Ex-Las Vegas mayors look back on a unique job

In 1987, when longtime Las Vegas Councilman Ron Lurie took over as mayor, he inherited a City Hall with scattered initiatives, where people were pulling in different directions and not always telling each other what they were doing.

His first task: Get everybody on the same page.

“It’s usually the mayor that’s got to bring them together,” said Lurie. And while he didn’t win all the battles, he said, “if you got to 80 percent, you were doing a good job.”

One of the battles Lurie won: convincing Union Pacific railroad to clear out of the land the company occupied west of downtown. That initiative left the property available for development years later.

Today, that site is home to the Smith Center for the Performing Arts and the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health.

(Full disclosure: My wife works for a public relations company that helps promote the downtown, including the Symphony Park area.)

Lurie, mayor from 1987 to 1991, recalled his years at the helm of the city during a lunch Tuesday at his eponymous steakhouse inside Arizona Charlie’s on Decatur Boulevard, joined by his successors, Jan Jones (1991-1999), Oscar Goodman (1999-2011) and his wife, incumbent Mayor Carolyn Goodman.

In addition to current issues such as web poker and economic diversification, the mayors discussed the unique circumstances they found when taking office and how each dealt with them.

Jones, now an executive vice president at Caesars Entertainment, said she discovered quickly that consensus building was essential to the job. “It was interesting to me you couldn’t come in and tell the council what to do,” she said.

But she found that harnessing the power of public opinion could move her fellow council members when the force of mayoral personality might not.

Jones’ frustrations were shared by her successor, Oscar Goodman, who approached the job like a big-city strong mayor one might find in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.

“I thought I was supposed to be a benevolent dictator,” Goodman said. After his first 4-1 losing vote (the City Council had only five members in those days) he, like Jones, realized the job involved more finesse than force.

Goodman and Jones say they favored consolidation of city and county governments, an issue that’s been discussed for decades but never accomplished outside the merger of the Las Vegas Police Department and the Clark County Sheriff’s Department. Those forces became the Metropolitan Police Department in 1973, the year Lurie was first elected to the council. Politics has kept consolidation from going further, but Carolyn Goodman and other mayors announced a region-wide business license application earlier this year for contractors.

Still, Oscar Goodman warns that consolidation – perhaps with a strong-mayor form of government – has its downsides.

“I loved being the mayor, but I didn’t have to be the mayor,” Goodman said. With the wrong person in charge, he said it could be a “monumental disaster.”

Carolyn Goodman is the opposite of her husband in at least two ways: She doesn’t think consolidation is necessarily a good idea, and she pays close attention to details. While Oscar Goodman would announce grand ideas and expect the staff to carry them out, Carolyn Goodman tracks progress to make sure things are getting done. Among the recent initiatives: a new redevelopment area.

But she agrees it’s the mayor who sets the tone.

“The mayor is really the one who is pulling everything together,” she said.

And, of course, each of the mayors served uniquely in another role: cheerleader in chief for Las Vegas on the national and world stage, a job that requires optimism. “It’s a great time to be alive. It’s a great time to be alive in this community,” Carolyn Goodman said.

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist and author of the blog SlashPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter (@SteveSebelius) or reach him at (702) 387-5276 or ssebelius@reviewjournal.com.