Educating Republicans

You couldn’t have missed the enormous red letters: “Taxes. They’re not about education.” This particular ad—the most recent in a series of around half a dozen weirdly misinformed full-page rants—ran in the Reno-Sparks section of the Reno Gazette-Journal on Sunday and Monday.

The ads were paid for by Las Vegas millionaire Robert Bigelow, who’s also the founder of the National Institute for Discovery Science. NIDS delves into such paranormal activities as UFOs, animal mutilations, poltergeists, Bigfoot, oversized wolves and cat abductions in the Nevada outback.

Bigelow also heads an aerospace firm that wants to make space tourism a commercial reality. This firm is financed by Bigelow’s proceeds from other businesses and investments, including a chain of more than 20 weekly hotels in Nevada, Arizona and Texas.

Why is someone like Bigelow so worried about new taxes that he’d finance these full-page ads in Reno and Las Vegas newspapers?

Seems kind of obvious, however Bigelow declined, through his secretary, to be interviewed for this story. He deferred questions to Nevada Business’s legislative henchmen, Assemblymen Bob Beers (R-Las Vegas) or Lynn Hettrick (R-Gardnerville).

The ads articulate the businessman’s position as well as anything, though.

“Governor Guinn and Speaker Perkins are trying to pull the wool over your eyes,” the ad declared. “Don’t Let Perkins/Guinn Hold Our Children Hostage.”

The ad invited folks to join an anti-tax march in Carson Wednesday.

By 9 a.m. Sunday, the ad had provoked a counter-march.

“Anti-tax groups in Las Vegas plan to bus in protestors … to show widespread support for opening the budget and cutting what they call ‘waste and bureaucracy,’ i.e. welfare, Medicaid and other human services programs we call essential,” wrote Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie in a mass e-mail. “To counter this protest and to show widespread support for our position, i.e. ‘the free ride is over and big business/banks need to start paying their fair share,’ we need as many people as possible to come to the Legislative building at noon on Wednesday. We don’t have money to bus up people from Las Vegas, so we will be depending on our allies in Carson City and the Reno area … I know you’re all tired of trekking to Carson but it is vital that you do it one more time on Wednesday.”

The battle lines were drawn, again.

Three weeks ago, the Nevada Legislature’s 2003 session ended with most of a state budget—minus school funding—and no plan to pay for it. A special session ensued. No compromise was reached on what kind of revenue plan might bridge a budget gap of about $860 million. Gov. Guinn sent legislators home. The fun resumed Wednesday as legislators reconvened once again, this time with less than a week before a new fiscal year begins for the state.

Assembly Republicans led by Hettrick pledge not to back off one single inch on their agenda: to reopen budgets and trim already-approved spending. Gov. Guinn vows to guard the budget on behalf of the people of Nevada who use state services—all of us.

Like any war, the winner may be the entity that wields the most effective propaganda machine. Schools, uninsured 8-year-olds and working families who rely on food stamps just don’t have the same kind of advertising budget as Bigelow or Vegas import-export mogul George Harris, who launched a recent radio ad campaign calling for a Guinn recall.

For the likes of Harris and Bigelow, a bit of investment up front may save them the thousands they’d end up paying into state coffers. To date, their favorite argument is based on scaring us with the idea that Nevada government is growing at an obscene rate.

Many of the specious pro-business arguments—from a purported increase of 900 “new” government jobs to a “33 percent” increase in state spending—can be traced to a Web site maintained by Beers.

What’s the reality?

“I do not think that any reasonable person, if they had the facts, would think government in Nevada is bloated,” says Nevada Budget Director Perry Comeaux. “Is there waste? Sure, there’s waste in every bureaucracy. Is it significant? No. And I certainly don’t think it’s more than you’d find in any organization.”

Here’s a weird exercise in illogic. It’s supposed to horrify us that the state’s general fund will increase by (what a Bigelow ad calculates to be) 32 percent for the next biennium when the state population is growing only by 6 percent.

For starters, this is like comparing apples and diesel trucks. Why would the numbers of a budget increase directly correlate to a population increase? The rate at which population grows has a direct impact on some areas—schools, for one—but there are other factors at play. Significant funding shifts have left some state programs that once relied on outside funds with nowhere to turn.

For example, the state has not increased the availability of its Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program. However, the state is still reeling from the impact of a huge post-Sept. 11, 2001, increase in need. It is true that, since the TANF program hit a record high in the number of caseloads last year, its caseload has dropped nominally. But the program also sucked up all of its federal block grant funds, its own rainy day funds and then some.

