Regents’ man in Reno strikes UNLV again

By Robert Lang, William Brown Jr. and David Damore

Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020 | 2 a.m.

With state and local leaders at his side, Gov. Steve Sisolak appeared in Las Vegas two months ago to announce a philanthropic partnership to develop a medical education building for UNLV.

Last week, the Board of Regents followed that announcement by approving the agreement between UNLV and the Nevada Health and Bioscience Asset Corp. (NHBAC), the nonprofit organization that will plan, build and manage the project and lease the facility to UNLV for $1 a year.

Ten of the 13 regents voted yes, one abstained due to conflicts of interest related to property ownership in the medical district, one voted no and one board member’s vote was not recorded.

As one might expect, several regents who voted to support the project thanked a group of donors who had pledged $150 million in contributions for the project. Regent Amy Carvalho’s comments were particularly poignant, as she noted the struggles that her family faced finding health care to treat her daughter’s cancer. Carvalho stated that the medical education building was essential to increase the number of doctors that Southern Nevada desperately needs.

But then there was the only regent who voted no — Rick Trachok.

For those unfamiliar with Trachok, he is a Northern Nevada blue blood. His father, Dick, was the football coach of the northern branch of the state university.

Trachok delivered his remarks via video conference from Reno, with UNR presidential aspirant Provost Kevin Carmen sitting silently beside him.

Trachok sharply questioned the Nevada System of Higher Education’s legal team, raising numerous concerns about ramifications for UNLV if the NHBAC failed to deliver a medical education building.

In Trachok’s view, the board should have rejected the proposal and implemented the plan approved last fall to use $125 million in state-guaranteed bonds to fund an inadequate structure, albeit under NSHE’s control.

Note that the NSHE building plan would limit classes to 120 students per year, instead of the 180 students projected under the NHBAC project. An NSHE medical education building also would lack any research and development space and would not qualify for federal tax credits that help offset construction costs.

Trachok did not address the fact that the NSHE plan also would exhaust most of UNLV’s bonding capacity, making it difficult for the university to fund other projects such as an engineering building.

Instead, Trachok said it would be in “the interest of our present and future students” for Nevada to be on the hook for bond payments until 2050 to fund an inferior building instead of leasing a state-of-the-art facility for $1 a year.

So disingenuous is the northern partisan that from his perch in Reno, Trachok felt entitled to criticize UNLV and its supporters for finding an innovative solution to thwart his efforts to limit the medical school’s capacity and thus prevent 2.3 million Southern Nevadans from receiving adequate health care.

After Board Vice Chair Mark Doubrava, Chancellor Thom Reilly and acting UNLV President Marta Meana and others praised the collaboration with the donor group, the due diligence of the NSHE and UNLV legal staffs, and the care that went into the preparation of the agreement, Trachok baselessly claimed the opposite by asserting that “the university has not been involved in this process.”

Trachok further questioned the donors’ motivations for not giving the money directly to UNLV.

Doubrava, a longtime advocate for the UNLV School of Medicine, later apologized to NHBAC representatives for his colleague’s behavior.

With his questioning, Trachok proved he didn’t understand how his own actions created the circumstances that led the board to sign away authority over what will be the most important educational facility ever built in the Silver State, and that serves as a model for future public/private partnerships in Nevada.

Trachok led the effort in spring 2018 to force out UNLV President Len Jessup, and in the process dragged the reputations of Nevada’s most generous philanthropists through the mud.

At the time, Jessup partnered with the same donors to develop a project of similar scope and scale to the NHBAC building.

The original project would have been announced in the summer of 2018 and funded through the UNLV Foundation, but Trachok’s insistence on Jessup’s ouster sabotaged the arrangement that he now prefers to finance UNLV’s medical education building.

And Jessup’s ouster wasn’t the only instance of Trachok undermining UNLV’s medical school. In 2014, he joined Regent Kevin Page and then-Chancellor Dan Klaich in presenting then-Gov. Brian Sandoval with a severely limited request for startup funding for the school — just $9 million, even though the regents had agreed $28 million was needed. Sandoval, when asked about the discrepancy after he included the $9 million in his 2015-16 budget, stressed that he funded 100% of what Trachok, Page and Klaich requested.

The culmination of these and other provocative actions by Trachok, as well other NSHE scandals and bad faith efforts, motivated legislators to twice pass by supermajorities a legislative referendum (Assembly Joint Resolution 5) to remove the Board of Regents from the Nevada Constitution. Nevadans will vote on the measure in November. If the measure passes, the regents will be stripped of their constitutional protection, and that would enable major reforms to NSHE and the Board of Regents.

Robert E. Lang is the Lincy endowed chair in Urban Affairs, executive director of Brookings Mountain West and The Lincy Institute at UNLV, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. William E. Brown Jr. is the UNLV director of Brookings Mountain West. David F. Damore is professor and chair of the UNLV Department of Political Science and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The three provided technical assistance leading to the creation of Nevada Health and Bioscience Asset Corporation.