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Wednesday, March 03, 1999
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
COLUMN: Jon Ralston
Sisolak's fair share ride
Imagine if Paul Revere rode through every Middlesex village and farm and the country folk refused to be roused.
Not only would Longfellow not have had a poem, the American Revolution might have turned into the Massacre at Concord and Lexington. No lanterns hanging aloft in belfry arches, the insurrection snuffed out, the colonists still colonists.
Now you know how Steve Sisolak, Southern Nevada's modern-day Revere, feels today.
After weeks of sounding a call to arms on funding inequities between UNLV and UNR, Sisolak, to paraphrase Longfellow, finds his cry of defiance echoing like a voice in the darkness, but with too few listening. And thus his attempt to start a fair-share revolution appears to have been short-circuited, meaning the south remains a colony of the north.
This week, the regents will meet to determine whether the state funding disparity between the schools is, as Sisolak claims, $3,000 per student. Although that may seem like progress, Sisolak's sounding of the alarum has clanged cacophonously among the education establishment, many of whom believe the new regent is on the right track but making unproductive noise.
"Steve Sisolak is not doing anything wrong," said fellow Regent Tom Wiesner. "But he is stretching the envelope."
Wiesner may be right. But anyone who has watched the fair-share issue over the years, whether the venue is university funding or highway projects, knows the art of compromise too often leads to artful dodging by the North. Sisolak's bull-in-the-china-shop style notwithstanding, the rookie is raising old issues in new ways. He is saying it's time for a revolution, not a group therapy session. Sisolak is asking questions that make a lot of folks uncomfortable. For instance:
-- Why does UNR President Joe Crowley get a landslide vote last week for a $100 million investment in a northern campus, but Regent Thalia Dondero can't get all of the southerners together on bridging a $16 million shortfall in the south? "That's not prudent fiscal planning when we have major overcrowding down here," Sisolak says. Wiesner and another southerner, David Phillips, voted with the northerners. Wiesner insists that it would be imprudent to open budgets already presented to the governor. Maybe so. But The Gang of 63 has not yet closed any budgets, so why not take a stand? And isn't Gov. Kenny Guinn a former UNLV president who should be receptive to these issues?
-- Why do the seven system presidents, five of whom are from outside Clark County, meet monthly in private gatherings with the chancellor to set budget priorities and then make recommendations to the regents? Isn't it strange this regionally skewed bunch, which can meet secretly because they are not elected, can make regionally skewed proposals to rubber-stamping regents?
This is not about whether UNR is a better school than UNLV. And this is not about whether UNLV should be getting its fair share of education dollars. This is about juice, and the north's serial ability to divide and conquer.
Sisolak's cause has been hurt by the overheated rhetoric of Regent Mark Alden, who has called for northern regents and the chancellor to resign. If Alden were scurrying around Middlesex in 1775, he would have been shooting himself and his fellow revolutionaries in the foot with his musket.
Wiesner remains hopeful the study will help rectify what he agrees is a problem, perhaps this session. And UNLV President Carol Harter is optimistic the discussion is at least occurring and there seems to be "a genuine understanding of our frustration."
Sisolak, though, seems less patient, unwilling to muffle his cries of defiance, fearful that should he turn down the decibel level, his words will not, as Revere's did, echo for evermore.
Jon Ralston publishes The Ralston Report, a political newsletter. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday.
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JON RALSTON
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