With so much focus being placed on government spending, partisanship, budgets and taxes, elected officials find themselves even more in the spotlight than usual. Recently, elected officials representing Nevada met at the law offices of Holland & Hart in Las Vegas to discuss some of the issues they face.
Connie Brennan, publisher of Nevada Business Magazine, served as moderator for the event. These monthly meetings are designed to bring leaders together to discuss issues pertinent to their industries. Following is a condensed version of the roundtable discussion.
What is the public perception of elected officials?
Kim Wallin, Controller: I think right now there is a sentiment amongst voters that if you are in office, you should be kicked out whether you are doing a good job or not. That’s a real concern to me, that voters will not go and get educated to find out if the people that have been representing them are doing a good job or not. They just want to vote people out. You need to look at what people are doing and not just automatically assume that if you’re in office you’re doing a bad job. I’ll admit that there are some that are doing a bad job, but by and large, I think, people are doing a good job. The best job we can.
Mike Schneider, State Senator: Every year I go out and help campaign for people and it’s just very volatile out there in the neighborhoods. You come across foreclosed homes, I guess there are 40,000 vacant foreclosed homes in Las Vegas right now, bank-owned. So, the people are angry, they’re just angry. They really don’t know what they’re angry at, but you see the ads on TV saying Titus will be thrown out and Harry Reid will be thrown out if they vote for some bill and it’s making them angrier. They have no idea what’s in the bill or how legislation works but they’re just angry.
Ellen Spiegel, State Assemblywoman: I’ve been going out and talking to constituents as well. The thing that’s interesting is as soon as you start engaging people and speaking with them and talking to them about their concerns, a lot of the anger seems to dissipate. It doesn’t matter what party people belong to because I knock on everybody’s door. I represent everybody and what I was finding was that as we engaged and started talking about the issues, people’s anger was melting a little bit. If we engage people on a one-to-one basis and they understand that we address their fears and believe in us personally, then the general atmosphere will dissipate a little bit.
Bob Cashell, Mayor, City of Reno: People just have a distrust of government right now and it’s really a shame. I’ve got a very high approval rating, but yet when I go out beating on doors, some of them get very ugly. I don’t know whether we as elected officials got out of touch with some of them, but it’s a tough thing to get back involved in it. Real tough. I think some of it has to do with the economy, but I think they’re just tired of what’s going on. They don’t feel that at the national level we’re being told the truth and so that washes down with all of us in the state and local levels. They just don’t think we’re being honest with them.
Mark Menendo, State Assemblyman: People are afraid right now. In my district, I walk before election, after election and during election. I try to do all I can to keep in touch. You go to neighborhoods and you see foreclosed homes, people are losing their money and they’re trying to figure out how to balance their own budgets. At the same time, they’re worried about the education cuts that we just did again at the legislature. They’re worried about whether or not they are going to be able to put food on the table because they don’t know if they’re going to have a job next week. It is so widespread and it’s not just the economy, but it’s the bigger picture. It’s the whole education. They’re fearful of their future for their kids. They’re fearful of their own future and their own family. As far as the sentiment, there are some legislators that actually shut off their legislative e-mail and I don’t understand that. You get an e-mail and you follow it up with a door knock, people appreciate that.
What are some of the positives and negatives to term limits?
Wallin: I have concerns about term limits because there are going to be so many new people coming and they’re all gung ho saying, “I can make a difference and make these changes.” I have concerns that there’s not going to be enough senior people there to mentor these people along and help them out. You can’t just go in there and things get changed overnight.
Schneider: Over the years since I’ve been in, I’ve seen politicians over promise and under deliver. They think that they can go in and make all these changes and set the course right. Everything is so simple. It’s not simple to make these changes and they’re almost impossible to change. I think that we, as politicians, especially the new ones coming in, overpromise and it’s not really their fault. Our government is designed to move slow. It really is, government can’t move fast. It has to move slow because you don’t want these big sweeping changes all the time. It’s a very tedious process and it’s hard to change how things go.
Spiegel: I actually thing term limits are a good thing. At some point you get people, and I’m in my first term, so my opinion might change over time, but you do get people who say things like, “We tried that 20 years ago and it didn’t work” or “We’ve tried that in the past.” Ideas will just get shut down because it didn’t work for whatever reason in the past, except Nevada isn’t the same Nevada it was 20 years ago. We’ve grown a lot, industries have changed, our economy has changed, our infrastructure has changed and sometimes we need to have fresh eyes looking at the same issues, but perhaps slightly differently.
Schneider: We have term limits. The Assembly forever has had almost 20 percent, up to a third turnover, every time. So, you’re getting term limits in there. The Senate’s been a little slower on term limits.
Ross Miller, Secretary of State: I don’t personally agree with term limits, but if the public feels that strongly about them being in place, then they should have them. If they’ve overwhelmingly decided that, left to their own devices, they don’t trust their ability to throw people out and this is the only way to get rid of entrenched politicians, then they should be allowed to exercise that right. That was the tough decision I was faced with when I had to issue the challenges defending term limits last cycle was this personal conflict. What it came down to was the fact that the public had overwhelmingly voted to put term limits in place and I felt it necessary to defend it.
