Friday, Aug. 29, 2003 | 5:51 a.m.
WEEKEND EDITION: August 31, 2003
Throughout her decadelong political career, Erin Kenny was no stranger to controversy.
Whether dabbling in development issues on behalf of special interests or pushing ordinances related to billboards, topless clubs, Wal-Mart or cell phone use, Kenny's name, and political agenda, were front and center.
"We never knew what Erin was going to be proposing next, and it was always like, 'Oh no, here comes another controversy,' " said Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury, who served on the commission during Kenny's entire 1994-2002 tenure.
Now Kenny, known for her aggressive advocacy on behalf of people and issues she supported, is in the middle of a two-year federal political corruption probe.
Federal officials are investigating potentially illegal campaign contributions and political payoffs. Kenny has been named as a target of the investigation and has told friends and supporters she had "made a mistake." She told people she was working with federal investigators.
On Thursday, former commissioner Lance Malone and Las Vegas strip club owner Michael Galardi were indicted along with three San Diego City councilmen and two others on charges of fraud and extortion. The indictment alleges Malone and Galardi bribed the councilmen with cash to get them to repeal a lap dancing ordinance in that city, where Galardi also has clubs.
Many of Kenny's friends and supporters are incredulous that Kenny could be tied to something illegal.
"I was shocked," said Chris Kaempfer, a land-use attorney whose firm had numerous issues and clients before the county commission during Kenny's service. "It took me by complete and utter surprise."
Neither Kenny nor her attorney, Frank Cremen, would comment for this story.
But from her childhood to her post-commission lobbying, Kenny has not shied away from aggressive activism or attention.
Erin Leigh Callin Kenny was born in Pasadena, Calif. in 1960, and moved with her family to the Chicago suburb of Wood Dale, Ill. at a young age.
In past interviews with the Sun, Kenny said she gained an interest in politics and an appreciation for the American democratic system from her grandparents, who had emigrated from Yugoslavia.
"The day John F. Kennedy died, I was 4 years old and it was the day I saw my mother and father, my grandparents and aunts and uncles cry for the nation's loss," Kenny said in a 2002 Sun interview. "Ever since, freedom has been a powerful influence in my life."
Kenny said she spent much of her early years at her grandfather's home, where he operated a shoe shop, gaining an appreciation for hard work and small business. Her mother was a public school teacher and president of the local teacher's union and her father was a draftsman for the Chicago & North Western Railroad.
"My mother was an active Democrat, and every weekend we went somewhere to help on a campaign," Kenny told the Sun when she was running for lieutenant governor last year. "When I was 7, I would bend the paperclips for door hangers."
In campaign speeches, Kenny often referred to her late mother, Dianne Callin, as a guiding influence in her politically active life.
Kenny graduated from Glenbard North High School in Glendale Heights, Ill. and earned a degree in speech communications in 1982 from the University of Illinois at Urbana. She married John Kenny, a chiropractor, and had the first two of her five children in Illinois.
After a post-college stint in publishing, Kenny in 1985 started a small advertising agency in Chicago, Callin and Callin Communication. Those who conducted research into Kenny's background on behalf of Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt's campaign last year said the company was sued several times, including once when Kenny failed to pay a printer's bill for a job she had ordered.
Records of the suits could not be located by the Sun.
Kenny filed for personal bankruptcy in 1988, the year she closed her advertising firm. In a past interview she said the bankruptcy was related to her business, but she declined to provide any details on the amount of debt.
In 1989, shortly after the bankruptcy, Kenny and her young family took a lengthy road trip with the intent of moving out West. Kenny said the couple settled on Las Vegas because she had won a small jackpot of about $600 on a slot machine during a stopover and continued to have good luck in the casino that night.
"We moved the next day," Kenny told the Sun in a past interview.
Kenny worked the graveyard shift as a waitress at the Imperial Palace before taking over a small public relations firm in 1989.
She opened Erin Kenny Advertising in 1989 and closed it within two years.
A politically active neighbor spurred Kenny, a lifelong Democrat, to run for the state Assembly in 1992 despite the fact she lived in a Republican district now represented by Bob Beers, a conservative who has drawn attention for opposing taxes and government spending.
"I never knew I was the Democrats' sacrificial lamb," Kenny said.
Kenny, though, won in the Republican stronghold, beating one-term assemblyman Brad Goetting, and, visibly pregnant, headed to Carson City.
