Jon Ralston on Politics

Southern surprise

By Jon Ralston / Staff Writer

Of all the post-mortems penned about Session '07, I have yet to see one that points out how one of the great pre-legislative assumptions proved unfounded: The Northern Governor.

After he was elected last year, Jim Gibbons was widely suspected of being northern centric because of his Reno-Sparks roots. Gibbons would be unfair to the South because he was a Northern Nevadan at heart, so the argument went. The old "fair share" issue would resurface and cause sectional strife that hadn't been seen in a decade and a half, some observers - including this one - firmly believed.

It did not happen.

In fact, when the rubber hit the road on transportation funding (feel free to wince at the pun), Gibbons was willing to sacrifice his northern brethren to get a bill and keep his no-new-taxes pledge. Nearly all of the money in the billion-dollar bill will go to southern projects, especially those involving Interstate 15.

Projects in Northern Nevada received short shrift. A couple involving key freeways - Interstate 80 and U.S. 395 - won't be able to start for three to six years. Another, the widening of Pyramid Highway, which was listed as a high priority among regional experts, was given no funding.

"It's a far cry short," Derek Morse, the Washoe County Regional Transportation Commission's deputy director, told the Reno Gazette-Journal recently.

The Northern Governor? Hardly.

The governor's home ground will only get about a tenth of the money in the package that was passed, perhaps one reason why southern Sen. Terry Care insisted on a "what's raised in Clark County stays in Clark County" provision. Care and other southerners have heard these promises before and then seen money rush out of the Las Vegas Valley. That phenomenon sparked many fair-share fights in the '80s and '90s - county folks have always at least reluctantly been fine with exporting money to finance poor rural counties but not so much copasetic with paying for Reno pork.

It was reasonable to assume Gibbons might look with more favor on northern projects than Kenny Guinn or Bob Miller, both of whom hail from Las Vegas. But the governor had been backed into a corner by political forces he had unleashed, thus leaving him with little choice (he believed) but to adhere to his no-taxes pledge. But if he did not agree to keep the money raised in the population center, Gibbons would have been left without a transportation bill - something he could ill afford to let happen.

So, the putative Northern Governor sacrificed Northern Nevada.

That's why it was so risible to watch southern Sen. Bob Coffin lampoon Gibbons when he testified on the measure as being ignorant of southern needs, of not paying attention to traffic as he traveled around Las Vegas in a limo. Coffin's point was that Gibbons was only supporting a fraction of the funding needed to improve the valley's transportation infrastructure. But the southern appetizer was satisfying compared to the microscopic morsel left to the North.

There will be some who look beyond the transportation package and insist that Gibbons ignored Southern Nevada's pressing needs. His pledge cost the South needed money for education, for instance, some will contend. Gibbons doesn't understand the problems of schools in Las Vegas because he lives in the North, where the problems are small-town compared to the big-city woes afflicting the Las Vegas Valley.

But on the signature issue of Session '07 - transportation funding - even if it was just a half-measure (or more accurately, a fifth-measure), the governor made sure the money came South.

The Northern Governor. I don't think so.

In Business commentator Jon Ralston also hosts the news discussion program "Face to Face With Jon Ralston" on Las Vegas ONE, publishes the daily e-mail newsletter "RalstonFlash.com" and writes columns and a political notebook for the Las Vegas Sun. To subscribe to Flash, go to www.RalstonFlash.com, or call 990-2550. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997 or by e-mail at ralston@vegas.com.

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