The Virginia City water caper

On Aug. 18, Virginia City High School inaugurated its new $250,000 football field. On that day, a crowd of about 200 cheered the Muckers as the school fielded a football team for the first time in 64 years, scrimmaging against the Coleville (Calif.) Wolves.

Guests of honor were Bill Nagel and John Byrne, who both played on the last Muckers squad, in 1942 and 1943.

Storey County School Board President Pamela Smith was escorting the two old-timers. She told the state Ethics Commission on Wednesday that it was a hot day, and she asked Laurie Barrington at the stadium concession stand for free bottles of water for the two guests, as well as herself and her husband.

At that point, according to the School Board president, Ms. Barrington “got very mad and very rude.”

“She said ‘Even God doesn’t get free water. You’re not going to get free water,’ ” Ms. Smith told the commission.

Concession profits benefit the team, Ms. Barrington testified Wednesday. If Ms. Smith tried to get free water, then it would be “over my dead body,” Ms. Barrington testified that she said.

At that point, Ms. Smith signed an IOU promising to return with her purse and pay the $4 tab, which she later did.

But things didn’t stop there. One Cathylee James of Virginia City filed a complaint with the Ethics Commission, accusing Ms. Smith of trying to improperly use her office to get free water. Why, Ms. Smith had even tried it before, seeking free stuff at basketball games, said the finger-pointers, who described Mr. Smith’s conduct as “reprehensible” and “self-serving.”

Good heavens.

School Superintendent Robert Slaby testified Wednesday that the former players were treated as VIPs, given shirts and other trinkets. He said he could not be certain, but he might have indicated there was nothing wrong in giving them free water on an 80-degree day.

After a 90-minute hearing, the commission voted 5-0 to absolve Ms. Smith of ethics violations in the matter of the four bottles of water, valued at $1 each, ruling that because her IOU was accepted by Ms. Barrington and she eventually paid for the water, no ethics law was violated.

A close call, though!

When asked afterward why the commission would spend its time on such a minor matter — Ms. Smith even felt it wise to hire a private lawyer to accompany her — Commissioner Jim Kosinski said there is no minimum threshold in state ethics laws.

“Do you want to enact one?” he asked. “What would it be? Five dollars? $100?”

Hard to say. While the public conscience is hardly outraged when the owner of an all-night diner refuses payment for a coffee and donut when a police officer is nice enough to stop in for a look-see on a cold night, it certainly might be appropriate for the commission to make inquiries if it turned out an entire department were expecting free meals, all the time, as a matter of course.

It’s a question of scale and perspective — precisely what the commission seems to have lacked in this case. In spades.

Ms. Smith should have been advised to carry a couple of bucks in her pocket. And while Ms. Barrington’s attention to her fiduciary duties is admirable — and what she would charge God, of course, remains entirely up to her — someone might express to her the hope that she would have made an exception if one of the octogenarians had actually appeared ready to collapse.

The question is whether — with state revenues failing to grow at expected rates and Gov. Jim Gibbons expected to announce cutbacks next month — the commission should have assigned staff to spend months dealing with a case that would have been better handled by calling in all the parties and telling them to grow up.