Former state legislator and labor supporter Tom Hickey dies at age 86

CARSON CITY — Former state lawmaker Tom Hickey, who served 22 years as a Democrat and labor supporter in the Assembly and Senate from North Las Vegas, died Wednesday of a heart-related condition. He was 86.

Services are being arranged but won’t occur until after the Nov. 8 general election.

Hickey chaired the Committee on Agriculture during most of his decade in the Assembly. In the Senate, he chaired the Senate Committee on Government Affairs in 1985 and 1991, the two sessions during his tenure when the Democrats held the majority.

For 10 years, he chaired the interim Committee on High-Level Radioactive Waste and was involved in the controversial creation of Bullfrog County in Southern Nevada as part of Nevada’s response to the siting of a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

He served from 1972 to 1994, when he ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state.

“He was a very strong Democrat and labor-oriented,” said his wife, Liliam Lujan Hickey. “He served in the Legislature only for the people he represented. He had no personal interests, only to do a good job.”

Former state lawmaker Danny Thompson, executive secretary-treasurer of the Nevada State AFL-CIO, said Hickey was his mentor when he served in the Assembly for a decade beginning in 1980.

“He was a great legislator for the little guy, that’s for sure,” Thompson said. “He never forgot where he came from, and his voting record shows that. He was a regular guy and a good friend.”

Former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said he and Hickey became friends years ago.

“We were just a couple of knock-around guys in Las Vegas,” Goodman said. “He was a good guy.”

Goodman said he listened to Hickey for his advice on politics, and it paid off. In his first parade, Goodman said he waved as he rode along, but Hickey told him he wouldn’t win an election that way.

“Get out and shake everybody’s hand.” Goodman said Hickey told him. “I listened to him, and I won my races.

“I am sorry he is gone, but he had a great life. No one had anything bad to say about Tom.”

Former state lawmaker Helen Foley, who served three sessions with Hickey in the Assembly and Senate from 1981 to 1986, recalled Hickey as a great storyteller and “an Irishman through and through.”

“He was always plotting and scheming to pull one over on the Republicans,” Foley said. “Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but he never stopped scheming. He was a very good guy.”

The idea of creating Bullfrog County was an effort to ensure that the state received federal funds if Yucca Mountain was going to be built, she said.

While the Legislature was his priority, that changed for a weekend in May 1981 when lawmakers took a break and Hickey married Liliam, Foley said.

“Tom was a bachelor forever,” she said. “When he found Liliam she was the light of his life.”

Hickey was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, and graduated from what was then the University of Omaha.

While a legislator, he was employed as a brakeman with the Union Pacific Railroad, retiring shortly before his final session. A bachelor when he was first elected, Hickey married Lujan in 1981.

A native of Cuba, Hickey’s wife served on the State Board of Education from 1989 to 2001 and was honored by having a neighborhood elementary school named after her in 2006.

Hickey proudly credited his wife as being the better politician in the family.

Hickey was particularly fond of his Irish heritage and usually led off the Legislature’s biennial St. Patrick’s Day festivities with a recitation of a limerick.

While involved in many important issues during his time in the Legislature, it was Bullfrog County that many Nevadans who knew him most remember. In an oral history recorded in November 2008, Hickey recalled that the idea came from him and his colleague Paul May.

“Our thinking was that we would form a county where this waste is going,” he said. “We were looking at more money — not just a hundred million — but the support for a county, which would be under the control of a governor, like Richard Bryan. He would select the county commissioners. He would select the sheriff. He would control the political entity in Bullfrog. He could approve or disapprove anything that happened in Bullfrog. We thought he’d go for it. He did, by the way.”

The creation of the uninhabited county in 1987 to give the state more control of the proposed waste repository was short-lived. It was challenged successfully in state court and dissolved in 1989. The territory was returned to Nye County. The Yucca Mountain repository remains an issue for Nevada to this day.

Hickey also once fought off two men, one armed with a knife, one evening when he was leaving the Legislative Building.

“Although the man was much younger, he was holding the knife wrong,” Hickey said in his oral history. “That’s how I knew he couldn’t handle himself.”

Asked about his fondest memory of serving in the Legislature, Hickey said it was the camaraderie with his colleagues.

“Great bunch of people, all trying in their own way to serve the population,” he said. “They do some strange things, like I have done. I just respect it. I respect what the Legislature attempts to do. I know that, in many quarters, they’re not respected. But they still do it. That’s all right.”

Contact Sean Whaley at swhaley@reviewjournal.com or 775-461-3820. Follow @seanw801 on Twitter.