"She was very good on labor issues," said Assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani, D-Las Vegas, who served with Kenny in the 1993 session. "That was the year they were gutting workers' comp and she worked hard to present the workers' perspective."
Giunchigliani said that for a freshman legislator Kenny was energetic and proved a dependable vote for Democrats on the Labor and Management Committee.
Stephanie Smith, a North Las Vegas City Councilwoman, developed her long-standing friendship with Kenny when the two served as assemblywomen.
"We roomed together and since Erin was pregnant and I'm a Mormon we didn't go out drinking with the others," Smith said. "We spent a lot of evenings at home together getting to know each other very well."
Smith and Kenny, with like political backgrounds and philosophies, created ties that would last throughout Kenny's tumultuous commission tenure, a noisy 2000 election and the current scandal.
"She's my friend and she'll continue to be my friend," Smith said.
Immediately after the 1993 session, Kenny set her sights on the powerful county commission and took on incumbent Don Schlesinger in another race described to her as an uphill battle.
Schlesinger said early voting totals in the primary, which at the time were finalized two weeks before the election, showed him ahead of Kenny by a 2-to-1 margin.
However, Schlesinger said he lost the race in the final days of the campaign due to a series of "vicious and over the top" negative mailers.
One of the mailers, sent anonymously from Southern California, portrayed Schlesinger as gay. He did not respond to the mailer, a move he has since determined to be a tactical mistake.
"I decided at the time that if the only way I could retain my seat was to get into the gutter with Erin Kenny, then I didn't want it," Schlesinger said. "I thought that the electorate would see through the absurdity of the crap and relegate it to the trash bin."
After beating Schlesinger, Kenny joined the county commission in 1995 and immediately won the favor of then-Commissioner Paul Christensen, who had butted heads with Schlesinger. Christensen mentored Kenny in her early career.
"She was a bright lady, anxious to do things," recalled Christensen, who lost to Lance Malone in 1996. "She was hard-charging, but I found her very easy to work with."
Every aspect
Pat Shalmy was county manager at the time and said Kenny sought to learn every aspect of the county's operations. She spent her time on such things as going on sewage treatment plant tours and meeting one-on-one with department heads.
"She was very headstrong and once she had her mind made up about doing something, nothing was going to change it," said Shalmy, now CEO of Nevada Power. "She would consult me, ask my advice and maybe follow it 50 percent of the time."
Shalmy said Kenny was the kind of person who couldn't be pinpointed, and that the first few times Kenny went against his advice, he felt confounded. After a while, he chalked it up to "Erin being Erin."
Developer Jay Bingham also served with Kenny during her first two years on the commission and remembers her as "aggressive, and aggressive for her constituents."
Smith said Kenny's biggest success as a commissioner began in these years as she worked tirelessly to build new parks for county residents and make open space and recreation issues part of the ongoing dialogue.
Even Kenny's critics, like activist Lisa Mayo-de Riso, say Kenny was passionate about the issues residents cared about in those early years. Mayo-de Riso walked precincts for Kenny in her 1994 race and remembers a stroller-pushing Kenny with "kids in tow" handing out literature.
"I just saw this change in her, and suddenly she became so adamant and so diligent and so passionate about other things," Mayo-de Riso said.
Part of the shift may have come with the new board in 1997. Malone had beaten Christensen and Bingham left office. The new commissioners got behind Yvonne Atkinson Gates' move to force Shalmy to step down amid threats of being fired.
The commission and the county Kenny knew changed. The county manager Kenny had supported, Shalmy, stepped down. Kenny suddenly faced Dale Askew, the new county manager, whom she didn't like, new colleagues and commissioners whom she blamed for Shalmy's ouster.
Despite Gates being a fellow female Democrat, Kenny never socialized with her and even publicly criticized her during subsequent ethics proceedings regarding the awarding of vending contracts at McCarran Airport.
'Never close'
"We were just never close," Gates said. "When Erin first came on she did her own thing and whenever she would do something childish, I just felt it was better for me to take the high road."
When Gates was named chairwoman, Kenny prefaced her vote by asking county counsel to read a prepared statement saying that the chairwoman had no more power than other board members.
In meetings at the time, if Gates was out of the room and Kenny, the vice chair, was presiding over the meeting, Kenny would not hand the gavel back to Gates when she returned, snubbing protocol and putting the audience, staff and commissioners on notice that she was unhappy.
