of two charged with overseeing Nevada's casino industry.

Gibbons, however, had other ideas. He wanted Randall Sayre, the control board's chief of investigations, for the slot, which traditionally is filled by a representative of law enforcement.

The dilemma: An old court ruling that said an outgoing governor was still governor until the new guy was sworn in. So that meant Guinn would still have the powers of the executive -- including the right to appoint members to the control board -- until Gibbons took the oath on the morning of Jan. 1 as scheduled.

So Gibbons jumped the clock, and was sworn in at midnight. Ergo, Gibbons was governor at midnight and the appointment was his to make, since the term to which Guinn had appointed Munro didn't become vacant until the clock struck 12.

(The simple matter of the 12-second gap between midnight and the time Gibbons finished uttering the oath of office wasn't fully debated, perhaps mercifully so.)

So Gibbons tapped Sayre for the job, a job that was, technically and practically, already filled by Munro. And then it got nasty.

"This was a political appointment made by Gov. Guinn without the interests of the people in mind," charged Melissa Subbotin, Gibbons's congressional press secretary, who'd moved to Nevada with him after the election. "Mr. Gibbons feels that moving forward with Keith Munro's politically motivated appointment would be undermining the tradition of the Gaming Control Board. That would be moving back to the dark ages when politics and personal interests ruled the Gaming Control Board. This administration is not for sale."

In addition to implying that previous administrations were for sale, Subbotin's sweeping remark called the integrity of one of Nevada's most critical public bodies into question. Whether Gibbons saw the remarks and agreed with them or not, the governor never corrected, retracted or modified the statement in any way.

In the end, Munro saved the day, resigning after a soft landing was arranged for him in a newly created "chief of staff" job in Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto's office. Sayre was then seated on the board, but not before the controversy grew serious enough for Chairman Dennis Neilander to say he'd hold the first meeting of the control board in 2007 with only two members, lest decisions be in legal jeopardy because of the crisis.

Had Munro not resigned, however, Cortez Masto would have been forced to provide a legal ruling to determine precisely who was governor at midnight and thus who had the right to appoint whom to the seat. In the meantime, a key regulatory board would have been crippled and its business could have ground to a halt while the finer points of constitutional law were debated.

And that was just the new governor's first week.

"We're just getting the first glimpse of Jim Gibbons and his world," said R&R Partners President Billy Vassiliadis at the time. He was typically prescient.

Count Three: Lack of facility with policy

Gibbons has never been known as a master of policy. In fact, he's more often known for a startling ignorance of it.

Faced with a $3.8 billion shortfall in the state's road-building budget (it's since grown to more than $6 billion), Gibbons suggested selling rights to the water underneath the state's highways. The proceeds could be "pretty doggone close" to the $3.8 billion needed for roads, he said. In fact, the amount Nevada could glean topped out at $120 million, according to state estimates. The governor was only wrong by 96.9 percent.

Gibbons worked hard on, and confessed some anxiety about, his first State of the State speech, delivered just 20 days after he was inaugurated. The centerpiece therein: An "empowerment schools" plan that decentralized management of local campuses to principals, who made hiring and firing and merit pay decisions, as well as extended the school day. The "powerful program" was testing and "successfully working in New York City, Houston and San Francisco," Gibbons told the Legislature.

Two days later, Gibbons attended a class designed to outline the empowerment program that he'd urged the Legislature to spend $60 million on. "I am here, like the rest of us, to learn about the program," Gibbons said.

The following week, lawmakers were still waiting for details on the program. Gibbons, it was announced, would be touring some empowered classrooms to see them firsthand. In other words, Gibbons had budgeted money and asked the Legislature to approve a program that he'd never seen and did not know much about.

In August, Gibbons went to Mexico, whereupon he promptly announced he'd been told about a program in which the Mexican government would pay the health insurance costs of Mexican citizens -- including illegal immigrants -- living in the United States.

As it turned out, the Health Windows Program simply referred immigrants to low-cost or pro-bono health care to help them avoid having to seek costly health care in an emergency room.

Count Four: Placing philosophy over people

In an interview in early December, Gibbons told News ONE anchorman Jeff Gillan that he first learned of the state's serious budget problems on Oct. 15. But the governor attended a cabinet meeting later that day with a detailed spreadsheet of potential cuts, deadlines for agency heads to submit their suggestions and other actions, including a hiring freeze.

