Bart Patterson

Bart Patterson was just chosen by the Board of Regents to be President of Nevada State College.  It was an excellent choice.

I worked with Bart at the system office for five years.  He was an outstanding general counsel with tremendous knowledge but even more important, he possesses outstanding judgment and integrity.  He is a super star in a time when the Nevada System of Higher Education needs many super stars.  

The Funding Formula & The Chancellor

I worked with Chancellor Dan Klaich for nearly five years.  He is smart, intuitive, hard-working and a man of unquestionable integrity.  When I left the Chancellor’s job in 2009, Dan assured me he would see that the funding formula would be reexamined and changed to make funding equitable among all eight of the higher education system institutions.  

I spoke in depth with Dan last week and he reassured me that the old formula was going to be thrown out and a new one would be adopted that would be as close to fair as possible.  I believe him.

Repair Thirty Years?

How does the Nevada legislature repair thirty years of shortchanging the southern Nevada colleges by more than $900 million dollars?  From what I see, there will be no attempt to do so.  Southern Nevada will always be at least $900 million short.  Hopefully going forward with a new funding formula, the $900 million dollar difference will not continue to grow.

Fundamental Problem

There isn’t one southern Nevada legislator who has any meaningful understanding of the northern Nevada higher education system and the same observation applies to the northern Nevada legislators’ knowledge about the southern Nevada colleges.

This is the fundamental problem to the distributions of higher education funding. The present attempt by the committee, all of whom have good intentions, to fairly distribute state funds between the southern and northern Nevada higher education schools is doomed.

With the limited amount of funds, and nothing in sight to indicate an increase of college funding, the legislature will now only decide how to give students in the south and the north funds from an inadequate source.  The new motto will be, rather than “share funds and support a few,” “spread the inadequacies of the system’s funding equally among all students.”  All will fail. 

South/North

Southern Nevada and northern Nevada have absolutely nothing in common.  They are incompatible and there are no universal rules that can be adopted to govern both ends of the state.  They cannot go their separate ways because the north and south cannot be legally divided.

But they can start to adopt rules and regulations that put more power into the areas where the power should be.  The northern colleges should have one board of policy makers and the south should have its own.

Because money controls all human activities, the right to tax and spend should be given to the County Commissioners in their respective areas.

The inequitable funding between northern Nevada and southern Nevada is the result of giving one group the power to raise and distribute money rather than two groups, one for the north and one for the south, which would allow each government body to represent their constituents, and only their constituents.  Each must have the power to tax and distribute those taxes.

Political Power And Its Abuse

This week’s tweets are not about Bill Raggio who was a good, honest, thoughtful, caring and hard working State of Nevada Senator for over three decades.  The tweets are about the gathering of political power and its abuse.  I am sure Raggio never made a back-room deal that put any money into his pocket.  He was a very competent lawyer, outstanding district attorney and certainly one of this state’s greatest, if not the greatest legislator. 

A democratic system cannot survive and reach its maximum potential where political power begins to be entrusted in one person, regardless of the person’s integrity, good faith, hard work and high intellect.

The higher education system colleges in southern Nevada have always been treated as second class citizens, only worthy of being financially supported, if the northern Nevada colleges got first count of the state’s higher education system money. Bill Raggio did his job and did it well.  He was the most powerful Nevadan for over thirty years.  He was a representative from the north who strongly and logically believed it was his job to fund the higher education schools in northern Nevada, not to fund the southern Nevada colleges.  He was right; he did what he was elected to do.

It was not Raggio who failed the southern Nevada colleges.  It was the system of government in Nevada that allowed the gathering of unlimited power into far too few people that failed us all.   Term limits are one of Nevada’s greatest achievements.   Those rules alone will protect the state from having the destructive concentration of political power that Bill Raggio was given.  There will never be another Bill Raggio – that is bad.  But there will never be another Bill Raggio and that is good.  

Raggio's Power

Nevada has been fortunate to have many competent governors.  One was certainly Kenny Guinn.  I had known him from his early years as Superintendent of the Clark County School System where he had been a super star.

In talking with Guinn on many occasions he described the role of Nevada’s governor and said “You have to understand that the governor has very little power – that the governor cannot really affect the direction of the state.  The governor’s day to day job is to operate the state and that does not call for bold and creative decisions.”  The control of the purse strings is in the legislature.

I am not a political scientist.  But I do know one very important concept.  He who controls the money controls the mission.

For forty years, Senator Bill Raggio gathered power on a regular basis and became more powerful than any governor who served during Raggio’s tenure.

One of the primary results of Raggio’s power was his brilliant and politically oriented ability to control the State’s purse strings – and control those purse strings he did.

There is nothing wrong with the use of power – the proper use drives society forward.  But the abuse of power by any person, regardless of his honesty and good faith, will finally destroy the project and send it in scattered directions.

In Raggio’s zeal to protect the colleges in northern Nevada, his power became so great that it resulted in shortchanging the southern Nevada colleges by more than 900 million dollars.