EDITORIAL: Other people’s money

What’s worse than a government agency wasting your money? Two government agencies working together to waste your money.

Clark County and the Southern Nevada Health District are at war in court, running up hefty legal bills on the public’s dime. As reported Feb. 15 by the Review-Journal’s Ben Botkin, the fight started in 2011, when the health district sought the right to own the property for its yet-to-be-built new headquarters, and the county countered that the health district couldn’t own the property. A District Court ruling in 2012 sided with the county, and the case is now with the Nevada Supreme Court.

Total legal fees thus far are approaching $300,000; the health district has shoveled $166,568.89 into the lawsuit, and the county has dumped $109,754.92. These two entities would be perfectly cast in Danny DeVito’s 1991 role as Lawrence Garfield, who said: “I love money. I love money more than the things it can buy. There’s only one thing I love more than money. You know what that is? Other people’s money.”

Businesses and individuals have a natural disincentive to litigate: It costs a lot of money. For every plaintiff and defendant, there comes a moment when the uncertainty of the outcome must be weighed against potential expenses. But government agencies have no such incentive. If they lose, they appeal until they reach the end of the line — as the health district already has proved — because they can always count on a steady supply of taxpayer funding.

This could have been settled nearly two years ago, when the county offered to build the health district a new building, after the agency left its previous headquarters on Shadow Lane in April 2012 because of structural problems. But the health district thus far has refused the offer of new digs at great expense to the taxpayers.

This is the point where the public expects elected officials to be the grown-ups in the room. Why in the world are Clark County commissioners and the elected officials who serve as the Southern Nevada District Board of Health putting up with this? Figure out a solution. Stop wasting the public’s money fighting a legal case about how to spend even more of the public’s money.