Initially, Gibbons said, certain state agencies were to be spared budget cuts, including K-12 education, the Department of Public Safety and Prisons. But later, instead of saddling the rest of state government with an 8 percent cut, Gibbons elected to impose a 4.5 percent cut on most agencies, including schools. The news threw local superintendents into a panic, since the school year had already begun, and some money that could easily have been cut earlier in the year had already been spent.

And if the public wanted to see the documents Gibbons was using to make critical budget choices, it was out of luck. Even though the Legislative Counsel Bureau said the documents were public information, and even though the Gibbons administration's claim of the "deliberative process privilege" was wafer-thin, Gibbons still fought an Open Records Law request from the Reno Gazette-Journal, filed in December. A judge sided with Gibbons, and the newspaper decided not to appeal.

But one hardly needs the documents to follow the strategy: Cut. Cut again. And then cut more. The governor's no-tax pledge -- a central campaign them repeated like a mantra with special relish before Republican audiences -- is inviolate. Despite the urging of university Chancellor Jim Rogers, members of the media, ex-governors and even generous donors to his own campaign, Gibbons has steadfastly refused to even consider a tax increase.

"I have maintained that government can maintain itself and actually operate on its current, existing revenues, and will continue with that until I'm shown it's impossible to do," Gibbons told the Associated Press in December.

On March 31, as Gibbons gathered with lawmakers to present even more bad news about the state's economy -- a deficit that's grown to nearly $900 million -- his philosophy was intact: There would be cuts, but no taxes. He said he'd try to spare education, public safety and health and human services from further cuts, but that's a promise he'd made, and broken, before.

Recalling his 10 years as governor starting in 1989 -- when tight times forced budget cuts that were just as controversial as today's -- ex-Gov. Bob Miller told the Review-Journal in December: "I don't think our budget was as restricted as the one they have now. It seems like it already has been pared down and there is no fat left to cut."

What is left to cut? A January list of cuts accompanying a Review-Journal story saw reductions in programs aimed at helping children with autism, people with traumatic brain injuries, infants afflicted by fetal alcohol syndrome and the mentally ill, as well as capping enrollment in Nevada Check-Up, which provides health care to kids. The final line of that story: "Gibbons has vowed not to support tax increases."

Count Five: Subverting campaign finance law

Coming into office with preexisting scandals, Gibbons had attorney's fees to pay. How he did it is a study in semantics.

Gibbons, unbeknownst to the public, created a legal defense fund previously unrecognized in Nevada law. There were no laws against such funds, but there were no laws allowing them, either. They simply didn't exist.

Gibbons's fund collected more than $200,000, sometimes from people who had already given the maximum amount to Gibbons's political coffers. The money wasn't reported, and it was collected during the legislative session, when traditional campaign fundraising is prohibited.

It was only after political columnist and television host Jon Ralston asked Gibbons how he was paying for his legal help that the governor filed an amended financial disclosure document, detailing "gifts" from legal defense fund participants. The rationale: It wasn't a political fund. It was a legal defense fund. Therefore, the rules don't apply.

Bear in mind: Under a 2002 attorney general's opinion, a public official could use campaign funds to pay attorneys. Instead, Gibbons chose to create his own legally murky fund.

Gibbons defended himself by saying any violations were innocent.

"It was an unintentional oversight," he said at the time. "I didn't intentionally break any rules. I would never intentionally break any rules. It was unintentional."

But that seemed to change a day later: "The uproar over this legal defense fund is completely driven by a few individuals to make an issue where none exists. This fund was established on the advice of preeminent and experienced lawyers, to comply with all rules during the campaign. It was not then, and is not now, a campaign fund," he said.

Well, which is it? An innocent violation of the law or a well-considered, legally sound fund set up by experienced lawyers?

"I realize that there are some media and political naysayers who will try to create a story or controversy every day, to defeat the goals of my administration, or just for the sport of it," the governor added.

Two days later, Gibbons settled on a new excuse: He was busy setting up his new administration and forgot to include the legal defense fund on his disclosure form. He also announced that day the fund was closing down.