Kenny would typically hand the gavel to Malone instead of Gates.
It was in this environment that Kenny began to reach out to others, according to fellow commissioners and those who observed her career.
"She began to form close relationships with the developers," Woodbury said.
Kenny's relationship with developer Jim Rhodes began in earnest in late 1996 and flourished in subsequent years, marked by nearly $200,000 the developer contributed to her unsuccessful bid for lieutenant governor in 2002.
After Kenny left office last year, she took a job with him and lobbied on behalf of his projects.
In December 1996, Kenny successfully pushed to annex Rhodes Ranch, a 9,000-home master-planned community in the Southwest part of the valley, into Spring Valley, a neighboring township that had higher tax assessments.
The move was something Rhodes wanted but the nearby residents didn't.
In early 1997, Kenny and three other commissioners formed a majority that would cut by a third land preserved as a rural residential area.
Residents thought they were getting a 2,268-acre preservation area, but the commissioners removed a sizable chunk of land that was to have served as a buffer between the rural estates and Rhodes Ranch.
In late November 1997, Erin and John Kenny and their five children moved from a 1,760-square foot, two-bedroom home into a five-bedroom home on a corner lot in the gated golf course community of Rhodes Ranch that sold for $346,000.
Kenny was making $54,000 a year at the time as a county commissioner, and her husband, a chiropractor, had cut back his practice to two afternoons a week to help raise the children, according to an article in the Sun from the time on stay-at-home dads.
The Kennys' Rhodes Ranch home was built in 40 days and the family moved in before county staff had recorded the necessary inspections. County staff at the time simply said they had "dropped the ball."
Rhodes did not respond to numerous requests for interviews.
Developers poured cash into Kenny's 1998 re-election campaign. A Sun analysis of her 1998 election campaign reports found at least $350,000 in donations from the development community.
Those donations, coupled with those from gaming, helped Kenny amass a $1.2 million war chest and withstand a challenge from police officer Steve Harney, whose campaign was financed by Venetian owner Sheldon Adelson.
Access, not votes
Developers who helped Kenny retain her office say the campaign contributions were simply designed to buy access, not votes.
"You support people who share the same ideas as you," Kaempfer said. "There's an inherent conflict, if you will.
"But what your donation gets you is access to a commissioner to hear what you have to say. That's what I tell all of my clients."
Others questioned her campaign's reliance on developer money.
"It certainly makes you question who her real constituents were -- her voting public or her cash contributors," said Paul Brown, executive director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, a non-profit organization that, among other issues, tracks campaign contributions in state races.
Residents noted that Kenny often left the dais and sat in the audience talking with developers during commission meetings.
"She was so blatant in her talking with developers," Mayo-de Riso said.
Out in the rural neighborhoods where residents were fighting encroaching development, residents would often show up at community meetings about development and find neither Kenny nor the developers there.
Evan Blythin, chairman of the Red Rock Citizens Advisory Council, said residents would get no official information at these meetings and assumed it was because they were not making campaign contributions.
"Ninety-seven percent of the time the commission voted for non-conforming zone changes," Blythin said. "We felt from the beginning that it was because of the donations the developers were making."
In her last three years of office, Kenny stepped up and began to push issues that drew attention beyond the small groups of citizens fighting development.
In early 1999, Kenny pushed an ordinance that effectively banned Wal-Mart supercenters because it prohibited stores larger than 110,000 square feet devoting more than 7.5 percent of space to groceries.
But Kenny was chastised by business leaders, residents and newspaper editorials for pushing what many believed to be simply a pro-union law since Wal-Mart has no organized labor.
Wal-Mart sued and the ordinance was subsequently thrown out by the courts.
Later that year Boyd Gaming and Triple Five Nevada Development Corp. pushed for an eight-story casino in a shopping center near Flamingo Road and Grand Canyon Drive.
The January 2000 approval of that neighborhood casino was widely criticized for violating the intent of a state law prohibiting neighborhood casinos.
Kenny joined with Mary Kincaid-Chauncey and Malone in supporting the casino, while three commissioners abstained. The vote was political suicide for Malone, who had assured residents he would not support the casino but changed his mind and voted for it.
Malone lost his re-election bid later that year.
The casino was challenged in court, and the commission's vote for approval was subsequently thrown out.
