Airport contracts stay intact

Two Clark County commissioners may have been disciplined for their roles in awarding contracts to concessionaires at McCarran International Airport, but the contracts won't be voided.

That's what Nevada Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa ruled Thursday in response to people who sent letters asking that the contracts be canceled.

Commissioners Yvonne Atkinson Gates and Lance Malone were disciplined by the State Ethics Commission for not disclosing relationships with concessionaire applicants. Not all of the people Gates and Malone recommended were chosen.

Del Papa's decision supports a similar one in July by Clark County District Attorney Stewart Bell, who also declined to take action to void the contracts that were the focus of a grueling four-day Ethics Commission hearing in June.

"Due to the public interest expressed relative to the specific issue of voiding the agreements ... the Attorney General's office concur(s) with the basic findings of the Clark County District Attorney's office," Del Papa said in a Thursday news release.

In late June, following the culmination of a 10-month investigation, the Ethics Commission ruled that Gates and Malone violated ethics laws the previous summer by submitting friend's names as potential concession operators in McCarran's new Concourse D.

However, they were not sanctioned by the panel because their actions were "unwillful."

On July 13, Bell ruled that the airport contracts did not fall under a statute that says government contracts agreed upon in violation of the law are voidable.

"The concession agreements under scrutiny at the Ethics Commission hearing were not governmental contracts but were subleases to which the county is not a party," he wrote in a letter to County Manager Dale Askew.

While Marriott Corp. and W.H. Smith Airport Services Inc. are the airport's master concessionaires, the county board still has to approve sublease contracts.

Marriott and W.H. Smith submitted their recommendations to the commission in August 1997. Marriott's six subleases and W.H. Smith's seven subleases were approved unanimously.

Bell ruled that even if Gates' and Malone's votes were disallowed, the contracts would have received more than the required four votes.

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