“Our economy went to hell in a handbasket,” Comeaux explains. “Our tourist traffic hit the deck. Our [welfare] rolls really swelled, and we could have cut the eligibility requirements. But if we pull in our horns when the citizens need us, well, that’s not what the governor wanted to do.”

That’s why the TANF program will have to rely more on the state’s general fund than it did in the past.

That’s just one example.

“There’s little new spending in the budget that the Legislature has already approved,” Comeaux says. “There just isn’t a lot.”

Gov. Guinn, far from being the enemy of “lean government,” as Beers suggests at his Web site, began cutting the bejeepers out of the state government from the time he took office. For several years, he has maintained a hiring freeze that forces state agencies to justify filling any positions lost to attrition. About a year ago, more than 9 percent of state jobs were unfilled, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. Remaining state workers were doing double duty in nearly all departments except those deemed necessary to client services or critical to public safety.

It’s said that morale among state workers is at an all-time low as duties increase, raises are deferred (or non-existent) and employees contribute a larger share of health coverage costs. To top that off, there’s public scorn for these employees who are deemed part of the whole nauseating state machine.

Speaking of the number of state employees, the Beers/Bigelow contingency has expressed outrage at the number of what it calls “new” state workers being added by what they consider an overfed state government.

Beers’ site links to a list of new positions to be filled in the coming biennium. What Beers fails to mention is that the Legislature, at the same time 916 or so new positions were planned, eliminated funding for another 350 or so jobs. Most of these were positions that had already gone unfilled during Guinn’s hiring freeze.

“The governor took the position that, if they’ve been doing without them for this long, we can eliminate them,” Comeaux says.

Of the new positions added in the 2003 Legislative session, about 157 were approved beforehand by the interim Finance Committee. If a state agency, for example, received a federal or corporate grant, it would go before the committee and ask for an OK to accept the money. Often the grant money would require the agency to add staff to administer the funds. This costs the state nothing.

Of the positions eliminated, 70 percent were funded through the state’s general fund.

Of those added, only 35 percent are funded through the general fund.

The total net increase in staff is 3.5 percent, and Comeaux notes that a chunk of these new staffers will be working at the Department of Motor Vehicles “to keep the governor’s commitment to keep the lines down.”

Is a 3.5 percent staffing increase effusive?

“Not only is it not outrageous, it’s a pretty conservative increase,” Comeaux says.

Especially since the state’s population is growing by 6 percent.

Finally, higher education. Some Assembly Republicans scoff at the idea that Nevada universities might ever seek the prestige associated with being research institutions. In these Republicans’ minds, a professor who’s not teaching five classes per semester is a slacker.

Beers writes: “More than half of UNLV’s professors teach less than three classes, a workload decreased from five classes in deference to UNLV’s goal of being a ‘research’ institution. Write your senator or assemblyman right now and help stop the insanity!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

To be fair, it should be noted that a few Assembly Republicans have never attended universities and wouldn’t know a “research” university if they convened in one for another self-congratulatory Republican caucus meeting. Like Republican Don Gustavson, who lists his occupation as “professional driver.” Gustavson has a bit of junior college under his belt, and that’s more than John Carpenter, whose formal book learnin’ appears to have ended upon graduation from White Pine High School in Ely.

Another scathing indictment from Beers’ site: “The staggering $238 million increase in university funding proposed by the governor was based on the wildly unrealistic projection of a 16.1 percent enrollment increase.”

“Wildly unrealistic"?

Actually, the increase in budgeted enrollment over the next two years is 19.7 percent, according to the Nevada Faculty Alliance, who ran a smaller black-and-white ad on a page facing Bigelow’s ad in Monday’s Reno Gazette-Journal.

According to the Governor’s Office, the number of full-time-equivalent students enrolled in Nevada colleges and university increased by 15.7 percent from fiscal year 2000-01 to 2002-03. That number is expected to increase by 7 percent each year of the next biennium. (Thank you, Millennium Scholarship.)

Like K-12 schools, the colleges are trying to keep up with rising health care and utility costs and with government mandates—like a doubling of nursing enrollments to meet Nevada’s nursing shortage.

Well, there it is. With days left in the fiscal year, compromise is essential but doesn’t seem likely. Hettrick’s a stubborn fellow who insists on calling the entire disastrous lawmaking venture “a purely philosophical disagreement.” Tell that to the principal of a local elementary school who can’t hire teachers.

Philosophy has consequences.