Fans of the kids cartoon "Dora the Explorer" will be familiar with the character Swiper the Fox who tries to swipe things that Dora needs. To stop him, Dora has to repeat the phrase "Swiper, no swiping" three times.
Loux, no looting. Loux, no looting. Loux, no looting.
I am referring, of course, to Bob Loux " head of Nevada's Nuclear Waste Projects Office (NWPO) " who admitted this week to looting an ex-employee's salary and giving it to himself and the rest of his staff in the form of unauthorized double-digit pay hikes. In doing so, Loux raised his own six-figure salary to over $150,000 a year " more than the governor himself makes and far more than the already generous $114,000 he was budgeted to receive.
Ben Kieckhefer, spokesman for Gov. Gibbons, said it was "just unfathomable that an agency director would do this while everyone else is seeing their budgets cut." State Sen. Bob Beers called what Loux did "corrupt." Assemblywoman Heidi Gansert says she intends to file an ethics complaint against Loux. Assemblyman Morse Arberry says Loux could be thrown in the clink because "it's unlawful for any state officer to do what he's done." And Gov. Jim Gibbons has called on Loux to resign.
But Loux defiantly declared on Wednesday, "I am not going away." He told a legislative committee this week that his greedy, self-serving intentional taxpayer rip-off was just an "error," adding dismissively, "What I did was not a good idea."
Gee, ya think?
But perhaps the only real surprise here is that it's taken so long for something like this to be discovered at NWPO. Back in 1997, Stuart D. Waymire wrote and published a little-known book titled, "Yucca Mountain: The Battle for National Energy Policy." In it, Waymire wrote:
"No thorough independent audit has ever been done on the agency. Certainly there have been superficial audits which in essence asked the question of whether NWPO spent the money it received, and unsurprisingly found that they had. The real multi-million dollar question is whether NWPO spent its money on legitimate oversight or as a giant political slush fund."
That was over a decade ago. Who knows what's transpired since then? But at least it appears the days of unsupervised slush-funding may finally be coming to an end. Kieckhefer announced on Wednesday that a full audit of the NWPO will now take place "to find out how long this agency has been in disarray. I suspect it's been a long time."
And I suspect we're going to find a lot more funny-money floating around than $72,000 in unauthorized purloined pay raises. After all, the reason Loux was finally caught this week is that he had exceeded his budget by a half-million dollars and was asking the Interim Finance Committee to give him mo' money. Hmmm. Where'd it all go?
Unfortunately, the law doesn't allow the governor to fire Bob Loux. You see, Loux serves at the pleasure of the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects. And guess who the current Chairman of the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects is? Former Nevada Gov. Dick Bryan " the man who hired Loux in the first place some 20 years ago and who on Wednesday referred to Loux being caught with his hands in the cookie jar and melted chocolate chips dripping from his chin simply a "mistake."
So it appears the only way to get this Master of Malfeasance away from the taxpayers' treasure chest is for the public and responsible elected officials from both parties to follow Gov. Gibbons' example and pressure Loux to resign. Or maybe it's time to consider Sen. Beers' suggestion that the Waste Projects Office itself is a waste of taxpayer dollars " after all, we have a congressional delegation in Washington already dealing with Yucca Mountain " and should be eliminated completely.
I'm in favor of both. But I'd also be in favor of Assemblyman Arberry's idea of fitting the shifty Bob Loux for a prison-orange jumpsuit.
- Chuck Muth, of Carson City, is president and CEO of Citizen Outreach and a political blogger. Read his views Fridays on the Appeal Opinion page or visit www.muthstruths.com. You can e-mail him at chuck@chuckmuth.com