by Dennis Myers
Whazzat?
Clark County Assemblymember John Hambrick touts his crime stance on his website.
Asked for his position on the danger of Nevada becoming like California, an “issue” in the governor’s race, Gov. Brian Sandoval told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “I honestly don’t know what that means.”
PHOTO/DENNIS MYERS
Fee Fight In Nye County, the county government has been collecting money from marijuana shops in unincorporated towns. Former Amargosa Valley Town Board member John Bosta read the statute that covers the matter and felt the county’s action in collecting the taxes and fees violates the law. The county disagreed and continued the practice. The legislative counsel—lawyer to the Nevada Legislature—has now issued an opinion taking Bosta’s side. The county is mulling over the opinion. However, opinions issued by the legislative counsel are not binding on public agencies. They get their legal advice from elected district attorneys, the state attorney general or counsel of their own. Bosta has quite a history. He’s currently in court challenging state water law on the basis of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which brought what is now Nevada into the union—and he organized an effort that led to an elected instead of appointed Amargosa town board.
Musk helps shareholders On Aug. 7, Tesla exec Elon Musk tweeted, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured,” prompting a frenzy in Tesla shares that got worse with three other Musk tweets egging the market on. The Securities and Exchange Commission was not amused, filing a Sept. 27 suit to have Musk removed as chair and CEO of Tesla, bar him from heading any publicly traded company and impose fines. Shares were in a tailspin. There was a reported settlement of a $10 million fine, with Musk keeping his CEO gig but stepping down as chair for two years, a settlement the Tesla board rejected. A day later, a repentant board made contact with the SEC seeking a new deal. That deal, as finally drafted, included Musk departing as chair for three years and paying a $20 million fine, plus the corporation paying its own $20 million fine and adding two independent—independent, presumably, of Musk—directors to the board and an independent chair. Oh, and the corporation would curb Musk’s communications, including his use of social media. Before the day was out, Musk tweeted a shot at the SEC: “Just want to [sic] that the Shortseller Enrichment Commission is doing incredible work. And the name change is so on point!” Shares nosedived again. He kept tweeting into the night, and shares kept falling. The settlement still needs court approval, and Tesla is seeking a new chair, being described variously in financial news reports as a manager, babysitter and an adult.
—Dennis Myers
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10.11.18
Running for sheriff Nevada’s still locking them up a think tank—this time the Crime and Justice Institute—has told Nevada what it has known for decades. The state puts more people in prison than, well, almost anywhere. The study, the latest in a long line of such studies, was commissioned by the State of Nevada. On one occasion in the 1990s, a U.S. Department of Justice survey indicated that Nevada taxpayers pay more per capita than any in the nation for their prison costs. At another point, Nevada Supreme Court Justice Charles Springer, then a member of an in-state study panel, said the state imprisons at a higher rate than any known government in human history. Yet it is seldom an issue in state political campaigns. Rather, it’s likely that such campaigns are a factor in driving Nevada’s high rate of incarceration, since state legislative and even judgeship candidates run on “tough on crime” platforms. For decades, and particularly since the turbulent 1960s, state legislators
have regularly enacted laws creating new crimes, increasing penalties to existing crimes, and making parole more difficult to get. Paradoxically, criminal justice experts say these steps seldom contribute to reducing repeat offenses. But then, that may not be the purpose of these laws. The purpose may be political, and, if so, it seems to work admirably, continuing to drive the enactment of more and more such laws. In one judgeship campaign against incumbent Tom O’Donnell in Clark County in 1975, rough television commercials accused O’Donnell of being soft on crime. While the camera panned over a list of names, the narrative went, “These are the rapists, robbers, murderers and thieves put back on our streets to terrorize.” In that case, O’Donnell survived and was reelected. Not all candidates are so lucky. And many of those who go through such campaigns get the message, and it affects their performance in office.
There has been one technique that helped slow the expenditure of taxpayer dollars on these measures. The state in the late 1980s and early ’90s was nearly at a point where it would be building a prison a year. That was when Republican Sue Wagner and Democrat Robert Sader became chairs of the two legislative judiciary committees—Sader in the Assembly, Wagner in the Senate. Until then, each tough-on-crime bill had been scrutinized individually. There was no cumulative assessment of all the criminal justice bills in a legislative session to determine their fiscal impact. Sader and Wagner held all the measures as a group so their committees could examine the cost to taxpayers of the pieces of legislation together. Wagner said the state’s criminal justice practices “ate up a lot of money that could be spent better on education or a variety of other things.” “It was the first time anybody had ever really done anything to try to systematically figure out what impact this was going to have,” she said in her 2005 oral history. “Before then, everybody said, ‘Oh, good, it’s going to go from a misdemeanor to a felony.’ Well, that’s like going from a county jail to the state prison system. In addition to that, if you go from a misdemeanor to a gross misdemeanor to a felony, there are all these other implications, and people don’t think about that. They just think that they want to be tougher than the next person.” Sader said the impact of the cumulative assessment was that the state was able to avoid building one planned prison. The technique was successful enough that it was assumed, in some circles, that it would be continued. But Wagner was elected lieutenant governor, and Sader retired from legislative service. And turnover both in population and in office-holding in Nevada is such that institutional memory is severely lacking. The legislative staff did not inform new lawmakers of previous practices in running committees. Mark James, who later chaired Senate Judiciary, said he had never heard
