Republican state Sen. Warren Hardy was initially advised to recuse himself from voting on the final leg of the Billion Dollar Tax Hike because a member of the board of directors for the organization he heads had an interest in the legislation. But Democrat Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford's conflicts of interest dwarf anything even remotely attributed to Sen. Hardy.
Horsford is president of a nonprofit organization called Nevada Partners, which gets lots of government grants. And wait'll you get a load of the members who serve on Horsford's board of directors " and consider the legislation they obviously would have an interest in.
Jan Jones is senior vice-president for Harrah's Entertainment " which pushed hard for that three-percent room tax hike that Horsford voted for earlier this session.
D. Taylor is secretary/treasurer of Culinary Workers Union Local No. 226 and Danny Thompson is executive secretary/treasurer and paid lobbyist for the AFL-CIO Nevada.
Tony Sanchez is NV Energy's senior vice president for public policy and is the company's paid lobbyist. Rose McKinney-James is president of Energy Works Consulting and is a paid lobbyist for the Solar Alliance. McKinney-James is also a paid lobbyist for Barrick Gold.
Taylor and Jones also serve on the board of trustees for the Culinary Training Academy, a Big Labor-Big Gaming cooperative that employs Horsford in the "off season."
A cursory review of Horsford's 2004 campaign finance reports (2008 reports were mysteriously missing from the Secretary of State's Web site at press time) show he also received political dough from Sanchez, McKinney James client Barrick Gold, the Culinary and Bartenders unions, Harrah's, and Nevada Power and Sierra Pacific (now NV Energy).
Let's just follow one strand here: The culinary union is a primary funder of the Culinary Training Academy, which pays Horsford's salary, and culinary union boss D. Taylor serves on the board of trustees. Taylor also serves on Horsford's board of directors for Nevada Partners, which gets a ton of taxpayer funding. And the culinary union helps fund his political campaigns to serve in the Legislature where issues of interest to organized labor come up over and over again.
Nope. No conflicts there, right?
How about gaming, mining and energy legislation?
Which makes it all the more outrageous that it was Sen. Horsford who led the charge at the end of the session to suspend the rules and give the entire Legislature what amounted to a blanket amnesty to vote on any and all budget and tax bills regardless of potential conflicts of interest. Was the majority leader really just covering his own keister?
I realize we have a "citizen legislature" where occasional conflicts of interest are inevitable, but Sen. Horsford has taken this problem to a whole new level.
- Chuck Muth is president of Citizen Outreach, a limited-government public policy organization.