Oceguera’s double-dipping delight

Somebody call 911! John Oceguera's pants are on fire!

The Assembly speaker and North Las Vegas assistant fire chief just announced his candidacy for Congress on Monday, and already he has allowed a relatively small political blaze to spread to his back side.

Oceguera can't get his facts straight in explaining how he received roughly $70,000 in compensation from North Las Vegas while he was also drawing legislative pay in Carson City this year. Throw in the fact that he has yet to answer other important questions about his simultaneous service in two branches of government, and it's easy for taxpayers to conclude that Oceguera is taking advantage of them to further his political career.

The more you deny the obvious, the worse you look, especially when there's easily available evidence that contradicts your denial. Is this guy getting his media relations advice from Anthony Weiner, or what?

Back on June 26, I broke the story that Oceguera was being paid by the North Las Vegas Fire Department while serving as Assembly speaker during the 2011 session. Although he wasn't drawing his full salary from the city, taxpayers still provided him with a good chunk of change.

Then, on June 28, the Nevada Policy Research Institute released the findings of its own investigation into Oceguera's pay through its publication, the Nevada Journal. According to Fire Department work-roster logs obtained by NPRI, Oceguera drew his full salary during the 2011 session.

Oceguera and his boss, North Las Vegas Fire Chief Al Gillespie, asserted through letters to the editor and television and print interviews that the logs they were responsible for maintaining were inaccurate, and that as a result, NPRI had it all wrong.

Gillespie and Oceguera produced a written agreement: It said Oceguera would squeeze in nine hours of work per week for the department while leading the lower chamber of the Legislature during the budget crisis. Oceguera could cash in vacation time for extra income, but otherwise would take unpaid furloughs for the rest of each pay period.

The men also claimed that because Oceguera is a salaried administrator who's never really off duty, there's no reason to track his hours with precision. "So it doesn't matter what our ... when we're actually in the office or when we're responding to calls," Gillespie told NPRI's Steven Miller.

But the pay figures I reported didn't jibe with the written agreement released by Oceguera and Gillespie. If Oceguera was being paid for just nine hours per week -- about a quarter of his normal schedule -- then he would have received the equivalent of roughly one month's salary from the Fire Department over the four-month legislative session. Instead, he received about $30,000 for hours worked and longevity pay, or more than two months worth of salary. Amazingly, Gillespie and Oceguera declared those payroll records accurate while defending the veracity of their written agreement.

Gillespie then set about attacking me and NPRI without addressing many of the substantive questions the investigations had raised. Oceguera hoped the story would go away.

It didn't. On Thursday, NPRI published detailed payroll records from the city of North Las Vegas that show Oceguera being paid for 18 hours of work per week during the 2011 legislative session -- twice as much pay as Oceguera and Gillespie repeatedly asserted Oceguera had received.

"I'm just being straight up with you. I don't understand this sheet," Oceguera told Miller last week, adding, "I may be able to get some more clarity after I talk to somebody who can explain this."

Um, how about you? You're the assistant chief, aren't you? The one running for Congress as someone who can "stand up to Washington"?

Those questions should be easy enough for Oceguera to answer. The harder ones, not so much.

Foremost among them: Did the schedule agreements released by Oceguera and Gillespie after NPRI's initial report follow city protocols? The agreements were undated, unsigned and not printed on city letterhead. And they weren't provided to me or NPRI when, separately, we requested information from the city related to Oceguera's pay and schedule during the legislative session. They look like they were cranked out in a hurry.

Skeptics (myself among them) may not ever be able to prove that the men typed up those agreements after the fact to provide themselves cover, but, absent new documentation, Oceguera and Gillespie can't prove that they didn't.

Among the other questions Oceguera and Gillespie have been avoiding:

-- How did Oceguera manage to collect more than $151,000 in wages in 2009 -- a figure that's well above his base annual salary of $138,336 and excludes benefits -- when he was in Carson City for more than four months, supposedly working only 18 hours per week for the department? After all, as he and Gillespie have pointed out, Oceguera is salaried. How did he make up for those lost hours, and then some, on a fixed salary?

-- Will Oceguera take a leave of absence from North Las Vegas as he runs for Congress -- a full-time job in itself -- or will he draw full pay as he campaigns over the next 15 months, attending every special event and photo op while asserting that he's "salaried" and, rest assured, he's putting in his hours?

Considering Oceguera was paid for hours he said he didn't work (according to his agreement with Gillespie, at least), and considering North Las Vegas is so broke that children begged the City Council on Wednesday to keep a recreation center open, Oceguera should, at a minimum, reimburse the city for the wages he was not entitled to.

Whatever Oceguera does and whatever excuses he makes, he'll have the full backing of Gillespie. In his letter to the editor, published by the Review-Journal July 5, Gillespie wrote, "We should be encouraging more firefighters and public safety officers to lead our community, not less. It is exactly the type of real-world experience that we desperately need in our public officials."

The public sector as the "real world"? Where tax revenues pour into monopolies as a requirement of law? Where unions call the shots even as they disappear from the job-creating private sector? Where millions upon millions of bureaucrats are insulated from competitive pressure?

In fact, our Founding Fathers warned against allowing people to assume multiple roles in government, saying it allows individuals to amass too much power at the expense of the public. That kind of power allows an assistant fire chief, doubling as a legislative leader, to wield more authority than his chief, mayor and City Council combined -- and call into question whether he's getting special treatment.

And so John Oceguera, the double-dipping, schedule confusing, tax hiking, separation-of-powers violating firefighter/lawmaker who apparently can't read a paycheck, will ask you to send him to Washington to avert economic ruin and restore fiscal sanity to the nation's capital.

Provided, of course, he can keep his britches from burning whatever credibility he has left.

Glenn Cook (gcook@reviewjournal.com) is a Review-Journal editorial writer.