Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Governor’s wife balances her causes with his budget

Brian and Kathleen Sandoval

Sam Morris

Gov. Brian and Kathleen Sandoval

Sun Coverage

A dozen years ago, Kathleen Sandoval arrived home from a business trip just after midnight and slipped into bed alongside her husband.

“Guess what,” she said. “I just quit my job.”

Sandoval had just returned from a health care facility in New Mexico where workers had tied a patient to a toilet. The hospital was so understaffed that employees saw no other way to keep the patient safe, she said.

She was at the facility as a consultant on rehabilitation programs for traumatic brain injury patients, and was starting to see a disturbing pattern: Decisions were increasingly driven by what insurance companies would pay for, not what was best for the patient.

Shortly before her trip to New Mexico, one of her patients had been discharged from a Northern Nevada rehabilitation facility even though he couldn’t yet care for himself. His insurance company would no longer fund his care, she said.

“The walking wounded, they were called. He could walk, but he had no processing skills.”

One night, the man slipped out of his house. A bell that was supposed to alert his wife didn’t ring. The man walked onto U.S. 50 and was hit by a tractor-trailer.

And then came the patient tied to the toilet, and Sandoval thought to herself, “Gosh, I can’t do this anymore.” Her job, she said, conflicted with her sense of right and wrong.

She left that job for another, as a project director for Children’s Cabinet, a nonprofit agency that serves disadvantaged youth. Sandoval manages 27 programs with 193 funding sources that are available to 62,000 children.

Nevada’s new first lady is known by colleagues, family and friends as forthright, caring and direct — a trait that surfaced when she spotted a young Brian Sandoval eating lunch at their college and sat down next to him.

They married in 1990 and she is blazing a new path as the first governor’s spouse to balance a full-time job, raising a young family and her duties as first lady.

She spends weekends doing the family laundry, shepherding their three children to activities and wrangling the first family around the dinner table.

“She’s able to raise three kids, have a husband, be a governor’s wife and support the 62,000 kids who are eligible for the Children’s Cabinet’s services,” said Mike Pomi, executive director of the agency. “Now it’s a broader scope. She still manages it and she’s fairly seamless with how she does her job.”

As first lady, however, she finds herself walking a difficult line as a career advocate for some of the neediest Nevadans who stand to lose the most from the budget cuts proposed by her husband as he holds to his vow not to raise taxes.

Brian Sandoval Defeats Reid

Brian Sandoval enters the Red Rock Resort ballroom holding his daughter Madeline's hand after it was announced he defeated Rory Reid for governor Tuesday. Launch slideshow »

Her colleagues hope a sympathetic Kathleen Sandoval has the governor’s ear and will gently lobby him.

But like her husband, Sandoval says Nevadans need to deal with reality.

•••

Kathleen Sandoval met her husband in the 1980s while both were summer school students at UNR.

The pair became close friends, but didn’t date seriously until he graduated law school. He proposed a short time later while the two were on a drive. He pretended to get lost in Gardnerville and the two ended up at the Genoa House — a popular bed-and-breakfast in Nevada’s oldest town.

Kathleen Sandoval wanted a big family but knew it would be a challenge.

The couple spent five years undergoing fertility treatments before Kathleen gave birth to their first child, James. They began trying immediately for their second and soon had Maddy.

“We didn’t have to go through in vitro — we were very lucky,” she said. “But we had a couple of miscarriages. That was the most difficult part. That was more difficult than actually trying to do the fertility treatments.”

Kathleen Sandoval said her husband was the calm stalwart when she would begin to despair.

“Brian is always optimistic,” she said. “He’s definitely ‘the glass is half full,’ all of the time. I leaned on him more than he needed to lean on me. He would always say we had other options: ‘We can adopt.’ He was extremely supportive.”

Their third child, Marisa, “came all on her own.”

Into their second month in the Governor’s Mansion, the Sandoval family is learning a new routine.

The children go to school in Reno, 30 miles away, where Kathleen Sandoval works.

Mornings start early.

Brian Sandoval is usually headed to the Capitol by 6:30 a.m.

“He likes to have time in the office before everybody gets in,” his wife said. “He likes to have time to himself, be able to review materials, have a cup of coffee, read information he likes to know about, just be in his own mind frame.”

James, a freshman at Bishop Manogue High School in Reno, rides to school with an older friend. Maddy, who is in middle school, is driven by a college student. And Kathleen Sandoval drives the youngest, first-grader Marisa.

