2 -- State Law
Regarding Budgets and Meetings
ARTICLE TOPICS:
An
Interesting Exchange Between Bruce Kittess and the
Commission
Budgets
State Laws
Regarding Budgets & Meetings
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There are several issues to
discuss on this page. If the Commission for the Reconstruction of the Virginia
& Truckee Railway Tourist Railroad had never tried to get $10 million more
from Carson City, no one would be paying attention to this stuff.
WHO IS
IN CHARGE OF THE BUDGET?
To start, I think it's a fair question to ask,
" who is in charge of the budget?" You would think that either a staff member
or the Treasurer, Ron Allen, would be on top of this. Yet, after voting last
year not to ratify bills unless a budget report was made available to the
Commissioners, the Commission has repeatedly done just that. Bonnie Weber has
complained about this and others have agreed. There is always a new
excuse.
What's more scary is an exchange that happened at the July 2008
meeting. While you may have to do more research to understand the entire
situation, this exchange between Bonnie Weber and Ron Allen is telling:
Commissioner Weber spoke up again to
ask, “I am very confused, I have no idea from having a verbal report of
what our balance is and how much money we have, and I feel it's so important. I
don't mean to give Ron a hard time, can he tell us with this being paid how
much money will be left in the account?”
Ron Allen said,
“at this moment no, there's no way I can.” Weber:
“Approximately?” Allen gave an answer and then said “but that's
not going to be an accurate amount.”
(from
renorailfans.com
July 2008 meeting report, see agenda Item 7, Ratifying Bills For
Payment) |
BRUCE KITTESS EXPRESSES HIS CONCERNS, TREASURER
SAYS "I CAN'T ADDRESS THAT"
At a previous meeting Ron Allen was asked
about the entire budget. Bruce Kittess of Carson City was asking questions and
the following exchange happened:
Bruce K. got up to say that Allen was
discussing cashflow, said “those of us in Carson City who are being asked
to vote on an issue for another $10 million, we want to know about the project,
from the start to the finish. How much can we plan, what's the adjustments, how
much is it going to cost to finish. We're interested in the project financing,
no so much your cashflow.” Going on, Bruce said, “I've looked at your
financial statements, it's about a business, your assets and liabilities,
that's interesting; we're interested in the project costs from start to
finish.”
Allen replies, “actually I can't
address that, I'm the treasurer, I'm not the engineer. That's up to Mr.
Dorr.” He referred Bruce to Ken Dorr.
Bruce replied,
“That's the project manager, that's the numbers we're interested in, the
project. What if there is no more $10 million dollars, there is no more money?
We heard you say you can get across the freeway, we want to know what we're
going to get for the $37 million.”
(from
renorailfans.com
June 2008 meeting report, see agenda Item 7, Treasurer's Report) |
RON ALLEN IS SMUG AND WRONG, A BAD
COMBINATION
See the
renorailfans.com
September meeting report, Commissioner's Comments for a full treatment of
this subject. Briefly, Ron Allen tried to use a letter from the Nevada Attorney
General's office to clear the Commission of all wrongdoing. Actually, what
happened was, the AG said the Commission was not posting minutes fast enough,
but since the error had been corrected, no action would be taken.
This
excerpt is from the September meeting report:
WHY RON ALLEN THINKS HE SMELLS LIKE A
ROSE AND OTHER LEGAL THEORIES
Treasurer Ron Allen's comment was most
notable. “This was a letter is response to complaints about some of the
Commission's practices.” He went on, “It does validate ... sometimes
it appears to certain people that we're not doing a satisfactory job in a
satisfactory manner, and this vindicates us of that.” |
COMMISSION IGNORES FUNDING MECHANISM AND ROTATING
MEETING REQUIREMENT
The rest of this page is a long excerpt from the
above-referenced
September,
2008 meeting report, starting with Ron Allen's comments:
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COMMISSIONER COMMENTS
John Flanagan, Commissioner from Storey County (Virginia City)
mentioned that a proposal was in the works to put windmills along several miles
of ridgeline above Virginia City, Gold Hill and Silver City.
WHY RON ALLEN THINKS HE SMELLS LIKE A ROSE AND OTHER LEGAL
THEORIES
Ron Allen's comment was most notable. “This was a letter is
response to complaints about some of the Commission's practices.” He went
on, “It does validate ... sometimes it appears to certain people that
we're not doing a satisfactory job in a satisfactory manner, and this
vindicates us of that.”
