(Travis Chandler) – No mere big taxer, Joe Hardy has a history of being a big spender too.
As Boulder City Councilman, he turned the City’s finances upside down in a big way, turning a $15 million cash surplus into a $57 million debt principal amount starting in 2001, to build a golf course and an extra water line to service it. Debt service over the next decades will push that to nearly $100 million. Meanwhile the golf course has lost money and been subsidized by millions each year it has been in operation.
It is his obsession to seize the power of unchecked spending that is the key to understanding Joe. As we have seen, he is willing to take the taxpayers deep into debt for his boondoggles. And to protect that power he will go to great lengths.
For example, the citizens and voters of BC passed an initiative ordinance last November, to limit new debt to under $1 million unless voter approval is obtained. This is one of two that Mayor Roger Tobler and Councilmen Cam Walker (of LV Monorail fame) and Duncan McCoy have directed the City Attorney to attack in court (at taxpayers expense of course). The initiative was in response to Joe Hardy’s golf course boondoggle, to make sure something like it could not happen again.
Having lost at the ballot box, and not content to fight it only in the courts, they are now fighting one aspect of the new debt limit ordinance in the Legislature. AB 166, having passed the Assembly unanimously and now before the Senate, will take away the power of a City to reduce its debt burden through refunding where a special election is called for. As interest rates change, this drastically reduces the windows of opportunity to profitably do a refunding.
For example, just prior to the November election, BC city staff came forward with a refunding proposal that they claimed would save the taxpayers $4 million dollars. But refunding would not be available if the voters had to approve it. And the voters, our City Attorney argued with the help of Carole Vilardo of the Nevada Taxpayer’s Association, will not be able to do it promptly in a special election.
Well, that’s not actually true, at least currently, so Carole found a sponsor to make it true in the current Legislature. Why would Carole care? Why does Carole act to hurt Nevada taxpayers? Simple. Cam Walker has her ear; they serve on the same Board. I wonder if she has the full story, though.
Now the cynical observer might view the auspicious timing of the possible refunding just before the election, with the savings of $4 million dangled before the taxpayers, as a political ploy to defeat the debt limit initiative. And that cynic might also view the attempt to pass AB 166 as a means to establish legal grounds to void in the courts the ordinance the voters just passed. Four million is a lot of money for Boulder City, a town of 16,000 souls. How much damage could this bill do to entities like Las Vegas or Clark County, where serious money is at stake?
Joe Hardy has long been intimately familiar with Roger Tobler and Cam Walker; indeed they may be called his political progeny. And not surprisingly, they too chafe at any restrictions on their power to spend money they don’t have. Just like Joe.
So, hopefully, it should not surprise anyone that Joe Hardy is the Senate sponsor of AB 166.
(Mr. Chandler is a Boulder City city councilman)
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