PHOTO/DENNIS MYERS
Obama sign burned A sign supporting the Obama/Biden ticket was burned at someone’s home by an unknown arsonist. A reader comment posted on the RN&R website (see Letters, page 3) reads in part, “Tonight, March 10, at 10:10 pm someone set our ‘OBAMA/BIDEN’ sign on fire. ... I tried to catch the perpetrator, but was unable to find him. ... The sign will go back up in the morning with all of its scars. Perhaps I will catch up with the Limbaugh loving axxholes next time!!!! The sign will be up in the morning and will stay up. Police report filed.” A Reno Police Department spokesperson confirmed the incident occurred: “We do have a report on file. Essentially, our reporting party saw flames out his front window, went out and discovered the sign had been lit on fire. He saw an unknown male riding away on a bicycle in the area. It is unknown if this individual had anything to do with the sign being lit. There is no additional information available on any possible suspects.” The victim is Anthony Matulich, who lives on Grandview Avenue. Fire has been a favored form of protest by some of Obama’s critics. Over the years, Obama signs have been burned in Altadena, Ca., Boca Raton, Fl., St. Peters, Mo. An effigy of the president was burned in West Allis, Wis. In Springfield, Mass., a black church under construction was torched the day after Obama’s election.
Holland announces Former Reno mayoral candidate Erik Holland announced in a March 12 Facebook post that he will seek election to the U.S. House of Representatives. “I’m running because I’m concerned about recent erosions of civil liberties, and want to see a return to fiscal sanity—as in paying our bills,” Democrat Holland wrote. “How odd—conservative reasons!!!” He has been outspoken in his opposition to provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that critics say allows detention of U.S. citizens who the executive branch considers terror suspects, sections that have drawn wide attention because they give wide latitude to presidential powers. Holland was Mayor Robert Cashell’s opponent in the 2006 campaign, expressing his opposition to sprawl, particularly the Winnemucca Ranch development 30 miles from Reno proper. The U.S. House seat is currently held by Republican Mark Amodei, who won a special election last fall for a partial term. Told that Holland would be running on NDAA and the deficit, Amodei said, “Great. He’s on the right track.” Amodei also said there is considerable misinformation about NDAA spread by the blogosphere on what the law contains. He said there are three different provisions in the language that make clear it does not apply to U.S. citizens.
IAP nominates Nevada’s Independent American Party nominated its 2012 candidates for public office at a convention on March 3. David VanderBeek of Pahrump, a life skills consultant, is the U.S. Senate nominee. He ran unsuccessfully in 2010 for the Nevada Assembly. In the northern U.S. House district, Russell Best of Stagecoach was nominated. He unsuccessfully sought election to the Stagecoach General Improvement District board in 2008. It’s his second run for the House seat. He pulled 4.05 percent of the vote in 2010 against Republican Dean Heller and Democrat Nancy Price. The IAP was started in Nevada as the state arm of the American Independent Party, the vehicle for George Wallace’s 1968 presidential candidacy. It was kept together in most elections after that. Smaller parties do not have primary elections to nominate their candidates in Nevada, instead holding nominating conventions.
—Dennis Myers
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MARCH 15, 2012
Assemblymember Debbie Smith of Washoe County, who oversaw construction of the state budget in the Nevada Assembly, listened to an audience member last week at a Nevada Women’s Lobby meeting.
Grinding to a halt After four rounds of budget cuts, some services face dim future Some Nevada programs, including aging services, are at risk of slowing down by radically or even shutting down Dennis Myers because they are being kept afloat by federal funding, and state government may not be able to pay its small share. Some of the programs involved, such as police staffing levels, cut close to the daily lives of citizens. “I will tell you that I had our staff do a matrix for me of how much [state] general fund was in every budget across the state, and there’s so little general fund money left in most places that you can’t really cut,” Assembly budget chief Debbie Smith told a Nevada Women’s Lobby luncheon last week. “Aging and Disability Services is another example. There really isn’t much general fund [money] there.” With the state providing so little money to its own programs, federal moneys or grants are keeping them going. But to qualify for those federal dollars, the state must provide matching funds. That match is normally only a fraction of the federal grants but even those small amounts are becoming more difficult to come by. “We have a great deal of federal money that funds a lot of the programs,” Smith said. “Aging is a perfect example. ... With the federal deficit reduction, all that going on, the grants to the states will probably be cut by about 30 percent. And so a lot of these justice grants, for example, that fund cops on the streets, that schools use ... foster care ... that kind of stuff is just going to be gone. Thirty percent of that money will just be gone.” She said legislators are in conversations with the Washoe County School District, which is on precarious financial footing. “They have virtually no funding— no funding—once they use up the money that we were able to free up in this [2011] legislative session. Once that’s gone, they aren’t going to have any bonding capacity ’til 2017. 2017. And that means roofs, asphalt—if anything big happens, they have to go to their [school district] general fund. ... That’s a really scary situation, but it really tells you that with our property
values declining and therefore property tax revenue [also declining], that’s the ramification of that, is that the programs that we fund like that are in serious jeopardy. And there’s no ability, then, to do the repairs needed for schools other than going into general fund, which would hit the classroom. So that’s one example of the still-precarious position we find ourselves in.” A couple of her listeners asked Smith about cultural programs such as libraries, and she had to tell them that with budget levels now so low, choices have become much more painful (“Artburn,” RN&R, Dec. 30, 2010). “When you’re talking about human life versus anything else, it’s always hard to preserve,” she said. “It’s hard to preserve culture and parks and that type of budget item because you’re looking at taking older people off of day care. ... There were hearings that I personally as the chairman had a hard time getting through because I knew what we were facing. You know, cutting the senior property tax assistances program, cutting veteran’s services officers.”
She said legislators had made some progress in rebuilding mental health programs after previous economic downturns and now find themselves returning those programs to reduced levels again. With four waves of budget cutting behind the state, the easy cuts were already made two or three rounds ago. One of those is state workers and their benefits, which have been slashed more than once, to the point that some state workers are now eligible for public assistance and workers are departing state service. That kind of turnover causes expensive and perpetual training costs. Moreover, the desirability of state employment is not what it once was. “The state employees have continually taken cuts in the form of furloughs,” Smith said. “The last session we did a combination of furloughs and pay cuts. They had their benefits cut and their costs increased. Because they are such a large part of the budget they are a natural target, if you will, for cuts. But it’s hard. Doing it once is one thing, but over and over is very difficult. We have state employees who qualify for state aid”—a murmur ran through the audience—“and that’s very, very difficult for us to know.” State workers leaving for the private sector or leaving the state now number in the thousands, she said. “It has really changed the whole climate of the situation for state employees. ... And we have double digit numbers of agency heads leaving.”
Harder to ignore
State legislators and executive officials have worked hard to insulate the public from the effects of budget cuts, but that is becoming more difficult to do. “This is where the rubber meets the road, that the cuts
