Regents in Fantasyland

For nearly a year, university system Chancellor Jim Rogers and his enablers on the Board of Regents have cried to any taxpayer who'll listen that the sky is falling on Nevada's higher education system. Their message hasn't wavered: Budget cuts are not only ruining the state's public colleges, but the state itself.

On Friday, however, they took a break from doomsaying and went to a happy place, a realm where Nevada's economy is still exploding, allowing government budgets to grow by double-digit rates each year.

That request from Gov. Jim Gibbons for state agencies to submit budget proposals for 2009-11 that cut spending by 14 percent?

Pshaw! The Board of Regents gave tentative backing to a two-year budget that includes $125 million in new funding and an additional $27 million wish list, just in case Santa Claus decides they've been especially good.

That represents a 9.5 percent increase over current funding levels, never mind declining enrollment; the foreclosure wave that has forced thousands of valley residents to find new homes; the plunge in home values that has ruined lenders, builders and retailers alike; the tightening of credit markets that has shelved major casino and shopping mall projects, sweeping away thousands of jobs; the steep climb in energy prices that has wiped out the discretionary budgets of the middle class; and the drop in visitors to Las Vegas and the resulting loss of tax revenue that has put the brakes on runaway government growth.

The public has been assured by this group of elected officials that not only is cutting one more cent from the university system's current operations impossible, it won't be able to function without a huge injection of new funding that the state's current tax structure can't be expected to produce.

"What we're doing is good for the state," Regent James Dean Leavitt said at Friday's meeting in Reno. "We're saving the state money long-term."

Regents endorsed the opinion of Executive Vice Chancellor Dan Klaich, who proclaimed that the board isn't obligated to balance the state's budget, nor does it have to prioritize its limited resources.

"We present what we think is needed to run the system of higher education. That's our job," he said.

If that's the case, then why not simply have the faculty senates of the state's public colleges run the board? If regents can completely disregard funding realities in preparing a budget, why have them waste time making recommendations at all?

At least one regent, Dorothy Gallagher, pointed out Friday's vote will strike at the board's credibility, and that the budget will prompt lawmakers and the governor to ask what "rock we've been living under."

The Board of Regents, as a body of citizens elected to provide oversight of one of the state's biggest agencies, must be suffering from Stockholm syndrome -- constantly surrounded and badgered by academics, donors and college administrators, they've taken the side of their captors.

Friday's move amounts to another warning shot of the drama to come in the 2009 Legislature. The public won't get any election mailers from legislative candidates promising massive tax increases -- just an occasional reference in the media to a tax "restructuring" that will miraculously give the higher education system and other supposedly starving government lobbies the dough they're demanding at the expense of suffering private industry.

During today's primary and November's general election, voters should keep that in mind.