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Monday, August 03, 1998
Jones no stranger to ethics disputes
The mayor of Las Vegas has faced six complaints but never has been found in violation of state ethics laws.
By Jane Ann Morrison
Review-Journal
Ethics controversies are not new for Las Vegas Mayor Jan Jones.
The politician who promised in 1993 to live by a higher ethical standard than the law required has faced six state ethics complaints since 1994.
Yet she has never been judged to have violated state ethics laws -- each complaint has been dismissed.
Jones believes many of these complaints have been politically motivated. "You've got to find some way so that it's not used as a political agenda," she said, referring to complaints filed without merit.
A little more than two weeks before Jones' name again will be on the Democratic primary ballot as a gubernatorial candidate, the ethics commissioners will be quizzing her a seventh time, meeting Aug. 14 to consider a complaint filed by former City Councilman Steve Miller, who lost to Jones in the 1991 mayoral race.
The commissioners will probe the complex financial relationships between Jones, her husband Richard Schuetz, and casino executive William Boyd and others. The panel also will question whether she should have disclosed those ties before she voted against a proposed restaurant Boyd opposed.
Jones cast her no vote a few days after asking Boyd for a campaign contribution and after her husband had received financing from Boyd for a land purchase.
The mayor had initiated her first bid for governor by insisting ethics would be a cornerstone of her campaign. "I would never vote on an item where a person who gave me money had a material interest," she pledged Nov. 4, 1993.
She blasted Gov. Bob Miller, the Democrat she sought to unseat, because his fund-raiser was raising money from gaming officials who later appeared before state gaming regulators, calling it "influence peddling" and "abhorrent behavior" even though it is not illegal.
Jones pledged as mayor she would hold herself to a higher standard than the law required and would not vote on items that materially affected her campaign contributors without either disclosing or abstaining.
But six weeks before the 1994 primary, research showed Jones had violated her own vow to abstain on matters affecting her campaign donors. She had voted on three businesses that contributed $26,000 to her gubernatorial race.
One vote extended a $200,000 contract to Environmental Technologies of Nevada, which had donated $6,000 to her race through a related company.
She voted for a major rezoning by Howard Hughes Properties two days after the company had donated $5,000 to her. She said she had asked for the donation months before.
And she voted on a gaming license for a company partly owned by Ernie Becker Jr., whose gaming company had donated $15,000 to her five months earlier.
Ethics issues dogged her throughout her campaign. However, each time an official complaint was filed, it ended up being judged without merit.
Now that she has had extensive personal experience with ethics complaints, Jones has a concern about the way the process can be used for political purposes -- but she also contends the law needs more teeth.
Jones won't discuss the pending ethics complaint against her -- whether she should have disclosed or abstained on the controversial restaurant vote.
But in an interview before the ethics panel voted June 23 to go forward with the complaint against her, Jones suggested the law needs to be changed to toss out clearly frivolous complaints. She also said there needs to be clearer ethical guidelines -- something she has sought for four years.
However, if the ethics laws are broken, she advocates putting more teeth into the punishment side. "There's no point in saying you shouldn't have done that but we don't have the authority to punish."
She proposed stronger financial penalties than the $5,000 fines possible, and making it easier to fine people. "If there is a violation, then do something about it, but in some of those cases, there shouldn't even be hearings."
Jones' seven complaints put her in second place as the politician with the most ethics complaints filed.
Former Clark County Commissioner Paul Christensen's 13 complaints -- none of them upheld -- puts him in the top spot. Two were withdrawn voluntarily and the other 11 were all found to be without merit.
One complaint was filed as a campaign trick by a person who didn't exist. Christensen believes the complaints contributed to his 1996 loss to Lance Malone, who recently was found to have broken the ethics laws.
Because Jones had made ethics an issue in 1994, she has been open to close scrutiny, and news stories surfaced four years ago even when ethics complaints were not filed.
In February 1994, it was disclosed Jones failed to report on her city and state ethics forms in 1991 and 1992 that she had sold a restaurant to the Becker family and that family members were paying her a sum under $300,000 when she was voting on their issues.
At first, she said she would seek an ethics opinion from the city, then she concluded there was no prohibition from her voting on issues involving the Becker family because the note was negotiated before she was elected mayor in May 1991.
A few days later, she asked the state ethics panel to address whether City Council members can solicit business from private individuals if they conduct business with the city, whether the council member should disclose the business relationship and abstain from voting, and how long the council member should continue abstaining from voting.
The state ethics panel said it cannot answer generalities but would have to have specific facts. No opinion was ever issued.
Jones faced her first formal complaint in April 1994 when Al Westcott filed a complaint asking the Ethics Commission to investigate a Fletcher Jones magazine advertisement in which Jones is identified as the Las Vegas mayor -- potentially a violation of the ethics code that advises public officials against using their political positions to secure privileges for themselves or any business in which they have a significant interest.
Jones appeared in Las Vegas KIDZ magazine. She also was shown in a Toyota advertisement in People magazine that appeared in August 1992. In May, the commission voted unanimously that the complaint was not worth pursuing.
In July 1994, the Ethics Commissioners voted 3-1 that Jones did not violate ethics laws when, acting as a Regional Transportation Commission member, she voted to approve a $112,340 contract to buy four vans from a Reno company owned by her then estranged husband, Fletcher Jones Jr.
Jones said she did not know the agenda item involved his company and acknowledged she did not read the backup material that showed the contract was with Jones West Ford in Reno.
The lone vote to go forward with the complaint was cast by the relatively new ethics commissioner, Mary Boetsch, who said, "I have a problem with someone who doesn't find out what they're voting on. ... When they give you a packet of materials, it's expected that you read it. That's not anybody's problem but her own."
Boetsch was direct and forceful in her questioning and her summary, even though she was not yet the chairman of the Ethics Commission.
Two other complaints were dismissed without much controversy.
In November 1997, the commissioners rejected a complaint by Las Vegan Robert Rose, who had accused the mayor of failing to disclose stock she holds in various casinos. He also accused her of "willfully withholding" the address of the clothing store she owns at the Stratosphere Tower. However, Blue Pacific Coast Wear Store was listed on her financial disclosure form. And there is no law requiring she identify specific stocks she owns.
In April 1998, the panel dismissed another complaint from Rose asking for an investigation into whether Jones manipulated the sale of Main Street Station to Boyd Gaming Corp., when there were other higher offers on the table. The commissioners said there was no evidence to go forward.
A month later in May, the commission rejected another of Rose's complaints and ruled Jones hadn't violated disclosure laws by using her position to get a deputy city manager's job for a friend of her husband's, Ann Holland.
Boetsch, by this time chairwoman of the ethics panel, called Jones' actions "as close to the line you can get without stepping over it. It looks high-handed as hell." But Boetsch agreed with the majority that it was not an ethics violation.
Jones also was dismissed from a complaint alleging she and her spokeswoman Cathy Hanson threatened the city job of Assemblyman Wendell Williams. For a sixth time, the ethics panel said there was no evidence of a violation.
Rose, 71, a retired mechanic and former construction superintendent, has filed eight ethics complaints, generally by clipping newspaper stories and submitting them. He believes he is serving a public service and denied he is filing complaints for political purposes.
He filed the complaints that concluded with the finding that Clark County Commission Chairman Yvonne Atkinson Gates and Commissioner Lance Malone broke state ethics laws by helping friends get lucrative airport concessions.
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