EDITORIAL: City, county should scrutinize spending, not IOUs

A fiscal dispute between the city of Las Vegas and Clark County has the governments examining every line item in their budgets to make sure each is getting the last possible dime from the other. If it weren't becoming so petty, it would be encouraging to see the bureaucracies move so quickly to identify inefficiencies.

The simmering spat reached a boil last month when the city went public with an assertion that the county owed millions of dollars for services provided by the city Fire Department to unincorporated areas over recent decades. An agreement outlining required payments exists, but neither the city nor the county appeared to know about it until city staff dug it out of a dusty file cabinet while hunting for loose change.

The city's failure to bill the county all these years hasn't imposed a hardship on city taxpayers. City and county emergency responders assist each other all the time, and city fire crews would have been on the clock all those years, ready to roll, even if such a contract didn't exist. But the city's demand for back payments totaling more than $3 million certainly would hurt county taxpayers for the sole purpose of giving the City Council some coveted spending money.

Lo and behold, the county released an audit last week — its report completed in just 10 days instead of the usual few months — that determined the city and other municipalities are being undercharged by the county by millions of dollars for the staging of city elections.

County-owned voting machines are rolled out at least once every odd-numbered year for municipal elections, but county Audit Director Angela Darragh figured out that cities aren't appropriately billed for county labor, for county expenses incurred preparing for public voting, or for eventual replacement costs for voting machines.

So if the city follows through on its effort to collect from the county, it should expect to pay it right back. (Unless the cities of Clark County take the common-sense, money-saving step of moving their elections to statewide ballots in even-numbered years.) Not that any of this matters to taxpayers, who care more about how much money is their wallet than which government bucket their dollars ultimately drop into.

If the city and county scrutinized their spending instead of their revenue, this back-and-forth might actually do some good.