Sunday, March 30, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
Rosetta Johnson of Reno gave state legislators in Carson City an earful on the uphill battle to improve services for mentally ill Nevadans.
"Our organization represents 50,000 people and their family members," she told them last month. "But we don't have a powerful, sexy lobbyist to talk for us."
The president of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill of Nevada is not alone. Numerous people are virtually shut out of the legislative process because they don't have anyone in the state's capital to lobby for them.
They include minimum wage earners and the unemployed, casino dealers, nonprofit social service providers, racial minorities, disabled individuals, apartment tenants, criminal defendants, nonunion workers and artists.
What do they have in common?
They're groups that are mostly unorganized, vote sparingly and contribute little money to political campaigns.
Michael Pawlak, who deals with low-income clients as housing division administrator of the nonprofit Economic Opportunity Board of Clark County, said developers have the upper hand over tenants in shaping public policy.
"We don't have the resident councils and tenant organizations that other communities have," Pawlak said. "People who are disenfranchised can't exercise the same rights as people with influence. The influence is with developers who build upscale single-family housing and upscale multi-family housing instead of low-income housing."
Pawlak said lack of influence among low-income residents is the reason politicians have virtually ignored the need for affordable housing and expanded social services caused by Southern Nevada's rapid growth. Instead, the ongoing infrastructure discussion has concentrated on more visible needs such as water lines and schools.
"There is a lot of frustration," Pawlak said of his clients. "The frustration is they don't have the ability to engage the system. They don't have the time or background or knowledge."
Well-organized
Most lobbyists in Carson City represent business and industry, professions, local governments or organized labor. Unlike the disenfranchised, they're well organized, vote in high numbers and contribute heavily to political campaigns.
Some of the state's most powerful lobbyists such as gaming representatives Billy Vassiliadis of Las Vegas and Harvey Whittemore of Reno even help coordinate political campaigns and give advice to elected officials.
When it comes to writing legislation, lobbyists are eager to give lawmakers a helping hand. Legislators welcome the input because they juggle so many issues that they don't have time to gain proficiency in most of them.
"It's a tremendous influence," Las Vegas attorney Karen Winckler said. "The Legislature sends its representatives to Carson City with very little staff, so they rely on lobbyists for information."
Winckler, president of Nevada Attorneys for Criminal Justice, said that puts criminal defense attorneys at a disadvantage because they don't have full-time lobbyists as do prosecutors and law enforcement agencies.
"One way the Legislature could balance things would be to fund consumer advocates, such as in social services," Winckler said.
One-sided views
Legislators run the risk of passing bad laws when they rely on lobbyists with one point of view and don't solicit other opinions.
Witness legislation passed in 1995 with heavy backing from prosecutors. The "reciprocal discovery" law would have forced defendants to reveal information that could link them to a crime. So said the Nevada Supreme Court, which ruled the law unconstitutional.
Had lawmakers bothered to consult with defense attorneys, the law might not have gotten passed, Winckler said.
"With a criminal defense lobby there would be a balance, with both sides of the issue being presented," she said. "Legislators listen to their constituents, but the poor are not a constituency that reaches out to them. Legislators try to do the right thing but when they only get one side of the issue, that's when you have a problem."
Johnson said the lack of a full-time lobbyist for the mentally ill is one reason Nevada has been ranked in the bottom 10 nationally in services for such people.
When Gov. Bob Miller took measures to insulate the state from the recession of the early 1990s, mental health care was one of the hardest hit by his budget cuts. The Miller administration argues it has since restored the funding, but Johnson isn't satisfied.
"In 1992, we still weren't at the level we should have been," she said. "Our population is growing in leaps and bounds, and that includes people with mental illness."
Welfare dilemma
A similar funding dilemma confronts welfare recipients, said Jon Sasser, state advocacy coordinator for the Legal Services Statewide Advocacy Office. Sasser, one of the rare Carson City lobbyists who fight for the poor, noted that welfare mothers with two children still receive $348 a month, same as in 1992.
