CAN BOB BEERS SAVE NEVADA?
By Mike Zigler

When then-Assemblyman Bob Beers ran against then-Senator Ray Rawson in 2004, he did so because he felt Rawson disserviced the constituents of District 6. Rawson, a Republican, supported the heaviest tax increase in state history the previous year. 

But with Jim Gibbons, Beers� decision to challenge him for governor isn�t fueled by that same attitude. Rather, Beers is running for the financial security of the state. Over the past four legislative sessions, Beers served three on the Ways and Means Committee and one on the Finance Committee, examining endless line and subline items. 

�I believe strongly that the next governor needs to have an immediate command of the budget because there�s going to be the trained reflexive behavior of the state�s budgeting process if we increase spending more than population growth and inflation,� Beers said. 

While Beers voted for this year�s record $5.9-million budget, he said he tried everything else he could to scale back spending. He introduced TABOR (Taxpayers Bill of Rights) to control spending increases to the rate of population growth and inflation. That died 5-2 in the Senate Finance Committee. He brought a bill to repeal all the tax package implemented in the 2003 session. That didn�t even get a hearing.

So to vote for this year�s record budget, Beers got what he could out of it � a 3-percent reduction in the payroll tax. 

Beers approached Sen. Bill Raggio and said there were enough votes in the caucus to spend a big piece of the leftover pork money on reducing the payroll tax. Raggio, reluctantly, allowed it.

�It was something only Raggio could really do; he required the Assembly to vote it out,� Beers explained. �It killed those people to reduce a tax rather than spend pork.�

That�s Beers� forte � money. A Certified Public Accountant, Beers is well-known for his fiscally responsible approach to politics. And fiscal responsibility is something Nevada desperately needs after a 55-percent increase in spending these past two sessions, Beers said. 

There are two ways to save Nevada from becoming as financially damaged as California � electing Beers as governor, or amending the state constitution with a spending restraint like Colorado�s Taxpayers Bill of Rights. The Nevada amendment will be called TASC For Nevada (Tax And Spending Control). If things go right, Nevada might get both.

�Getting TASC implemented here is more important than who�s governor,� Beers said. �I don�t want my campaign for governor to hinder the TASC effort at all. If I am elected governor, I intend to propose a budget that conforms to TASC at the outset. I will be working for both.�

With the budget and spending being Nevada�s most pressing issues, Beers clearly has an edge on Gibbons in terms of experience. Gibbons has never served on a state or federal budget committee, much less in a leadership position. As a freshman Senator, Beers� peers made him Vice Chair of the Senate Finance Committee.

Beers has 13 months to convince Republicans that he�s the candidate to rescue Nevada from a dark and dysfunctional future. One poll showed him with only 8 percent of the likely votes next September. He�s got some ground to cover.

By now, most are familiar with the property tax cap on residential property. Before this year�s legislative session, all Nevadans paid property taxes on the market value of their homes. This caused some property tax bills to shoot up in the neighborhood of 40 percent or more than the previous year�s. 

Lawmakers capped owner-occupied property at 3 percent and non-owner-occupied property at 8 percent. That blends to a total of about a 6-percent increase in property tax proceeds to local government from existing property in Nevada. To that, government will add tax revenue on newly developed property at its current, hyper-inflated value, Beers said. 

�This year�s bill will be 3 percent higher than last year, and the one next year will be 3 percent more than this year�s � all while your home value will increase by more than 3 percent, subject to adjustment or elimination by a future legislature,� Beers said. �The cap was just a ploy to take the wind out of any momentum a Prop 13 or TABOR initiative might have by offering a false reality that the property tax issue is resolved.� 

All told, taxpayers are going to constrain annual property tax growth to local government at about 10 percent, which is roughly twice the rates of population growth and inflation. Beers wants to correct this rate with TASC � Tax And Spending Control For Nevada.

In addition to paying their property taxes, many Nevadans pay dues to a homeowners association, which turns around and pays property taxes on commonly-owned property that can only be used by homeowners. The interesting thing, Beers explained, is that property tax is supposed to be at market value. 

