In radio, TV and newspaper ads, the Center for Union Facts portrays the Department of Motor Vehicles as the realm of well-paid, priggish bureaucrats. It picks on teachers for kicking too much money to their union bosses. "Union chiefs have greased the system," one newspaper ad warns.

But union leaders say the organization behind the ads — the Center for Union Facts — is dead wrong.

"We believe that unionfacts.com does not have the facts," said Jeanine Lake, senior employee representative with Nevada Employees Association. "If they did, they would know that (Nevada employees) are without collective bargaining, and every benefit and salary issue is a legislative decision."

Mary Ella Holloway, president of the Clark County Education Association, says: "Considering the fact that we're having a difficult time attracting teachers to Nevada because of low pay, I think this is a little out of line."

The media campaign in Nevada was designed to be generic, said Sarah Longwell, spokeswoman for the Washington-based organization. The same ads are also running in Michigan, Oregon and Montana.

"We're not really targeting specific unions," Longwell said. "This is a campaign to educate taxpayers about public sector unions. I don't know in this case that any one union is particularly worse than the other."

The center plans to launch a national campaign, but for the moment it is using up $1 million from undisclosed donors to run ads in the four states. The four states represent four different types of media markets, so the center can test what will work on a national scale, she said.

All four are "places where the idea of public sector unions was a hot topic," Longwell said.

The states are also all considering a government spending cap. Nevada's is TASC, the Tax and Spending Control measure that will be voted upon in November. It would limit spending in the state to a formula based on inflation and population growth.

Holloway is suspicious: "The basic purpose of the ad campaign is to support TASC, which I think is terribly detrimental to education," she said.

Bob Adney, executive director of TASC, denied any connection with the Center for Union Facts. He said he found out about the ads at the Americans for Limited Government Conference in Chicago, at which he sat on a panel with one of the center's leaders.

"We had nothing to do with them," he said. "I didn't know about the ads until they had already started running."

The Center for Union Facts never discloses contributors because "union leaders specifically have a long history of intimidation and coercion," Longwell said.

The center was founded in February by Richard Berman, a former labor lawyer who is known for similar attack campaigns against activist groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

In less than seven months, Union Facts has compiled a database of union salaries, unfair labor practice charges and political contributions. Longwell said the organization is not anti-union, but rather anti-abuse by union leaders.

"We would like to see more responsibility taken by union bosses for what taxpayers are going to have to ultimately pay for," she said. "Rather than negotiating things that are really unreasonable, they should think ahead, plan ahead and think about the cost to the taxpayers."

The ad campaign, which will likely be finished within a month, directs people to state-specific sites, such as www.nevadaunionfacts.com, which has a narrative that attacks several unions.

But state officials say most of the information is misleading or untrue:

• One part implies that "many" unions have negotiated contracts so that Nevada pays for "most or all" of employee contributions to a pension fund.

But Dana Bilyeu, executive officer for the Public Employees Retirement System, said the state and employees split the contributions equally. Sometimes the state pays into the pension fund in lieu of giving raises, she said.

• Another point on the site says that the PERS pension system has a $9 billion shortfall, and that individual households could be forced to pay $10,300 each to make up for it.

Bilyeu said the 30-year program for the fund has just $5.2 billion left to collect in the next two years. Already $20 billion is in the portfolio. The remaining money likely refers to an unrelated health fund, she said.

"That is assuming tomorrow we'd have to pay all the $9 billion, and that is absolutely not the case," she said.

• The teachers' association is blasted for the results of a survey sent out four years ago, while it was in arbitration with the school district. Teachers responded that they would be willing to strike, even though state law forbids that.

Holloway said the teachers were angry at that point. Since then, both the association and the school district have completed federal training on "interest-based bargaining" to ensure more productive sessions, she said.

There is evidence that the ads are riling up union members, at least. The employees' association had received about 200 calls in the first two weeks after the ads ran, Lake said.

But Holloway does not believe the ads will work for her members.

"Every person that I've ever spoken to, just the average guy, says that teachers don't make enough money, and we need to pay them more," she said.