Firing draws criticism

Some members of the Nevada Taxicab Authority’s board contend an appointee of Gov. Jim Gibbons botched the recent dismissal of the authority’s chief administrator, and they label Richard Land’s firing as unfair and unseemly.

Nevada Department of Business and Industry Director Mendy Elliott fired Land by phone May 8 after he returned from lunch to find an interim replacement in his office. Neither Land nor the authority board was aware that Elliott was contemplating a change.

“Nobody deserved to be treated in that way. Silence is acquiescence to that kind of treatment,” Ed Goldman, a member of the five-person board, said Wednesday. “That’s not called for. That’s not the way to do things.”

Kathryn Werner-Collins, the authority’s chairwoman, said her board is appreciative of “what a great job Dick has done” but regret “what an unprofessional manner in which he was removed.”

In a statement, officials at the Department of Business and Industry, which oversees the Taxicab Authority, said that they would not publicly discuss a personnel matter but that Land served “at the pleasure” of Elliott, per state law.

At the time of Land’s dismissal, a spokeswoman for Elliott said the director “just wants to take the department in a new direction” but offered no specifics.

“There are a lot of changes that are going to be occurring in the (Business and Industry) department after the (legislative) session, in terms of what this new administration feels is appropriate for regulatory agencies and what they want them to do,” the spokeswoman, Amanda Penn, said May 8.

At the time, Land, who was appointed under former Gov. Kenny Guinn’s administration, called his dismissal “politics.”

“If there was some desire to move the agency in a different direction, it’s a shame no one expressed that to Dick and gave him a chance” to do that, Werner-Collins said. “The board still has not been given any direction (by Elliott). None whatsoever.

“It would be nice to know what the direction is. We’re operating in a vacuum,” Werner-Collins said. “It’s frustrating.”

Although the administrator reports to the board, the administrator is hired and fired by Elliott, appointed earlier this year by Gibbons.

No legal requirement exists for the board to be consulted on an administrator’s dismissal, but the board must vet potential replacements.

“I think that common courtesy would have dictated the board would have been talked to before this happened,” Goldman said. “I understand that legally the director (Elliott) has the right to change administrators. However, we’re an autonomous board.”

Land was administrator since 2005 and preceded Werner-Collins as board chairman, a role Land held from 2001 to 2005. He was credited with getting surveillance cameras voluntarily installed in almost all valley cabs and building consensus among drivers, managers and customer groups on that and other industry issues.

“He (Land) was able to bring them together, to collaboratively solve things,” Goldman said. “I don’t know what the big need for change was.”