"Recipients have been able to beat down a bunch of negative welfare reform bills in the past few years," Sasser said. "But there's an ebb and flow. In recession times, programs serving the poor take the biggest hit, and they don't make up their losses in fatter years."
When the state does enjoy a budget surplus, such as in recent years, that money usually goes toward one-shot "brick and mortar" projects rather than social services, he said. That's not likely to change, as long as the poor don't have lobbyists.
"You really have to know the process and be here and be able to respond on a very short notice," Sasser said. "That's certainly difficult for nonprofits to do, especially in Las Vegas. They can't afford to send people full time, but the lack of a lobbyist on sight does hurt a lot."
Why don't powerless groups band together and lobby for their cause? Easier said than done.
Tony Badillo, founder and president of the Nevada Casino Dealers Association in Las Vegas, said it takes guts just to join his organization. Only about 4,500 of the 40,000 casino dealers in Clark County belong to his association. The association has representatives in various hotels but membership is accomplished discreetly.
"The reason a lot of dealers don't get involved in any group is that as soon as management gets wind of it they're terminated," Badillo said. "In some cases they're blackballed. They put a 'jacket' on them."
Attempts to unionize dealers have failed. That leaves the association as their sole voice. Though Badillo has lobbied in Carson City, he said it's a waste of time. Consequently, he hasn't registered as a lobbyist this session, though he still may attend hearings on specific bills.
NRA battles dealers
The influential hotel-casino industry, headed by the Nevada Resort Association and its 14 lobbyists, often fights legislation pushed by the dealers association. Badillo figures his only alternative is to place initiatives on the general election ballot.
"It would be the most effective way to get around the Legislature," he said. "A lot of people in office are controlled by the big-money hotels."
Las Vegan Ronald Ray Smith said he and other disabled Nevadans have trouble simply getting together, let alone banding together as a political force.
"We don't have a lot of cars," said Smith, technical adviser to the Disabled Rights Action Committee. "It's a big deal for two or three of us to congregate."
California is considered a model state for grass-roots activism among the disabled. But in California, they can live and fight for their cause in warm-weather Sacramento, that state's capital.
Smith noted that most disabled Nevadans live in warm-weather Clark County, far removed from the chillier temperatures of Carson City.
"Nevada is a hard place to work (politically) because of communication and transportation problems," he said. "Las Vegas is a scattered community. It's a toll call to call up north, and not everyone has a computer or fax machine. You're reduced to one-on-one communication."
Nonprofit organizations are restricted in the lobbying they can do because they must protect their tax-exempt status, said Garth Winckler, president of United Way of Southern Nevada and husband of attorney Karen Winckler. Consequently, nonprofits try to work with established lobby groups that share similar interests on a particular bill.
"We recognize we'll always be second fiddle," he said.
Cold shoulder
Winckler said many United Way clients view the political system as being cold toward them.
"I suspect we deal with a lot of people who don't vote," he said. "Homeless people don't vote because they don't have a permanent address. Mentally ill people don't vote because they don't know what's going on. Kids can't vote. These are people without power, and they're never going to have power."
Chester Richardson, special assistant to the president of the NAACP's Las Vegas chapter, said the black community doesn't get involved in the legislative process unless there's a crisis.
"I was the only black lobbyist in Carson City in 1991, but I never registered because I wasn't getting paid," he said. "I went to two, sometimes three committee meetings a day. I never performed my duty by individual meetings with legislators, but it would have made me more effective if I had money to wine and dine them."
Richardson estimated it would take at least $25,000 to establish a full-time lobbyist for the biennial six-month session. That's money most powerless groups don't have.
Perhaps more important, he said, is the money well-funded lobbies pour into political campaigns. That, too, is money the powerless don't have. Even the state's black lawmakers get most of their campaign funds from white sources, Richardson said.
"How many black businessmen do you see giving money to campaigns?" he said. "The person who gives money is the one who gets heard. Who has unlimited access? Not the constituents. They have to wait for town hall meetings. But lobbyists have unlimited access to the politicians because they're the ones who contribute to the pot."
Karen Winckler agrees.
"People think the power is in the vote, but it's really in the person who gives the money," she said.
archive