So what is the market value of a HOA recreation center? Zero dollars because by deed, it cannot be sold. Take, for example, Sun City in northwest Las Vegas. To use one of the five rec centers in Sun City, you must own a home in Sun City. Therefore the value of those rec centers is factored into the price of the 8,000 or so homes in Sun City. 

While owners only pay 1/8,000 of the value of the five centers in the price of their home, the property taxes on the rec centers are paid. However, the Clark County Assessor has been separately taxing HOAs for the rec centers. 

Beers contends that�s double taxation and for the last four legislative sessions, he has brought legislation to correct this problem. 

�The value of the common property, reserved for the exclusive use of residents, is built into the market value of the home,� Beers said. �That actually became law 10 years ago, a law which found itself in the Nevada Supreme Court because the county assessor continued to charge a tax to the homeowners association anyway.�

The Supreme Court � go figure � didn�t agree with the double taxation argument. This legislative session, Beers finally corrected this specific matter.

While Beers passed a law eliminating this double taxation on people in homeowner associations, he and others are still trying to establish control with property taxes in general. Assemblywoman Sharron Angle is pursuing a Prop 13-style solution.

California�s Prop 13 capped property tax bills at 2 percent and was enacted 25 years ago. It resulted in about a 12- to 18-month setback for all of California�s government bodies before they found other taxes to increase, and new taxes and user fees to implement so that they could continue growing their revenue at an amount that exceeded inflation and population growth. 

Will Prop 13 work here in Nevada? Consider the number of people who�ve fled the Golden State for the Silver State. That�s the problem with Prop 13, Beers said. 

�The problem is government will always expand faster than the people who they are supposed to serve,� Beers said. Although Beers will sign the Prop 13 petition, carry it around and vote for it, he admits it really doesn�t fix the problem. TASC does.

Angle plans to kickoff the Prop 13 initiative effort in early September.

TASC is an acronym for Tax and Spending Control. A great civil concept, it says that 

government can increase spending only by the rate of population growth and inflation. If revenue generated is greater than the TASC spending limit, government must refund that surplus revenue to taxpayers.

TASC For Nevada gives government one shot to come to the people with a plan to spend surplus revenue instead of refund it, Beers explained. The request goes to a vote. If voted up, then the project is funded. If it�s voted down, then a rebate of the surplus goes to the people. Called TABOR in Colorado, the concept was amended into Colorado�s Constitution in 1992.

This is an idea that no legislature in the history of America has approved. Not one. Beers had the audacity to bring it in bill form to the last legislative session. It was referred to the Senate Finance Committee where it died on a 5-2 vote. 

So, Nevadans are left with what Coloradans were left with � a citizens� initiative process. Thirteen years have passed since Colorado�s constitutional amendment, and it�s been an interesting 13 years from a state government and local government standpoint. 

Requests to spend surplus revenues are called �de-Brucing� questions in Colorado, named for the fellow who pushed the TABOR amendment. About half of the de-Brucing proposals Colorado governments have made were passed by the voters. The ones that passed tended to build something � a park, a flood control project, a building, a capital project of some kind. What the Colorado people didn�t approve for the surplus was the creation of more government employee jobs. Even with these successful de-Brucings, $3.2 billion in reimbursements or rebates to taxpayers were paid out over 13 years. 

�Colorado leads the nation in job growth, not just jobs but good jobs that we spend quite a bit of government money trying to attract here in Nevada,� Beers said. �Contrast this Colorado story with Nevada where we are right in the middle of a four-year period of time when our government�s spending is increasing two-and-and-a-half times the rate of population growth and inflation.�

With the recent increases, Nevada ranks above the national average of spending per resident, Beers said. 

Where does the money go? 

Nationally, Nevada has the second highest average compensation for local government employees. In a 2002 survey by the Las Vegas Review Journal, 1,800-plus government employees made a salary more than $100,000 from local and state governments here in Nevada. 

TASC�s initiative process will launch shortly before Thanksgiving because Coloradans will vote on the largest de-Brucing question in history in early November. The people of Colorado are going to be asked to allow their government to keep the next five years of surplus revenue. 

In Nevada, opponents of TASC are spinning this as if Coloradans are about to repeal TABOR. Therefore it�s a terrible thing for Nevada. Two things: First, Coloradans aren�t being asked to repeal TABOR; they are being asked to allow government to keep the next five years of surplus. And the second thing is that the polls show that for every two people who support giving the surplus to the government, three people don�t, as published by the Denver Post last month. 

