Fretwell confronts challenges

Years ago, in Greenville, S.C., a teenage Betsy Fretwell participated in a mock city government day at her high school. The students drew positions to see what they would be.

"The role I drew out of the hat was city manager," said Fretwell, who recently took over the reins as a very real city manager for the city of Las Vegas. "I looked around and said, 'What does a city manager do?' "

She's got a much better idea of that now, having served as assistant or deputy city manager for Las Vegas since 2000 and having worked in leadership positions for Henderson and Clark County prior to that.

But even an experienced hand could be excused for trembling before the set of challenges facing Las Vegas today: falling revenue, urgent infrastructure and reinvestment needs, and the fact that Las Vegas isn't likely to grow again as it has in the past, prompting a hard look at every facet of how the city does business.

On Monday, Fretwell talked about balancing immediate needs such as plugging budget holes against long-term goals such as making city operations more environmentally friendly and continuing infrastructure investments.

"I think we've done a good job of explaining to the public our current financial dilemma," she said. "I think it's difficult for individuals to understand why you would continue to spend capital dollars when you are in a tough economic time.

"If (we) just hold on to all the money and stop everything, that just sends a clear signal that we're doing the ostrich-with-its-head-in-the-sand thing. That does not work. We have to be a catalyst in the economy right now."

When the economy does recover, several officials have said, Las Vegas will need to be a different city. There are geographical constraints that will limit the suburban growth that filled up city coffers before, which presents problems because "a lot of our revenues are growth-driven."

"When I first moved here, there was this campaign that growth needs to pay for growth," Fretwell said, "and systematically over the last 15 years our revenue structures have been adapted to have ... growth pay for growth, to have tourists pay for our services.

"Now that one leg of the stool ... is soft, really soft. It just means that you've got to do more with less."

Personnel costs -- a huge chunk of the city's operating budget -- present another long-term challenge. Union contracts govern almost all of the city's work force, and reworking an existing structure that contains annual raises and generous benefit packages will be tough.

"We've had contracts in place for years that basically get built upon. It's not like you start over from scratch each time you sit down at the negotiating table," Fretwell said.

The city has a salary comparison study under way, and two unions have agreed to contract changes that slightly lower cost-of-living raises. Fretwell also defended the city for maintaining a lean work force.

"We have a really low employee ratio delivering vital services to our community," she said. "Along the way there've been decisions to pay fewer people more.

"To unwind that is going to be difficult because at the end of the day, we still have to do that job ... unless we want to make some hard decisions as a community that we no longer want those services. Which is really hard to do when you're pulling up the bottom of the list on a lot of service categories, and when we're in pretty good shape ... do you really want to curtail them?"

Larry Brown, a former Las Vegas city councilman and current Clark County commissioner, said that while Fretwell is a good choice for the position, "her challenge is timing."

"She doesn't have a lot of time to establish a leadership style," he said. "She's jumped into a real challenge.

"She has some institutional knowledge of Southern Nevada for certain. With that institutional knowledge, her experience with the city ... I think she's well-positioned to take the city through the next few years," Brown said.

Contact reporter Alan Choate at achoate@reviewjournal.com or 702-229-6435.