Friday, Nov. 21, 2003 | 5:43 a.m.
Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the Ralston Report. He can be reached at (702) 870-7997 or at [email protected].
PLEASE TELL ME this is the bottom.
Let's pray we have reached the nadir as an embarrassment of embarrassments clogged the airwaves and paroxysms of disbelief coursed through the valley last week.
I am not referring to the surreal peregrinations of Wacko Jacko through Las Vegas, shadowed every moment by loony fans and breathless media types. No, I allude to the stops of the Scapegoat Express at City Hall and the University and Community College System, where Louis Renault-like conductors have declared that the buck stops nowhere and that they intend to leave behind a trail of scorched earth.
Shortly after Mayor Oscar Goodman told the public he was calling for a full vetting of that auditor's report on the Wendell Williams affair, city managers were awkwardly trying to jettison the assemblyman and his boss, Sharon Segerblom. Both refused to come in to be handed their walking papers, so they remain in purgatory.
Then, declaring that "hell hath no fury like a husband scorned," Segerblom's husband, Richard Segerblom, filed an ethics complaint that outlined incestuous relationships intended to muddy the waters and remind us of how you never have to count as high in Las Vegas as six degrees of separation.
But the city folks looked like personnel Einsteins compared to the regents, who once again have raised the bar on inexplicable and buffoonish behavior. They fired a well-liked community college president, probably guilty of benign neglect; castrated a lobbyist, who played the game he was hired to play; and protected a probationary employee retained with Williams' help and then lambasted by her superiors, but who brandished sexual and racial harassment clubs to make the pathetic regents cower. And the regents came to these decisions mostly during a closed session where Chancellor Jane Nichols, who has been accused of protecting Jones after meeting with Williams, was allowed to participate.
And people think Michael Jackson is a freak?
These decision-makers at the city and the university system are operating in a Neverland where no one ever has to grow up and face consequences -- unless, of course, you get on the wrong side of a capricious regent or two or a self-immolating assemblyman with a little extra gasoline.
The city leaders, tying themselves in knots over potential lawsuits and trying to erase the sins of the past by finding a fall girl of the present, have now laid the groundwork for a theater of the absurd Tuesday. They have botched this every step of the way, first by allowing the city manager's office any role in the probe of Williams and then by calling a special council meeting that now has no apparent governmental purpose.
I wonder if Goodman, who just this month gushed that Jackson was a "wonderful young man ... very gentle, very sensitive," will have similarly kind words Tuesday for City Manager Doug Selby and Assistant City Manager Betsy Fretwell. If I were those two, I wouldn't trust the fickle mayor, especially since Sharon Segerblom, judging by her few public comments, clearly had the impression that her neighbor, His Honor, would stand by her.
Perhaps Goodman will surprise everyone, read a prepared statement and tell the truth:
"This policy of city employees serving in Carson City has been condoned by past administrations and by mine. Well, we were wrong. It put everyone in an untenable position. We should not unduly punish Ms. Segerblom for giving a wink and a nod to something that was tacitly approved by the manager's office and the council. And Mr. Williams should be treated just as any other city employee who violated sick leave policies."
Where does the buck stop at City Hall? Amid all the inevitable hectoring and fingerpointing Tuesday, maybe we'll find out.
As for the regents, they are, generally, irredeemable. Someone over at the Boyd Law School ought to try to explain the concept of due process to these boneheads, who did not let community college boss Ron Remington, lobbyist John Cummings, employee Chris Giunchigliani or low-level employee Briget Jones tell their sides of the story before moving to fire all of them.
Of course, the regents have no authority to hire and fire, except for Nichols and the presidents. So they never should have made those motions to demote Cummings or oust Giunchigliani, who also is a state assemblywoman, and Jones -- the latter two of which failed.
How these spineless, self-absorbed guardians of the education system could do what the city has done with Segerblom and, to a lesser extent, Williams -- blame one or two people for what has been commonly accepted practice -- is beyond me. It's as if none of them knew that the community college had long been a safe haven for elected officials who need jobs. Why did I not hear of the regents' outrage when Giunchigliani, or Assemblyman Mark Manendo or other elected officials before them were hired?
Remington is paying a heavy price for allowing Cummings to do what he hired him to do -- get more political juice for the system, which is why Cummings has been demoted. And Jones, by threatening to sue, has kept a job that her supervisors say she shouldn't have but one that the chancellor has tried to protect with the approval of a majority of regents.
So as two government entities led by jellyfish attempt to pass the buck after years of cronyism have come home to roost, the question is not how high we can aspire but how low we can go.
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