Thursday, September 25, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

STEVE SEBELIUS: Williams in the dock

It seems like Assemblyman Wendell Williams and Topazia "Briget" Jones were always together.

They were together when Williams brought Jones to Community College of Southern Nevada lobbyist John Cummings in December, a meeting at which Williams asked Cummings to find her a job, Cummings says. When he did -- a clerical trainee position at in the continuing education department at the community college's West Charleston Boulevard campus, Williams suggested Jones be included on the college's lobbying team in Carson City. Cummings said he agreed.

Why?

"Straight up, because it came from Wendell Williams," Cummings said Wednesday. But he says that Jones was qualified for secretarial work, or he wouldn't have hired her. "You always feel pressure," he adds. "When you wear a (lobbyist's) badge, you always feel pressure when a lawmaker comes to you and asks for something."

And that pressure could only have worsened when Williams brought up the case of his wife, Zelda, who won a $49,000 settlement from the community college when she sued after overhearing a now-departed college official refer to her with a racial slur.

But after Cummings learned during the session that Jones had made unauthorized trips to Carson City without him, had sat with Williams on the Assembly floor and had worn a jacket that identified her as Williams' assistant, not a community college employee, he got fed up and finally sent her home. (But not before she'd spent a total of 29 days in Carson City at a cost to taxpayers of more than $1,800, Cummings reports. The bill should have been higher, he says, but Jones mysteriously did not apply for reimbursement for food or lodging.)

And the special treatment didn't stop there. Williams apparently asked legislative police to pick Jones up at the Reno airport and drive her to Carson City, a courtesy normally extended only to lawmakers, their families and witnesses testifying at legislative hearings, says Lorne Malkiewich. The number of times such trips were made wasn't available. And Jones was seen in Williams' company after hours, at Carson City nightspots such as Adele's restaurant.

After Cummings sent her back to Southern Nevada, she was sent to the Green Valley High Tech Center, where her job performance and attitude were rated poorly, according to a memo prepared by Thomas Peacock, vice president of human resources for the community college. Officials moved to fire her from the administrative assistant's job she held there.

But once again, Williams showed up -- with Jones in tow -- this time in Chancellor Jane Nichols' office. Williams complained about how Jones had been treated at the community college. "He came to my office with her and made the complaint," Nichols said Wednesday. She remembers it well, since it's never happened before or since in her three-year tenure as chief of the state's higher education system.

The only thing is, Williams -- in interviews with the Review-Journal -- said neither meeting happened.

Clearly, somebody's lying.

Williams briefly returned a telephone call, saying the reports of the scandal are wrong. "Things that have been printed in the papers at this point have been misleading and inaccurate in pretty much every way," he said. Williams said he'd call back later, but by deadline, he hadn't.

For Williams, the Jones scandal comes on the heels of a host of other personal problems that would doom the average assemblyman. He drove for two years on a license that had been suspended for failing to resolve a speeding ticket. No sooner had he paid fines and had his license restored than he found himself the subject of a failure-to-appear warrant in Reno's Justice Court, issued after a Reno lawyer reported him to the highway patrol for allegedly speeding and making unsafe lane changes in his BMW roadster conspicuously bearing Assembly license plates.

Williams, who was forced to enter into a payment program for $52,000 in back child support owed to his first wife, also entered into a payment plan for $15,000 in fines with the Secretary of State's office for failing to file even one of his three campaign finance reports on time during last year's elections. (At $100 per month, the fines should be paid off in 2016, long after term limits should drive the nine-term assemblyman from office.) And that comes after he paid off $6,800 in fines from late-filing fees from the 2000 election cycle.

Williams earns $85,981 as an administrative officer in the city's Neighborhood Services office.

But it's the Jones saga that most seriously threatens Williams' career. He is, after all, the chairman of the Assembly's Education Committee, a body that oversees the budget of both Cummings' community college and Nichols' university system. Asking them for favors is, at best, a gross and obvious conflict of interest; at worst, it's out-and-out extortion. And the more we learn about the case, the more the balance tilts toward "worst."

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist. His column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at 383-0283 or by e-mail at ssebelius@reviewjournal.com.