Jon Ralston wonders if even a feistier Jim Rogers can budge Gibbons on education

By Jon Ralston

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 | 2:01 a.m.

His bladder reconstructed and his spleen venting again, Jim Rogers is back.

To wit: Gov. Jim Gibbons is unreachable — he won’t even return the chancellor’s phone calls anymore. The business community is living tax-free — “I can tell you zero is not enough.” And when it comes to education, the chancellor minced no words during a “Face to Face” interview Tuesday.

“I honestly believe that the great majority of Nevadans cares nothing about education,” Rogers declared. “Nothing. N-o-t-h-i-n-g. Nothing.”

Amid his frustrated fulminations about the state of the state, Rogers, back at work after cancer surgery, seems more focused than ever on doing something about the sorry situation. But can he — will he — follow through?

Rogers said on the program that he has been meeting privately with major potential donors (read: gamers) to see whether he can jump-start his dream of a health sciences system in the wake of budget cuts. Rogers talked about medical schools in Arizona and New Mexico having budgets six or seven times as large as our medical school’s and of the impossibility of ever getting the state to pony up enough money. And why should it when a majority of Nevadans cares nothing about education?

So Rogers has gone private, meeting with “some very major foundations in this state ... We’ve been meeting with them for five or six months. One of the major foundations, and they have said, ‘We believe in the health sciences system ... We’ve made a lot of money here, and we owe the community.’ ”

So who is he talking about? He mentioned Kirk Kerkorian, Steve and Elaine Wynn and Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, a physician long involved in drug clinics.

“We should have been out there saying, ‘Look, this is what our medical school can do,’ ” the chancellor said on the program. “ ‘This is how we can grow. You’re a doctor. You understand this. You’re very interested in the addiction problem. We should have had a partnership with you 10 years ago.’ We haven’t done that.”

Mostly because a majority of Nevadans cares nothing about education, especially medical education, I’d guess.

So at a time of budget penuriousness, Rogers talked of expanding the medical school, or trying to tamp down the north-south paranoia and of tapping into world-class facilities such as the Cleveland Clinic for partnerships. “We ought to be good or excellent in something or a couple of things and good in a lot of things,” he said. “We’re mediocre in a lot of things and not excellent in anything.”

But Rogers’ frustration with the health system and its funding is a microcosm of his cynicism about the impact of the economic slowdown and the political slow thinking that is occurring.

“I thought we were making a hell of a lot of progress in the things that we were doing,” Rogers mused ruefully. “We were becoming more efficient. The Legislature said, ‘You throw money away.’ We took a look at a lot of things and said, ‘In some instances, we really don’t do a good job.’ We’ve tried to bring everybody together. We’ve tried to focus and go forward. But, you know ... We’re so far behind, so far behind, that I don’t know when we’re going to catch up. We’re sure as hell not going to catch up during my lifetime, even if I live another 10 years.”

So how do you keep from falling off the back end of the fiscal treadmill?

Rogers agrees with other great minds that a special session might be the beginning. “I don’t know what you do to talk to the governor about this,” Rogers said. “I’ve talked about special sessions. Maybe, I was the first to talk about them. I’ve talked about taxes.”

When I present him with the potential scenario that Gibbons calls a special session with the intent of vetoing all proposed taxes to cement his conservative bona fides, he nods knowingly if not sadly. “I think it’s a reasonable scenario, and I think it might sell well,” he said. “I think it might get him reelected.”

And the consequences? “We’re chasing ourselves down a hole,” Rogers said. “What we do is this. When things are bad, we say we can’t raise taxes. When things are good, we say we don’t need to raise taxes. What you end up with is no plan at all. We never look forward more than a year.”

So, yes, Jim Rogers is back. But unless he can find others to say what he is saying, to get through to the governor where he cannot, you know what he will accomplish:

N-o-t-h-i-n-g.

Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program “Face to Face With Jon Ralston” on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the daily e-mail newsletter “RalstonFlash.com.” His column for the Las Vegas Sun appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.