V&T commission bill likely dead

A bill that would give Carson City more representation on the state commission building the V&T Railway is likely dead.

The bill has been pulled from a state Senate committee hearing Friday because of opposition from some members of the V&T commission, said Janice Ayres, the bill's author. She said it probably will not be reintroduced.

Senate Bill 291, introduced last week by State Sen. Mark Amodei, would have added two seats to the nine-member Nevada Commission for the Reconstruction of the V&T Railway.

One of the new seats would have been a second representative from the Carson City Board of Supervisors. The other new seat would have been a representative from the V&T commission's fundraising arm, the Northern Nevada Railway Foundation.

Ayres, a former Carson City supervisor, is the foundation's director and probably would have been its representative on the commission.

She said she didn't mean to upset anyone with the bill. Carson City just deserves two representatives like it had on the original five-member V&T commission founded in 1993, she said. The commission expanded to nine members in 2001 and reduced the city's number of seats from two to one.

But the commission needs to recognize the money Carson City has given and the work the foundation has done, she said.

"Every time I turn around, someone's criticizing what I'm trying to do," said Ayres, a former commission member.

She said she hopes the commission can learn to work together better to build the 18-mile tourist railroad from Virginia City to Carson City.

"When there's contention and hurt feelings and you don't feel appreciated, things don't get done," she said. "They just don't."

Commissioner Larry McPherson, who represents Lyon County, said Ayres would have been "pretty embarrassed" if she'd tried to argue for the bill at the Senate meeting.

Some commissioners opposed the bill for several reasons, he said, including Ayres' failure to get the commission's approval before taking it to the Legislature.

"I don't care what it is," McPherson said. "You've got to be straightforward with the thing. You have to be honest. That's the whole idea of the thing."

The bill would have diluted the power of other members on the board, said Commissioner John Flanagan, who represents Storey County.

"The commission is big enough now and it's kind of unruly and two more members would make it really unruly," he said.

- Contact reporter Dave Frank at dfrank@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1212.