Boyd, Triple Five, its attorneys and employees donated nearly $30,000 to Kenny's 1998 election campaign and donated at least $50,000 to Kincaid-Chauncey, according to a Sun analysis of campaign finance reports.
Triple Five executive Don Davidson has hired a defense attorney in relation to the current federal investigation. Kenny and Kincaid-Chauncey have been identified as targets of the probe, while Malone, former Commissioner Dario Herrera and former Las Vegas City Councilman Michael McDonald, are considered subjects.
In another rezoning vote, Carolyn Edwards, a Spring Valley resident, fought against a zone change that resulted in a CVS drugstore being built behind her home.
In early 2000, Kenny pushed for the CVS despite county staff objections, 400 residents' signatures on petitions and the fact that the store wasn't even in her district.
"She pushed it anyway, and it's that that made me think she had another agenda," Edwards said.
Edwards now has a 50-foot store peering over her backyard's landscape wall, and said that the rezoning she never expected has resulted in a substantial loss in the appraised value of her home.
Planning gone awry
Current County Planning staff use the CVS store as an example of planning gone awry.
On the same day Kaempfer's law firm pushed for the CVS store behind Edwards' home, the commission considered a request for a drugstore near the Southern Highlands development -- a request accompanied by 500 signatures in support and staff approval of the idea.
The commission denied the Southern Highlands store shortly after approving the CVS.
"Logic was totally ignored," Edwards said. "It seemed as though something fishy was going on."
The 2000 elections were a busy time for Kenny as she pushed her friend Smith to run against Kincaid-Chauncey. Kincaid-Chauncey ultimately beat Smith after a rancorous campaign that created another wedge between commissioners.
During the campaign, a former county employee filed an ethics complaint against Kenny alleging the commissioner wanted to break into Kincaid-Chauncey's flower shop to find evidence that Kincaid-Chauncey had used county staff and equipment to move the shop.
The complaint filed by Gene Smith was ultimately dismissed.
During the 2000 election, Kenny was also attending UNLV Law School and leading a ballot question for construction of a children's hospital -- a campaign she worked on with Davidson of Triple Five.
"She worked her rear end off for that thing," Davidson said. "She formed a committee of really good solid volunteers and attended every meeting."
Davidson said Kenny knew of his involvement with the Western Regional board of the National Jewish Hospital for Respiratory Diseases, and that Davidson had been tapped to raise money for a charitable organization in Akron, Ohio. Kenny and he often attended the same political functions and charity events, he said.
"She called me and asked me to raise money for the campaign," Davidson said. "We just could not raise enough money and were outspent."
Kenny was portrayed as a meddler during the 2000 elections and, after the defeat of the hospital issue, she continued to be criticized for taking a lead on so many issues.
When Assembly Majority Leader Barbara Buckley, a fellow Democrat whose district was within Kenny's, would campaign, she found residents questioning what role the state Legislature could take in overturning what Kenny was doing on a local level.
"Going door to door I found that people hated her," Buckley said. "They really talked about how she would side with the developers in every zoning dispute and how she was always pushing something."
In 2001 and 2002, Kenny continued pushing items for Rhodes and other developers, often over the wishes of residents.
She worked with Rhodes routinely, at one time showing up at a county staff meeting to lobby on his behalf regarding a drainage ditch at Rhodes Ranch.
Uncomfortable
County staff reported feeling uncomfortable about a commissioner attending their meeting, and attending it on behalf of the developer.
Kenny also showed up with Rhodes at an airport staff meeting when Rhodes discussed a proposal related to land near the airport.
In the fall of 2001, the city of Las Vegas was trying to create a northwest land-use plan with the county to provide seamless development of annexed county islands.
City Councilman Larry Brown attacked Kenny in a public meeting, saying: "Commissioner Kenny is perhaps the best at putting up a smoke screen, doing all the rhetoric, getting the quotes in the paper. I'm not sure she knows how to get to the northwest."
Brown argued Kenny was trampling through his ward and ignoring the wishes of the county commissioner, Chip Maxfield, whose district includes the northwest.
"Erin Kenny has an agenda in the northwest, and I'd like to know what it is," Brown said.
While development issues drew the most attention from the public, the federal investigation suggests law enforcement was more interested in her role pushing lap dancing ordinances in 2001 and 2002.
Kenny led the charge to keep outcall entertainment out of residential areas. It would be the first of several sex-industry ordinances the county adopted over a two-year period, votes that impact specifically on the current federal investigation, dubbed Operation G-Sting.
