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Sunday, February 06, 2000
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Better watch your speed
Switchman asleep on Henderson college project.
If Southern Nevada keeps growing, it may eventually make sense to site a new college in Henderson -- though it would be vastly reassuring if proponents could point to a bevy of competing private institutions clamoring for a chance to do so.
Those who wish to promote not just any college or university in Henderson, but a tax-funded one, assume the burden of demonstrating that "cannibalizing" of talent and budget from UNLV and the Community College of Southern Nevada won't simply leave the valley with three lesser, flabby institutions, instead of a couple of leaner, stronger, more competitive ones.
It is an understatement to say that those promoting the dream of Henderson U. have not yet presented any such set of diligent market studies.
Instead, so breakneck has been the race to "staff" this phantom school -- the Legislature has not yet approved funding to buy the first brick or chalkboard -- that former CCSN President Richard Moore has already been brought aboard and promised a salary of $175,000.
(Three of 11 university regents properly asked whether Mr. Moore's hiring should have been preceded by a national search; the matter is currently subject of a probe by the attorney general's office.)
And now Mr. Moore -- whose firmest promise upon accepting the striped cap and oil can of this railroad-without-a-locomotive was that he would not raid his old roundhouse of associates at CCSN for staff -- announces he has proffered a 15 percent pay raise to hire away his former vice president, Orlando Sandoval, from the community college.
Though without any written job description, the "interim vice president for planning and administration" of this phantom institution without a campus or a site has apparently been promised $125,000 per year in taxpayer dollars.
"This is just crazy," opines regent Steve Sisolak. "We had to go to the students and ask them for more money to pay a technology fee, but we've got the money to guarantee a salary for an institution that doesn't even exist? ... This is just coming at us way too fast."
Tough questions from Mr. Sisolak and faculty members at a UNLV forum early last week led Mr. Moore to characterize the regent as his personal enemy and an enemy of the new state college -- remarks for which he later apologized.
But Mr. Sisolak's questions merely show he's doing his job.
Yes, the Board of Regents last year approved a state college in Henderson "in concept," and Henderson politicians managed to convince the 1999 Legislature to allocate $500,000 for "studies and planning."
But the salaries of Messrs. Moore and Sandoval will eat up that sum in no time. Then what?
All this undue haste sure makes it appear that proponents of the new school aim to present the next Legislature with a fait accompli -- bypassing a calm and deliberate inquiry into whether it's wise to found another tax-supported four-year state college anywhere. Instead, be prepared to hear: "But we've got all these people on board! The train is leaving the station! The die has been cast! The horses are out of the barn!"
Lawmakers would not be "cutting off funding." Because there is no funding.
Enthusiasm for the new Henderson college is all very nice, as boosterism goes. But before we lay down any more track in a hurry -- only to find we've been building on quicksand -- it's time to back off and call in the surveyors.
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