Please note that a complaint letter about SOME of the practices is
being used by Ron Allen to vindicate all their practices. Read on for detail,
but realize this was a challenge to press the Commission where their practices
don't meet with legal requirements. Because this project has received Federal
funding, legal requirements include Federal Law and the Code of Federal
Regulations. A letter from the STATE AG doesn't vindicate the Commission on CFR
requirements.
Back to Ron Allen, complaints had gone to the Attorney General's
Office regarding maybe 3 of 20 or 30 items where the Commission allegedly
violates government law. The Attorney General wrote a letter to the Commission
stating they were closing their file. The letter only addressed minor issues
about how the agendas are written. I have not seen this letter yet.
In a conversation with the AG's office this morning (9/10/08) I was
told that the AG doesn't have oversight over the Commission because it's a
local agency. The AG rep I spoke to said if the public is not happy with the
Commission they have to sue them directly in court. The AG made clear that the
letter did not represent an approval of all Commission actions, just that
nothing the Commission did wrong came under the jurisdiction of the Nevada
State Attorney General.
While Ron Allen claimed the AG letter “vindicated” the
Commission, the AG said it did no such thing!
LAWBREAKING 1 – HOW TO KEEP THE MEETINGS IN CARSON
CITY
I
can give two examples where the Commission ignores/breaks state law. The
enabling law says the Commission SHALL rotate their meetings among the
represented counties, yet every meeting is in Carson City. Here's the part of
the law:
Sec. 5. Meetings; limitation of
liability of Commissioners.
3. The governing bodies shall
each make available an appropriate meeting room and provide adequate clerical
staff and equipment to provide adequate notice of the meeting and to produce
minutes and audio recordings or transcripts of the meeting and any other
assistance necessary to allow the Commission to comply with the provisions of
chapter 241 of NRS.
4. The Commission shall
alternate the location of its meetings among the facilities provided pursuant
to subsection 3.
I
was told by a Commission member that if the meetings had to rotate they might
only do quarterly meetings, not monthly meetings. GOOD! Perhaps if they only
met quarterly they'd have to be more focused on serving the public, or at least
they have less opportunity to waste taxpayer dollars.
LAWBREAKING 2 – HOW TO IGNORE THE LAW, LOSE FUNDING AND BE LESS
ACCOUNTABLE
Next is a part of the law that says the Commission shall allocate
costs among represented bodies by determining the allocation of benefits among
the five counties represented:
Sec. 9. Budget; funding of costs;
Commission not entitled to distribution of revenue from supplemental
city-county relief tax.
1. The Commission shall
adopt a budget for its operation and for each project it proposes for
presentation to the governing bodies. Each budget must be accompanied by a
proposed allocation of the net cost of the budget among the governing bodies
which must be based upon the benefit of the Commission or project to the
jurisdiction of the governing body or another equally appropriate
indicator.
2. Upon final determination and
allocation of the costs by agreement of the governing bodies, each governing
body shall include its portion of the costs in its budget for the purposes of
chapter 354 of NRS and shall fund its share... (by various methods – ed
note)
This part of the law is a dead letter. According to the Commission,
the budgets have never included the proportionality/allocation estimate called
for in Sec 9, Subsection 1&2. On one hand the Commission might say, the
“bad” counties like Washoe and Lyon aren't willing to significantly
fund the project, so why should they bother figuring out the
proportionality.
On the other hand, since the Commission has never shown or proved the
benefit to Washoe and Lyon County, why should they be expected to provide
funding.
According to the law if this proportionality report WAS included with
the budget the “bad” Counties would have to pony up.
In summary, the Commission is too lazy to do a proportionality report
as required by law. The Counties would be legally required to pay up according
to their share of the benefits. This doesn't happen, thus the Commission blames
the evil counties for not paying their fair (unspecified) share.
The worst effect of this “lawbreaking” is that budgets are
passed and plans are made without the counties being on the hook to pay for
them. And we still wonder why the costs are out of control? There's no
incentive to look at ways of saving money.
You can look these up at the
Nevada
Legislature's page for V&T Special Act.
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