Taxicab board asserts authority over member of governor’s inner circle

In a face-off between the Taxicab Authority board and Mendy Elliott, the director of the Department of Business and Industry, Elliott blinked first.

For seven months, Elliott and the board members have been at loggerheads over who should be hired as the administrator of the Taxicab Authority. Elliott wanted Tom Czehowski, whom she had put in the job in May 2007 on an interim basis the same day she ousted the previous administrator.

Perhaps she assumed he was a shoo-in because Elliott said her office, limited by budget constraints, hadn’t done any background check on the 14 applicants and simply had passed the names on to the board.

When Czehowski didn’t make the list of the top three recommendations in September, Elliott waited until January, then told the board that two of the three people nominated didn’t pass reference checks and asked the board to bump up the next two candidates, which would have included Czehowski, the fifth-place finisher.

The board refused, saying they had sent her three names and there was still a third name on the list: Gordon Walker.

In the dispute between Elliott, who has Gov. Jim Gibbons’ solid backing, and the five board members, including two he appointed recently, the issue was whether a member of the governor’s Cabinet can control an independent board charged with overseeing a government agency.

It looked as if this could end up in the courts with both sides holding firm.

After sitting silently at a meeting at which it became clear he had no support from the Taxicab Authority board, Czehowski decided he wanted no more. On Feb. 8, he went back to his former job as chief administrative officer at the state Occupational Safety and Health Division, another agency under the umbrella of Business and Industry.

So the new administrator of the Taxicab Authority will be Walker, 54, who works for Richman and Associates, a government subcontractor with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Elliott said Walker worked for seven years as deputy executive director of the Nevada Taxation Department where he “enforced laws, conducted investigations, resolved complaints and issues and worked cooperatively with a board of directors.” That last skill is obviously something Elliott thinks will be important for the Taxicab Authority board, which oversees the 16 cab companies in the valley, regulates fares and decides where 1,600 cabs have permission to operate.

Walker begins Feb. 25, and four days later he has to wrestle with an application from A-Cab for permission to expand its service area outside the western part of the valley to the other areas. That effort is being resisted strongly by cab companies that already have permission to cover the Strip and the airport, the most lucrative sites for cabbies.

Kathryn Werner Collins, the chairwoman of the Taxicab Authority who resisted Elliott’s machinations, said she was thrilled that Walker was chosen. As for the selection procedure, she said, “The board took offense at having their role in the process circumvented” by Elliott. An attorney, she said Elliott was trying to end-run the state’s laws by changing the way the selection worked. Under the law, the board recommends three and Elliott selects one.

“I appreciate Tom’s service as interim administrator and I’m glad he has a job to go to, but at the end of the day, this was about who the board thought was the most qualified,” Werner Collins said.

OK, maybe it was also about whether a high-ranking gubernatorial director can force a board to go along with her personnel choice.

Werner Collins said that when the previous administrator, Richard Land, was fired in May without notification of the board, they were told the authority would be going in a new direction. She still isn’t sure about what that means, but she said there is talk of combining the Taxicab Authority with the Nevada Transportation Authority, which regulates the bus and limousine companies as well as tow trucks and moving vans. Another idea is creating a statewide agency to regulate taxicabs in Reno as well as Las Vegas. In addition, Clark County is looking at putting the authority under its control, she said.

As for Czehowski, Collins Werner said, “He left just as quickly and quietly as he came.”

The lesson probably not learned: Authoritarian approaches to state boards are not always the most successful.

Jane Ann Morrison’s column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0275.