Cashell: I think that we as citizens have the right to vote. But, when you only have 30 or 40 percent of the people show up to vote and then term limits, it just makes others that much lazier so they don’t go vote. We’re having such a turnover.
What are the realities of being in office?
Cashell: I’ve never seen the viciousness that I’ve seen in the last two sessions of the legislature. It’s scary to see how vicious people are and what they’re doing. A lot of it has to do with our own ego and it really bothers me when I see what’s going on over there and the way they talk and act to each other.
Schneider: I think a lot of this partisanship started in D.C. and it’s come out to the states now. They don’t get together with each other. Caucuses have caused a lot of that. I’ve noticed that in the Senate over the years. You get together with Democrats, Republicans get together with Republicans and you don’t interact. A lot of that is really bad because you can’t exchange ideas. It used to be you’d go out and have a glass of wine at night and the lobbyists were there and everybody would sit around, Democrats and Republicans. Pretty soon the lobbyists are gone and you sit there and you work things out, get along, get to know each other. Now, everybody goes to their apartment and hides and they don’t interact with each other, so there’s no free flow of ideas.
Cashell: Then people don’t want to be washed out in the newspaper every afternoon or on TV every night. When you’re in public life, it’s unbelievable. I’m so paranoid about doing something that somebody said, “Why do you raise money, you don’t have a good opponent?” It costs about $15- to $20,000 dollars a year to go to all the dinners that everybody expects you to be at and all the functions you’ve got to do. You have to raise an exorbitant amount of money, whether you have an opponent or not. Businesses used to invite you to go to dinner. They don’t invite you now. If they do, you’re scared to go with them. If you go with a bunch of lawyers, then, there are the lobbyists, they’re trashing you the other way.
Schneider: I’ve also noticed that when I first got to the Assembly, you ran, then the session is over and nothing happened until the next year. Now, the session is over in June and by the end of June, the Chamber of Commerce is calling, AGC is calling. They want to know who you have running and who they’re supporting and they want to go meet your candidates. You’re still trying to come down from the session and you haven’t even thought about who’s going to run. And, oh, by the way, we can’t get anybody to run anyhow. Who’s going to run for the $7,800 or whatever we get paid every other year. It’s hard to get people to run.
What is the price to get in and stay in office?
Cashell: It’s real expensive. When I ran my first campaign for the Board of Regents at the university, I was amazed it cost me $250- to $300,000 and I’m sitting there thinking this is ridiculous. I ran a statewide race and it didn’t cost me but $300,000 and now it’s just ridiculous. We used to be able to go out and throw barbecues and do things like that. It’s very expensive with TV, newspaper, radio and everything else you’ve got to do now. Anybody that signs up against you, as far as I’m concerned, once they put their name on that ledger right next to me, I see a big old rattlesnake looking me in the face and I’m going to get prepared. I don’t care if I know I can beat him. Just as soon as I get comfortable and sit back, I’ll get my ears cleaned.
Schneider: I have my license plates on my car and people at the grocery store will stop me and say, “I’d like to get one of those plates. How much does that cost?” I say, “Oh, about a half a million dollars.” It’s half a million dollars and every afternoon and all day on Saturday knocking on doors. My first assembly race was about $35,000, now to run for the State Senate, it’s a quarter of a million dollars.
Miller: It’s awfully expensive. I think the thing that most people don’t think about in terms of the public perception is, it’s very time consuming. It’s taking away from the time that we could ordinarily be spending on the people’s business. A million dollars doesn’t just magically appear in your bank account. You’ve got to be actively out there and make phone calls and meet with donors. Ultimately it’s time consuming and because the races are so expensive, it becomes very disconcerting to the public when they see that these races cost so much money because they look at is as perceived influence. Unfortunately, in Nevada, we’ve got some of the worst campaign finance laws in the entire country. That isn’t beneficial either. If there was a better model out there, I’d definitely be in favor of moving towards it. The easiest, I think is to move towards more transparency, something we fought for in the last couple of legislative sessions. There’s just no good reasons not to implement the kind of reforms that I think are necessary.
How can more transparency be achieved?
Miller: The easiest thing that needs to be changed is to require that our campaign expense reports be filed electronically so that they are searchable in a database. There are no good reasons for that not to happen. It’s done on a federal level. You can search by donor, by street address. With technology out there, it’s probably the simplest step to lead towards transparency. All the outside groups that come in and give Nevada “F’s” cite that as the biggest reason, that Nevada does not mandate electronic file. It’s an excuse to say that it’s burdensome to require electronic filing or that they don’t have access to computers to be able to file these things. It’s just an excuse to not move forward and I don’t think we can afford to do that today.
Schneider: I think that changes as the older legislators retire. The technology is the killer for the older legislators that are in. When they’re gone, it’s going to change.
Wallin: I don’t have anything to hide, so I file electronically. Whereas people, I think, purposely file on paper because they can kind of scribble and you don’t really know who it is. I’d like to see us go to a point where if we filed electronically, we could also go and tie the campaign contributions into contracts. That would be true transparency.