Topless club owners quietly supported the 2001 outcall ordinance as a means of limiting business that could compete with the clubs' services.
Kenny, like many of the commissioners, had received the maximum-allowed campaign contributions from strip club owners or clubs.
In June 2002 the commission approved a moratorium on new strip club businesses, but the moratorium did not apply to existing businesses that had already submitted expansion plans.
Kenny pushed that exception for one developer she did not name publicly but said had applied only for a tavern permit despite plans to expand his strip club.
With no strip club owner named, speculation grew that Kenny was referring to Galardi. He had donated to her campaigns in the past and would chip in $10,000 for Kenny's lieutenant governor's race in 2002.
Kenny was absent the day the commission by a 5-1 vote restricted patrons and dancers exchanging touches during lap dancing. Herrera was the lone vote in opposition.
But a month after the July vote, it was Kenny and Kincaid-Chauncey who successfully pushed the commission to reconsider its actions based on what Kenny called "a dilemma and a situation none of us feel comfortable about."
When the commission did reconsider the ordinance, the no-touch portion of the restrictions was removed. That portion had prohibited patrons from stuffing money into the G-strings of dancers.
Galardi's club Jaguars was one of 20 affected by the move.
The commission left in place the part of the ordinance that required clubs to install monitoring stations for police and business license staff to see what was occurring in private rooms at the clubs.
The $15 million Jaguars, which had opened earlier that summer, had numerous private rooms on its second floor.
Galardi's company asked the commission to allow Jaguars to be annexed into the city, a move Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman supported with a letter to the county.
The commission never acted on that request.
Billboard debate
While the sex industry ordinances drew much attention, Mayo-de Riso said she really began to take note of Kenny during a lengthy debate in 2001 over an ordinance to regulate billboards in unincorporated parts of the valley, including along stretches of the Las Vegas Beltway.
Kenny pushed for what she called "more reasonable and practical" rules that she said would give the commission more influence over placement of billboards.
Kenny served on a committee with representatives of the billboard industry to craft the ordinance.
The result: billboards were allowed in most county commercial and manufacturing zones, by a special use permit, with just a 500-foot separation between signs.
After the first billboard ordinance was approved, the commission considered another in December 2001.
The board voted 4-3 on an ordinance drafted largely by the billboard industry and presented by Kummer Kaempfer Bonner and Renshaw attorney Mark Fiorentino.
Kenny joined Dario Herrera, Kincaid-Chauncey and Gates in support of the measure over another possible ordinance that was considered a compromise between residents, county staff and the industry.
Herrera faced an ethics complaint as a result of the vote due to his wife's consulting work with a billboard company. The complaint, filed by Mayo-de Riso, was dropped.
It wasn't until both Herrera and Kenny were off the board -- in February 2003 -- that the commission reconsidered billboard ordinances, and by a 7-0 vote passed new laws that were more restrictive.
The new regulations required a 1,500-foot separation between signs and created a specific zone in which the new regulations could be applied to billboards.
This year's contentious debate over development near Red Rock Canyon had seeds sown in Kenny's last year in office.
In August 2002, John Laing Homes presented the first inkling that Blue Diamond Hill was proposed to be the site of a 20,000-person residential community. The developer presented a "concept plan," a presentation of the residential goal for the community without many specifics.
John Laing Homes pushed a citizens advisory council to support the plan, but neither the council nor the county commission expressed much interest.
What the public suspected at the time was that either John Laing Homes or another developer would continue to pursue the project even after the initial lack of support. What would not be publicly revealed until this year is that Rhodes had begun the process of acquiring the land from John Laing Homes back in 2001.
This year, when the commission began consideration of a sweeping plan to limit development in the area of the Red Rock National Conservation Area, Rhodes revealed that he had just closed escrow on the property.
The Blue Diamond Hill development would come into much clearer focus after Kenny left office and began lobbying the current commission as a paid consultant for Rhodes.
Rhodes aggressively fought proposed county and state laws that would prohibit development in the area of the Red Rock National Conservation Area. Both the local and state ordinances were ultimately adopted.
The criticism of Kenny's lobbying efforts was in sharp contrast to past support for Kenny which had resulted in her name being floated for higher political office. She had been mentioned for a possible U.S. Senate run in 2000, but in the last year of her commission term, there was the potential for a run for governor.