It is quite likely that those ballot questions will fail in November. With that in mind, Beers believes that TASC proponents in Nevada will be able to get a more broad-based group in support of a TASC amendment.

Former state Sen. Ann O�Connell, who lost re-election last year to Joe Heck, will serve as executive director of the TASC effort.

�She�s got the time and passion right now,� Beers said, adding that implementing TASC into the constitution will likely be a four-year process. �There was a small group of us who got the initial organization underway. One of the members suggested Ann and we agreed that was a great idea. 

�I think Ann is very sincere in her philosophy of government and senses getting TASC implemented is bigger than what any legislator could ever do.�

If Nevadans listen to Clark County School District officials, they might be concerned that this is the worst state in the union, by statistics, to get an education. And rather than give money back to the people via a DMV rebate, why not throw more money at the education problem to, in theory, �make this a better state�? 

It�s been touted that Nevada is 44th in the nation in funding per student. But numbers are manipulated to present an image of emergency. School districts, typically, have two funds � operating and construction.

The truth is that Nevada ranks second in construction funding per student, making the state�s overall ranking for school spending 26th in the nation. The effect of our growing population is removed by expressing this statistic on a per-student basis.

�We�re now the fifth largest school district in the nation, so you can directly compare Clark County to L.A. County, New York and Chicago � the worst of the worst,� Beers said. 

During the 2002 legislative session, Assemblyman Joe Hardy told a story about when he was a two-term Boulder City councilman. He went to Boulder City High School, walked into the library and asked the librarian to bring him all the books on a specific subject. The librarian collected a stack of books. Hardy found they were all very old, Beers shared. 

So Hardy requested the replacement of the Boulder City High School library book collection. It took two visits to school board meetings, and when finally approved, the money came from the construction funds per student. 

So this prompted the questioning of former Clark County School District Superintendent Carlos Garcia, Beers said. Is it possible that CCSD regularly spends construction funds per student on things that other districts in America spend their operating funds per student on? Is it possible that this is why both national teachers� unions say that Nevada is above average in ranking compensation levels of teachers? How can CCSD be above average in compensation but fund at 44th per student? Garcia eventually confirmed CCSD�s accounting subterfuge.

�Upon visiting the National Center for Education Statistics website [nces.org], anyone can see that Nevada ranks 26th in the nation in education spending by adding construction funds with operating funds and dividing by the number of students,� Beers said. 

Nevada�s population growth rate is 3 percent, suggesting that the state should increase classroom chairs by 3 percent each year. The number is substantial and something that deserves planning, Beers admits. After all, in 28 years at that rate, today�s classroom size would double. 

�So our growth is certainly nothing to sneeze at, but does it warrant having the second highest construction funds per student in America?� Beers asks. �I think the problem frankly is we have the fifth largest school district in America in Clark County. The ones bigger than us are slums, and that�s totally different than what we have here.� 

In those communities � Washington D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit and New York � there is one inner city, surrounding suburbs and lots of school districts. There are kids crossing school district lines for all the same reasons that one person chooses Vons and another chooses Smith�s Food King, Beers explained. 

�More school districts make the education system stronger and more responsible to parents,� he continued. 

Beers� vision is to break up the Clark County School District that currently services 450,000 constituents, an idea long championed by fellow Sen. Sandra Tiffany. He wants each school district to consist of a single high school, three middle schools and seven to 10 elementary schools. A school board would comprise of five elected people. And there wouldn�t be a superintendent. 

�You don�t need superintendents under my vision because the principals make a council. You�d have to have an administrative staff, but no one raking in $200,000 a year without ever interacting with students,� Beers shared. �I think that you�ll see your school board member at church, you�ll see your school board member at little league games, you�ll see your school board member at the grocery store � a lot.� 

What will this create? According to Beers, it�ll establish accountability � something the current system lacks. 

�I don�t think Carlos did a good job. I don�t think he did a bad job,� Beers said. �I think Carlos did an impossible job, and it�s going to stay that way until we break up the Clark County School District.� LW

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