EDITORIAL: Past time for county to do the right thing

The legal beagles who advise the Clark County Commission have finally gotten it right in a long-running dispute involving public records: They’ve advised the local government to pay up and move on. It’s about time.

Six years ago, the Review-Journal filed a lawsuit against the county coroner for withholding autopsy reports the newspaper requested as part of an investigation into the deaths of children in the care of the child welfare system. The documents are not specifically exempted from the state open records law and are thus available to the public under state statute.

Rather than comply, county officials indulged the coroner and mounted a legal fight, using taxpayer funds in an effort to keep information from those very same taxpayers.

More than three years and two Supreme Court losses later, the county finally turned over the records in late 2020. A District Court judge in 2021 awarded $170,000 in legal fees to the Review-Journal. Those fees escalated as the county continued to dig in.

On Tuesday — six years after this mess started and two years since the judge granted the initial monetary award — the commission is scheduled to consider settling the matter. The district attorney’s office recommends that the board approve the payout, which would be the second major payment the government has made to the Review-Journal in this case.

It’s a rare bit of intelligent legal advice that county officials have received on this controversy.

“I sincerely hope Clark County commissioners approve this settlement and finally end a yearslong legal fight that never should have begun in the first place,” Review-Journal Executive Editor Glenn Cook said. “More importantly, I hope county leadership stops wasting taxpayer money to defend the hiding of important records from the public.”

Given the long and pitiful record of Nevada governments ignoring laws intended to promote openness and accountability, such optimism is likely to evolve into disappointment eventually. Consider that the deal up for debate this week stipulates, “This agreement is being made voluntarily and not based on representations or statements of any kind made by any of the parties or their representatives as to the merits, legal liability or value of the claim or any other matter relating thereto.”

While some of this boilerplate language is intended to preclude future civil actions, it’s notable that the county continues to deny any culpability even as it has lost repeatedly in the courts. Why are county officials writing a six-figure check to this newspaper — at taxpayer expense — if not because their legal arguments in this case faltered under judicial scrutiny?

The commissioners bungled this dispute horribly. The legal guidance they received was suspect. It’s unfortunate that the taxpayers must bear the financial burden rather than those at the Clark County Government Center, who were playing irresponsibly with other people’s money.