COLUMN: Jon Ralston

     The county's Three Musketeers brought their consensus-building genius to an Assembly committee Friday, brimming with optimism and goodwill one week after the panel chairman had excoriated the commissioners for their All for Them and Them for Them attitude.
      "We will keep your committee apprised of our progress, and we look forward to working with you on developing the framework for a solution to our infrastructure challenges," Chief Musketeer and Commission Chairwoman Yvonne Atkinson Gates gushed to Assembly Infrastructure Chairman David Goldwater.
      "Your diligent work is very much appreciated," Goldwater gushed back, a far cry from his statements last week about how Gates, along with fellow infrastructure problem-slayers Myrna Williams and Mary Kincaid, had cared only about their own self-aggrandizement.
      Had peace really arrived? Was substance far behind? Seven days after Ego Week, was it time to declare the dawn of a new day?
      How much I would like to impart the news that it is so. How much I would like to tell you that after Gates and her allies lashed out at everyone from Goldwater to the gaming industry as the cause of their woes, they had come to their senses. How much I would like to reveal that a week spent debating whether funding plans should be pooled or earmarked, after a week spent meeting with other municipal officials who should have been included much earlier, that the musketeers were ready to present more than rhetoric.
      But cooperation without any sincerity or bereft of any policy underpinnings is no progress at all. And if Gates & Co. accomplished anything Friday, it was the impossible -- they actually managed to lower the level of the dialogue. How? In two ways.
      After a pabulum-filled address to the panel, in which Gates claimed to have neared a consensus that does not exist, the chairwoman presented her infrastructure needs assessment. She boasted she had managed to reduce previous infrastructure funding estimates from as much as $10 billion to $2.5 billion. But the assessment is, to be charitable, barebones, and to be blunt, unrealistic. If anybody thinks that with the need for schools (grotesquely underestimated), roads (not included), police and fire (not included) and parks (given short shrift) we can get away cheap, they truly are living in an Alexandre Dumas novel.
      But if that was simply disingenuous, what was even more remarkable was the "white paper" the trio proudly presented to the committee, a philosophical treatise, Gates asserted, on "addressing Southern Nevada infrastructure needs."
      Gates claimed that other municipal officials had signed off on the contents. I feel sorry for them if they did. The five-and-a-half-page document is an exemplar of Jabberwocky, one of the most insipid pieces of drivel ever presented at a public meeting. This is what we've been waiting for from the new county leaders? Don't take my word for it. Just read two snippets:
      -- "The time has come to take another path. The path must be wide and long. It must be wide enough to allow the establishment of a collaborative planning process to meet Southern Nevada's future needs yet maintain the ability of the county and each city to make decisions appropriate to their individual communities. The path must have room for all stockholders to stand side-by-side."
      -- "Our new path is one of process and progress. We begin our evolutionary process by building a planning framework, defining the magnitude of the challenge, determining timing requirements, structuring solutions, monitoring the progress of our plan and modifying as events dictate."
      Let that settle in for a few minutes, folks. And you thought that all these secret meetings they were having, all the time they spent thinking about this issue wouldn't yield results. Now we know. They are on a path. A path to the future, a path where we are all one community, one valley, one team building for the future so Southern Nevada can remain a wonderful place to live. See, anyone can do it.
      I thought what we needed was a little more substance, a little more thought. I guess what we really needed was more rhetoric. At least we have a consensus on that.
     
     
     Jon Ralston publishes "The Ralston Report," a political newsletter. His column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.