Sandoval Inauguration

Gov. Brian Sandoval takes the oath of office from Chief Supreme Court Justice Michael Douglas during the inauguration, Jan. 3, 2011 at the Capitol in Carson City. First Lady Kathleen Sandoval is at right. Launch slideshow »

When they can swing family dinners, Brian Sandoval does the cooking. Kathleen does the dishes.

Disciplining the children often falls to her, though she admits she’s the softy. Her answer for unacceptable behavior: Take away the cell phone or computer.

Kathleen Sandoval has learned to give her husband space when he comes home from a difficult day before asking about what’s bothering him.

“He internalizes his stress more than anything,” she said.

•••

After dropping the news on her husband that she quit her consulting job, Kathleen Sandoval didn’t stay without work for long. The couple were donors to the Children’s Cabinet, and she was soon hired there.

Among its services are anti-truancy, gang prevention and family violence prevention programs. They help homeless, mentally ill and abandoned youth, as well as foster children who are pushed out of the system because of their age.

Kathleen Sandoval built a reputation as a problem-solver who jumps bureaucratic hurdles and personally engages with the children and teenagers. It’s not unusual for her to pick them up and drive them to school when she spots them on the way to work — and then lecture them on the importance of making correct choices in life.

On the day her husband filed as a candidate to run for governor, she swung by the agency to pick up a laptop computer and interrupted a gang fight in the parking lot. A rival gang had come to challenge some of the young people at Children’s Cabinet.

“I just laid on my horn and drove in their direction,” she said. “It distracted them. I jumped out of the car and told them to get off our property.”

She was shoeless but didn’t notice her feet were bleeding from walking on the gravel parking lot until a police officer pointed it out to her.

“She’s a mom, first and foremost,” Pomi said. “She protects her kids, and those were her kids.”

Kathleen Sandoval has developed a special interest in substance abuse and mental health treatment — two priorities she has vowed to devote herself to as first lady.

“I think it gives me a really good perspective on what the needs and the gaps are in Washoe County and throughout the state for kids,” she said.

She is aware that budget cuts proposed by her husband would affect the services she has worked hard to provide. Funding for alternative placement for young offenders would be cut. Family-to-family counseling for young families would be eliminated, as would community justice programs.

Sandoval's State of the State

Gov. Brian Sandoval, center, leads a standing ovation for a pair of Nevada servicemen who were decorated for their actions in Afghanistan, while making his first State of the State address before a joint session of the Nevada Legislature in Carson City on Monday, Jan. 24, 2011. Lt. Col Tony Millican, who is stationed at Nellis Air Force Base, received the Bronze Star and the Air Force's Lance P. Sijan Award for heroism. Spl. Ernesto Padilla, of the Nevada National Guard received the Purple Heart for wounds he suffered from a road side blast that tore his vehicle in half. Launch slideshow »

But she is practiced at dealing with changing funding streams, she said. The grants and donations her nonprofit group relies on are never certain. Vanishing funding shouldn’t mean an end to services.

Instead, she said, it’s up to the community to confront the challenges by partnering with other agencies and finding smarter ways to deliver services.

The Children’s Cabinet, for example, recently stopped providing substance abuse treatment, partnering instead with another agency whose sole mission is to provide such treatment.

Sandoval said she knows there is frustration among her friends and colleagues over her husband’s budget cuts. But she said she has little patience for complaining.

“I can relate. Everybody feels their service is most important,” she said. “But the bottom line is there is not enough money to meet every single service.”

Her colleagues said the budget crisis has long been an issue for them and they are looking to the governor for long-term fixes.

Many hope Kathleen Sandoval will help protect them from some of the most painful cuts. Most are calling for a tax increase, which Brian Sandoval has steadfastly refused to consider.

They recognize the delicate position Kathleen Sandoval is in and they separate their antipathy for her husband’s budget cuts from their affection for his wife.

“Anytime someone in human services is in a position of influence, we’re all excited,” said Julia Ratti, a Sparks councilwoman who has spent her career working with disadvantaged youth. “It means more depth and insight and accurate information is likely to be part of the discussion.

“But I’m more in the camp of ‘we need to raise some revenue and make sure the least able to take care of themselves have the basic support they need.’ I’m concerned the governor will cut to a level where that won’t be true.”

As first lady, Kathleen Sandoval said she wants to build connections between the nonprofit and private sectors so providers can step in and offer services the state can no longer afford.

“If people just keep going the way they are going, hoping something will change, if they just continue to rely on the state and hope the budget turns around, if they don’t start thinking outside the box, then, yeah, kids won’t get the services,” she said.

“But that won’t be reliant on the fact the state cut the money. It’s going to be reliant on everybody.”

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