EDITORIAL: Local governments can’t waste if they want more

Personal finance experts don’t agree on everything, but every last one of them will provide this bit of advice: the smallest expenses matter.

That daily iced coffee, the lunches out, the gym membership that goes largely unused — they all add up fast. Coming up with money for important stuff, from debt repayment to savings for a rainy day or retirement, starts with cutting back on the small stuff anyone can easily do without, and identifying and halting wasteful expenditures.

These kinds of decisions have been made all across this valley, where hardship and sacrifice became a way of life for countless residents who lost their jobs and homes during the Great Recession.

Southern Nevada’s local governments can’t relate. Sure, they claim they’ve made cuts, too. But most of those “cuts” were merely reductions in what they hoped to spend. Public-sector jobs have been eliminated, but mostly through attrition.

Now governments claim they can cut no more, that higher taxes on the already-strapped masses are necessary. Households are being asked to sacrifice even more so governments won’t go without.

But go without what, exactly? After all, the smallest expenses matter. Have our local governments axed the daily iced coffee, the lunches out? No, they haven’t.

And the taxpaying public should be mad as hell about it.

As reported by the Review-Journal’s Arnold Knightly on May 9, 66 city of Henderson administrators were awarded new professional allowances of between $250 and $550 in April and May — at the same time some of those already well-paid administrators were out in public telling residents the city had no choice but to reduce services to needy seniors and raise recreation fees for residents. The City Council, meanwhile, was being urged to impose a property tax increase.

The city spent nearly $44,000 on the perk before City Manager Jacob Snow, who approved the program despite an operating budget deficit of $5 million, suspended it. But not before spending enough money to fully preserve some of the services that were cut. Saturday lunches for low-income seniors were slashed so Henderson’s upper-class brass could eat out on the public’s dime.

Meanwhile, the Clark County School District was spending thousands of dollars on an Emergenetics consultant who profiles the personalities of administrators. As reported May 11 by the Review-Journal’s Trevon Milliard, an expenditure of more than $80,000 was approved within days of Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky’s promise to cut all spending that doesn’t directly benefit student achievement. The school district had canceled this very program in 2009 — after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on it — because of public outrage. So much for learning from mistakes.

Teachers will go without supplies, and schools are raising money for urgent needs so that administrators can take a survey to find out whether they’re red-brained or blue-brained? The school district has long handed out rich consulting contracts while claiming poverty — its newest Emergenetics consultant, Erik Kieser, is being paid $1,000 per business day, as much as Mr. Skorkowsky. That creates quite a credibility problem heading into November’s election, when voters will decide Question 3, an initiative to impose a 2 percent revenue tax on business to fund schools.

Not to be outdone, the Las Vegas Centennial Commission, which funds city history-preservation projects with commemorative license plate fees, is considering pouring $1 million into the black hole that is the Huntridge Theater. That money would pay for just some of the land under the gutted structure at Charleston Boulevard and Maryland Parkway, and effectively make the public partners in a place no one has been able to revive. “Why is it going to work this time?” Commissioner Bob Stoldal asked.

Public money was put into The Smith Center to create a performing arts venue that would stand for generations. Now the public might pay into a dead 70-year-old theater?

Government can’t argue that it needs more of our money when it does so many dumb things with the money it already gets. The smallest expenses matter. If budgets have fluff, governments get enough.