North Las Vegas action plan: paging Doctor Doom?
There is virtually no chance a court will uphold the suspension of union contracts in North Las Vegas following the city’s decision Friday to invoke an emergency clause contained in state law.
The rule allows a city to suspend the provisions of collective bargaining agreements in the event of an emergency such as a “riot, military action, natural disaster or civil disorder.”
It won’t work for many reasons, not least of which is that there is no riot, military action, natural disaster or civil disorder in North Las Vegas. Mistrust, mismanagement and misery, yes. But none of that other stuff.
While the outcome of any court ruling can never be predicted with certainty, especially in Nevada, it’s as near to certain as possible that the city will be rebuffed by the courts.
That only means North Las Vegas is going to have to solve its problems the hard way: by laying people off.
City Manager Tim Hacker – perfectly named for our modern economic times, no? – understandably does not want to lay anyone off. In fact, he says layoffs in the public safety area could lead to, well, riots, military action, and civil disorder. Instead, he wants unions to accept concessions and stay on the job.
He claims the city faces a $33 million deficit, but unions don’t trust him to tell the truth, and are waiting to review in detail the city’s official spending plan filed with the state.
That’s where the mismanagement comes in: It’s not Hacker’s fault (he’s a recent arrival), but the city cannot escape responsibility for unnecessary spending that contributed to the present crisis. Look no further than a brand-new wastewater treatment plan ($240 million) and a new City Hall ($130 million) built in the middle of a recession. The price of those two structures alone are 11 times the size of the city’s stated deficit.
Oh, and another thing: The union contracts that now so vex the city, about which leaders complain so bitterly? They were approved by the city’s leadership, which bears responsibility for the state of the city.
Surely nobody could have foreseen the depth and breadth of the recession’s impact on Southern Nevada, even in North Las Vegas, with its excessive reliance on property taxes. But as the Review-Journal’s Richard Lake amply demonstrated in Friday’s newspaper, danger signs abounded even as the city went on its building spree.
But this is a far cry from saying that the city’s unions are right. Regardless of the complicity of the city’s leadership, the fact remains that contracts are threatening the city’s ability to provide services residents require.
Local government is not a jobs program, after all, but exists at a bare minimum to maintain public safety. If the city truly cannot do that, union contracts must yield to the public good.
How will that happen? Since the Nevada Legislature has not seen fit to authorize municipal bankruptcies in Nevada, that fix – used by California cities to renegotiate contracts – is out. A state takeover may result in increased taxes, which would hit residents hard.
Disincorporation is tempting; it would change leadership, and allow for a successor agency to get a better handle on contracts. But it’s not as if Clark County, Las Vegas or the Metropolitan Police Department are stepping forward to take over.
This is a problem not easily solved, where nobody is fully right or wrong, where the bad decisions of the past have finally come home to roost. What kind of a fix are you in when your only solution is to root for riot, military action, natural disaster or civil disorder?
Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist and author of the blog SlashPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter (@SteveSebelius) or reach him at ssebelius@reviewjournal.com or (702) 387-5276.