Secretary of State Ross Miller, who sent Gibbons two letters demanding the governor provide more information about the matter, quickly closed his investigation, after learning that checks were made out to the Gibbons legal defense fund, and not to a campaign fund. Because there was no language about legal defense funds in the law, Miller ruled, there was no action he could take to prove a violation.

"I think it satisfies our inquiries, but it highlights the need to strengthen the campaign finance statutes," Miller said.

Indeed: During the 2007 Legislature, state Sen. Dina Titus (who'd lost the governor's mansion to Gibbons in the 2006 election) passed a law regulating legal defense funds. Call it Jim's Law, which isn't too harsh, considering that Gibbons opened a new legal defense fund on the exact day they became legal.

Count Six: Yielding power of government to private interests

As the foreclosure crisis roiled Southern Nevada's once-hot housing market, Gibbons told the Nevada Development Authority he'd call a summit at the Sawyer state office building to deal with it. "We owe it to our businesses, employers and working families to ensure their wealth is protected to the greatest extent possible," he said.

The summit, however, was actually held at the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce offices in the Howard Hughes Center. A handful of home lenders -- including Bank of America, Countrywide Home Loans and Wells Fargo Bank -- attended, but a representative of the Nevada Fair Housing Center was asked to leave.

Gibbons, who refused to label the crisis a "crisis," emerged from the closed-door session to tell homeowners not to look to the state for help.

"I'm convinced the way out of this is addressing each individual problem, one at a time," Gibbons said. "There's no silver-bullet solution. We didn't get into this overnight and it won't end overnight. It will take us some months to get out of it."

Meanwhile, then and now, Nevada leads the nation in home foreclosures.

If it seems like the Gibbons administration has its eye on money that normally goes to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, it's because key Gibbons backers have had their eyes on it for far longer.

The transition team led by Las Vegas Sands President Bill Weidner recommended grabbing room tax money otherwise used by the LVCVA to market Las Vegas and run the convention center (a competitor, by the way, to the Sands Convention Center). But that was just a recommendation, a line on paper that didn't even find agreement among other panel members. (One, MGM Mirage Chairman and CEO Terry Lanni, sarcastically suggested that if the issue was national security, Sands would suggest taking LVCVA money.)

Later, however, it got more serious. Gibbons formally endorsed the proposal in May, and when he finally did get around to presenting his roads plan to the Legislature, it called on a contribution from the LVCVA. The elected and appointed officials who run that agency objected at first, saying it was a bad precedent and money was needed to pay off bonds. But they finally relented, agreeing to contribute $20 million per year toward road construction.

With that, a longtime goal of Sands owner Sheldon Adelson was realized, through the efforts of a governor he helped put in office.

On another front, Gibbons was only too happy to oblige in January when state Sen. Warren Hardy came to him with a suggestion: Why not ban project-labor agreements on state construction projects?

Hardy, speaking apparently in his other role, president of the Associated Builders and Contractors, persuaded Gibbons to sign an executive order barring the agreements, which set wages in exchange for an agreement not to take labor action on projects. Critics, including Hardy's group, contend the agreements drive up the cost of projects and discriminate against nonunion contractors.

(Hardy, meanwhile, faces a lengthy ethics complaint that alleges he violated ethics laws by voting on matters that benefit the contractors in his group.)

Count Seven: The hepatitis crisis

Perhaps no other issue ties together so many of Gibbons's bad traits -- procrastination, inconstancy, ignorance of the political landscape and tone-deafness -- than the health-care crisis that broke in late February.

It was centered in the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada, run by Dr. Dipak Desai, a contributor to Gibbons's campaign and a member of his health-care transition team.

Desai is alleged to have ordered the reuse of single-dose vials of medicine and syringes to save money at his clinics and, potentially, bill Medicare for a new bottle of medicine when an old one was used. The FBI, Metro and state health authorities are investigating the allegations.

After inspectors from the Southern Nevada Health District discovered a "cluster" of hepatitis C cases, they traced the infections to Desai's clinic, where they observed the reuse practices. It resulted in the largest notification of potentially infected patients in U.S. history, 40,000. And the numbers are likely to go even higher. The health district told the community about the issue on Feb. 27, although Gibbons later acknowledged that the state knew about the situation starting on Jan. 2.

