It's been a decade since a Clark County audit revealed more than a million dollars being wasted providing fancy free vehicles to top-level Las Vegas public servants who (it turned out) didn't need them for "emergency responses," at all.
At the time, the county's Vehicle Review Committee removed 71 executive vehicles from 24-hour status and adopted rules which supposedly prohibited such freebies except in cases where emergency night or weekend responses were really, you know ... necessary.
Well, guess what? It turns out that shortly after those new rules went into effect -- as soon as the heat was off and no one was watching -- county managers and supervisors went right back to playing Santa Claus in July.
Hey, the hours may be short and the pay may be high, but how do you like my free truck?
County employee compensation is already a too-often-ignored factor in the skyrocketing cost of local government -- outpacing salary increases not only in the private sector (the lowly taxpayers who foot the bills) but even among bureaucrats at the state and federal level.
But do those who tally up those county pay packages also factor in the county executives' 24-hour use of these vehicles -- often top-of-the-line sport utilities costing more than $30,000?
"These people are getting a sweetheart deal," comments Paul Brown, regional director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, a watchdog group.
"If it means they don 't have to buy a second car, they are saving a lot of money. ... Those of us who are paying the taxes would love a deal like that."
County commissioners are so far expressing ignorance or puzzlement over the fact that a newer audit -- released a year ago in October 1999 -- found 60 of 79 vehicles assigned to top-level supervisors (start ital)still(end ital) aren't really necessary to respond to nighttime and weekend emergencies. Yet a year later -- and a decade after the same problem was exposed back in 1990 -- the fancy and largely unmarked SUVs are apparently still being driven around and parked in home driveways as little more than "seniority perks."
The audit did not include the Clark County Fire Department, but did cover McCarran International Airport, where auditors found at least half of the 18 "emergency" vehicles currently assigned to senior staff aren't really needed for emergencies.
The Public Works Department turns out to have 41 of the luxury super-trucks assigned primarily to top-level supervisors. Yet during an eight-month period ending in April 1999, the auditors found, only 14 supervisors from two divisions were called out to a total of nine emergencies.
" I don't know how it happened," comments Bruce Woodbury, one of the elected County Commissioners who's supposed to make sure such abuses aren't ongoing. "I guess people, through practice and custom, were using procedures that were in violation of policy."
Contacted last week, Don Burnette, the county's director of administrative services, yawned and stretched and couldn't even say how much it costs to buy and maintain these 60-odd "emergency" vehicles, or why the supposed internal controls put in place a decade ago haven't been enforced.
"The (1999) audit identified some clear cases where individuals and departments were assigned vehicles ... when the necessity for the vehicle wasn't there," Burnette admits. But not to worry, now that there's been an (start ital)audit(end ital), it's all going to be fixed, Mr. Burnette assures us.
"New, stronger regulations" are due to be issued in about a month, agrees County spokesman Doug Bradford.
Well, isn't that special? As we all know, whenever existing regulations aren't being enforced, the foolproof solution is to come out with a set of newer, "stronger" regulations to not bother enforcing.
Instead of going through all these fruitless motions, maybe the County Commission should just have those 60 top-level supervisors drive their Big Wheels down past Mr. Burnette's office once a year, where he can stand on the sidewalk as each fancy Ford Expedition and Chevy Tahoe cruises past, shaking his finger and sternly warning them, "Bad truck! Bad SUV! You've been very, very wasteful!"
Then, their bad vehicles duly chastised, everyone can drive home and continue using their free $30,000 extended-cab heavy-duty luxury county vehicles for pizza runs and family trips to the lake, while the taxpayers who paid the bills wait in line down at the DMV to shell out for the "privilege" of being allowed to drive the battered eight-year-old compacts they bought with their own paychecks, until the (start ital)next(end ital) "audit." (No wonder these public servants no longer like to be called "public servants" -- it does indeed start to sound like we've got that whole thing backwards.)
Either that, or the Country Commissioners could identify everyone who violated the rules, and -- you know -- fire them.
But hey, what kind of example would (start ital)that(end ital)? A couple million here, a couple million there ... it's not as though we're talking real money.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and editor of Financial Privacy Report (subscribe by calling Nelson at 612-895-8757.) His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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