City licenses

Green Valley Lock and Safe is based in Henderson, but serves customers throughout the Valley. Owner Jeff Schonzeit says that means he needs at least four business licenses: one each for Henderson, Las Vegas, North Las Vegas and Clark County.

Not only that: Since locksmith licenses require background checks, Mr. Schonzeit underwent four of those, as well.

"Henderson has about an 18-page application that you have to fill out and go through fingerprinting and a background check," Mr. Schonzeit said. "Then you go to Las Vegas and they do their own. You have to go through the same thing four times because nobody shares with each other."

Legislation passed earlier this year requires Clark and Washoe counties and the cities within those counties to study consolidating and reorganizing government services, with a report to the Legislature due in September 2010.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman has long advocated consolidating local governments. "The power that we would have," he mused, recently. "Together, I think we would be a real force to contend with."

Yes, larger governments bestow greater power on those who run them -- a prospect Americans once viewed with well-deserved alarm. For as government entities grow larger, they can also grow more expensive, remote and impersonal. The Legislature tried twice in the 1970s to merge Las Vegas and Clark County. One effort was found unconstitutional; voters defeated the second.

The Las Vegas Police Department and the Clark County Sheriff's Office merged in 1973. That's worked fairly well. Las Vegas and Clark County also share a library district, which has done more in the way of cultural activities and architectural experimentation than in assembling collections of bibliographic repute.

It's even less clear that the 1955 decision to merge Clark County's 14 school districts into one was a net gain, unless you love bureaucracy.

Should the business license divisions be consolidated? If the goal is reducing costly bureaucracy, a preferable solution would be to declare most business activity presumed legal, and to stop "licensing" it, at all.

In cases involving public safety -- such as locksmithing -- consolidation might make sense. But failing that, at the very least, the municipalities should enter into reciprocal agreements, honoring each other's local licenses the same way drivers licenses are honored across state lines

Surely fingerprinting Mr. Schonzeit once should have sufficed.