So for the first two months of the year, Gibbons did nothing.

On March 6, a week after the news broke, he issued a news release, saying all the resources of the state would be available to help with the investigation. He faced charges that he'd opposed hiring more health inspectors during the 2007 Legislature (he had), but he noted the state Bureau of Licensure and Certification had unfilled positions. Even with the money, the agency may not have been up to full staff, and even if it had, there's no guarantee that the scandal would have been uncovered sooner.

But then the games began.

On March 11, Gibbons was quoted in the Review-Journal saying that "If they [doctors] knowingly endangered the lives of people, that does constitute a criminal act" and that anybody guilty of that should be "held accountable." Fair enough, even if his quotes on the next day to the Las Vegas Sun were somewhat more flippant. "We do not have enough highway patrolmen to stop everybody who makes a mistake," Gibbons said. "We could inspect [surgical centers] annually and then pretty soon, have we done overkill?"

To be fair, speeding doesn't expose other drivers to hepatitis C or HIV.

Then things turned truly bizarre.

After three doctors on the state Board of Medical Examiners recused themselves March 14 from the case because of ties to Desai, the R-J ran a piece March 16 about the political connections of some members of the medical community. That same day, Gibbons called for the trio -- Drs. Daniel McBride, Javaid Anwar and Sohail Anjum -- to quit, along with board Executive Director Tony Clark.

Here, Gibbons seems to have made a political miscalculation on a grand scale. McBride is a close friend of U.S. Sen. John Ensign, who, along with U.S. Sen. Harry Reid and Guinn, who'd appointed the men in the first place, would publicly break with Gibbons and encourage the doctors not to resign.

But Gibbons was adamant.

"What we have is a public health-care crisis, and what we need is public health-care confidence," Gibbons said on March 17. "That is why I am taking decisive action to restore public trust."

Suddenly, another controversy flared alongside the first, larger problem. The doctors refused to quit, saying their reputations would be tarnished. Clark said Gibbons was trying to settle an old score from their Nevada Air National Guard days, when Gibbons was forced to quit as vice commander of the guard.

Gibbons tried negotiating, saying on March 24 he'd publicly declare the resignations had nothing to do with Desai or unprofessional conduct. Perhaps sensing a wane of gubernatorial credibility, however, the doctors refused.

Ultimately, Gibbons was forced to give up.

"The decision was made that in the best interests of restoring public faith in the health-care system, we shouldn't let this drag on," Gibbons's press secretary, Ben Kieckhefer, said March 28.

Does that sound familiar? Indeed, Gibbons had used almost the exact same language about restoring public faith in the system as a reason for calling for the resignations in the first place. So, in the space of two weeks, the governor had said two diametrically opposed actions would be taken for the exact same purpose.

In the meantime, the crisis continues.

Closing arguments

We may all like to think that anyone invested with the power of the governor's office will eventually feel the weight of the job on his (or, someday, her) shoulders, and act accordingly. It's a weight that leavens partisanship, hard-fought principles and even long-established visions of reality.

In that way, politicians are transformed into leaders, who rise to the challenge of carrying the future of the state in their hands.

We'd like to think that, but Gibbons is living proof it doesn't happen every time.

The mere fact that his tenure thus far has been bookended by the exact same kind of problem -- arguments over the makeup of state boards, based on something other than the quality of the board member -- shows he hasn't learned a thing in the 15 months he's had the helm of Nevada.

His no-tax philosophy, while certainly his electoral lifeline, will eventually cause real damage to Nevada, especially its most vulnerable citizens. And that damage will be made all the worse given that the state's parsimonious budgeting means Nevada starts from zero on its best day. The governor must know that hewing to his philosophy means the suffering of real people. His indifference to that is at once heartbreaking and maddening.

Republicans and Democrats alike, rural and urban residents alike, should be able to see Gibbons has neither the grasp of policy, the instinct for politics or the earnestness to learn either.

In the final analysis, there really is no there there.

Because of that, and because it doesn't appear that things can or will change, the governor should do the right thing, assuming he even cares to know what that is. Whether he does or not, one thing is certain: It's time.

Time for Jim Gibbons to go.

Steve Sebelius is editor of CityLife. he can be reached at 871-6780, ext. 306, or at SSebelius@lvcitylife.com.