It’s all under control

The Nevada State Contractors Board has quietly closed one of four complaints that the county filed in October in connection with the remodeling that took place at the Rio and at Harrah's on the Strip without required permits or inspections.

The board threw out the complaint against Ford Contracting for any role in renovating guest rooms at the North Carnival tower at Harrah's Las Vegas.

"We have determined there was no violation of the contractor's license law," Chris Denning, the board's deputy director of investigations, wrote on March 21 to Gregory Franklin, the county's assistant director of Development Services.

Last summer, Review-Journal reporters were able to locate several men who worked on the remodeling who alleged they regularly saw and interacted on the job with personnel from Ford Contracting.

Is the Contractors Board saying -- in criminal law parlance -- that, "Some other dude done it"?

Or is this finding more in the nature of a technicality -- that performing major hotel renovations which could impact fire safety for thousands of guests doesn't "violate the contractor's license law," any more than it would "violate the contractor's licence law" to commit murder or espionage, since there's no specific wording about those offenses in the code?

It would be nice to know -- just as it would be nice to know whether the board sought input from anyone other than Harrah's and Ford, itself.

But Art Nadler, a board spokesman, declined to answer any questions, this week. The contractor's board is bound by state law not to discuss complaints that do not end in a formal disciplinary action, Mr. Nadler said Tuesday.

Nonsense. State law says such detailed findings (at the very least) are presumed to be public records, subject to only a few specific exceptions. Does the board contend its witnesses are likely to be wiped out by mob enforcers if their identities are revealed? That proprietary information -- something on the order of the formula for Coca-Cola -- will become public, bankrupting major corporations and causing a tectonic shift on Wall Street, should it spill the beans on why it's OK for a licensed contractor to perform major renovations on a high-rise hotel without bothering to get any permits or inspections?

Cynics have long complained such regulatory boards do precious little regulating -- that they're actually little more than cartels of the existing "good old boys" in any given industry, anointed by the state to sit around a table wearing fancy hats and seeing to it that upstart competitors have to jump through plenty of expensive, time-consuming, often arbitrary hoops before being allowed a piece of the action. Meanwhile, any missteps by one of the established "good old boys" themselves is treated with a wink, a nod and a round on the house.

How sad, in this rare instance where the Contractors Board gets a chance to show it can really bare its fangs when needed, standing up for the safety of residents and visitors alike, that Mr. Nadler and company instead choose to lock the doors to the fraternity house, curl up and fall asleep like old hounds on the doormat, insisting the public has no right to ask what all that whooping and hollering is about in there, as the beer bottles and the panties come flying out the upstairs windows.

Meantime, what happens to the county fire inspector who said those six high-roller suites at the Paris were A-OK back in 2001 -- although they now turn out to have mysteriously fewer sprinklers than required? A free slice of quiche and an evening with Irma La Douce?

Nothing to worry about. Nothing caught fire, no screaming tourists jumping to their deaths out of the top-floor windows on national TV.

This time.