During the Nevada State Democratic convention in the spring of 2002, Kenny implied she was simply seeking re-election to her commission seat, telling the Sun she had no intention to run statewide.
Days later, and in the last hour of filing for the 2002 races, Kenny decided to file for lieutenant governor, notifying only Republican state Sen. Mark James, who arrived with her to file for Kenny's commission seat. James moved into Rhodes Ranch shortly thereafter.
"It was a complete surprise to me," said Terry Care, a state senator, who at the time was chairman of the state Democratic Party. "It's common knowledge that there were potentially Democrats in that (commission) district who would run for her seat if she didn't."
Raising funds
Kenny raised scads of cash for the lieutenant governor's race, finishing with $1.6 million -- a full $1 million more than Hunt, the incumbent.
Rhodes did his part, donating $90,000 through his related companies in the form of nine $10,000 checks on two days in September 2002. On the eve of the Nov. 4 election, he signed six $10,000 checks. He added four more $10,000 checks Nov. 7, after she lost the race, according to the Sun's analysis of campaign reports.
The $190,000 in donations were all legal, with the possible exception of $20,000 attributed to Tropicana Durango Investment Corp. in two donations, Sept. 25 and Nov. 7. Companies are permitted to donate a maximum of $10,000 in an election cycle.
Those close to Kenny say she was shocked that she lost the lieutenant governor's race. Kenny concentrated much of her effort in Republican-held northern Nevada, where she lost by 3 points to Hunt.
In Clark County, Hunt won by 10 points.
"She did much better up north where they didn't know her," Care said.
In the last eight weeks of her commission service, colleagues watched what they describe as "a tear," as Kenny pushed projects for developers Billy Walters and Woodside Homes.
"It was like all bets were off in the last couple of months," Woodbury said.
Walters said he does not believe any campaign contributions he made to Kenny influenced her decisions.
"She told me 'no' as many times as she told me yes," Walters said. "And there were obviously many issues, like the Wal-Mart thing, that she stood for that I didn't agree with."
Walters won a battle to rezone a prime piece of southwest property for a commercial complex. The land had originally been part of a 330-acre parcel McCarran International Airport had leased to Walters to build two municipal golf courses.
Rival developer Ed Nigro was stunned that Walters was trying to put commercial development on land earmarked for one of the golf courses.
Kenny and Herrera led the effort and secured two more votes to make the rezoning possible in late November 2002.
Walters said Kenny had originally said no to such a plan, but later changed her mind when the character of the area had changed enough to enable commercial development to fit in.
Spring Valley residents, still reeling from the 2000 casino vote and other zone changes, objected when the commission approved siting a $70 million industrial park near Jones Boulevard and Sunset Road.
Residents had pleaded with the commission to keep the area rural and three commissioners had urged Kenny and Herrera to hold off on the vote.
The applicant, Nevada Commercial Development, which was represented by Kaempfer, won the zone change by a 4-2 vote.
One vote in her last days allowed a controversial zone change for Kaempfer client Woodside Homes to build homes under the flight zone of the airport. That vote was subsequently overturned by the new county commission this year.
Immediately after she left office in January, Kenny concentrated her time on lobbying for both Triple Five and Rhodes.
Her lobbying drew criticism in May when James revealed that Kenny had personally lobbied him on proposed development restrictions that would have impacted Rhodes' intent to develop Blue Diamond Hill near Red Rock.
Kenny said she was not violating the intent of a county ethics policy that prohibits county officials from lobbying on any issue under consideration by the commission for one year after leaving office.
But the county revived its Ethics Task Force in the wake of Kenny's lobbying and charged the group with examining when commissioners should abstain from discussing or acting on an issue and what fines should be imposed for those who violate the county's "cooling off period" restrictions on lobbying after leaving office.
Shortly after the Red Rock issue drew massive media attention, the federal probe stole the spotlight.
On May 14, agents raided Galardi strip clubs and served search warrants on Kenny, Herrera, Malone, Kincaid-Chauncey and then-Las Vegas City Councilman Michael McDonald.
Kenny has remained largely out of sight ever since. She is reportedly now cooperating with federal agents, and information about any charges against her is contained in a sealed court case.
Schlesinger, the commissioner Kenny beat to first take office, said he believed District F residents are the ones who have paid the biggest price for Kenny's eight-year reign.
"There are neighborhoods that have been permanently, and negatively, impacted by her presence," Schlesinger said.
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