Free federal lands to release Nevada's entrepreneurs and spur economic growth
Derek Yonai, an economics professor at Campbell University, had a great op-ed in Sunday's Las Vegas Review-Journal on how freeing Nevada's lands from federal control would increase economic growth in our state.
The federal government owns approximately 85 percent of Nevada's land, preventing the state from developing those lands to improve its economy and allow for job creation.Read the whole thing here.
With just 15 percent of the state left to its people for potential private development, Nevadans are restrained in realizing their entrepreneurial potential. Making due with only 15 percent of one's resources would hinder anyone. Who can flourish on 15 percent of their present assets? ...
All of this federally owned land is "dead property," meaning it is not available for development and its value is not being realized.
To get a sense of how much "dead property" there is in Nevada, consider this picture.
If you're interested in freeing Nevada lands from federal control, NPRI's Geoffrey Lawrence has written on a couple of great pieces on this topic as well.
Thomas Mitchell at 4th St8 has also written extensively on this issue and had a great post in response to the above op-ed.
In an op-ed article in the Los Angeles Times earlier this year titled "Free the American West: Get the federal government off public lands that are of no national importance," Robert H. Nelson, who worked in the Interior Department from 1975 to 1993 and now is a prof in Maryland, explained rather succinctly why the federal stewardship is a problem:Read Mitchell's whole post for a telling quote from Daniel Webster and a stunning comparison about how much land the British government controlled before the American Revolution."Most public land decisions are made by two federal agencies, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, and involve matters such as the number of cows that will be allowed to graze, the areas available to off-road recreational vehicles, the prevention and fighting of forest fires, the building of local roads, the amount of timber harvesting, the leasing of land for oil and gas drilling, mineral rights and other such details. Outside the rural West, most such decisions are made by private landowners or by state and local governments. In the West, Washington acts as if it knows best."And they don't do a very good job of it, as those in the West can attest - massive wildfires, long delayed mining permits, grazing fees and water rights jerked about, roads closed at a bureaucratic whim.
It's time to free the West.
Read moreNSEA endorses ... all Democrats, but withholds endorsement for some reform-minded Dems
Of course, this isn't a surprise. Everyone knows that the Nevada State Education Association is a hyper-partisan organization dedicated to protecting ineffective teachers and preventing proven education reforms. Their NSEA Recommended Candidate List is just further evidence of that.
(Click to see the original)
There are several races on this list where NSEA didn't endorse a candidate. Some of those races are in strongly Republican districts, but that's not the case in Senate Districts 1 and 13 and Assembly District 5, where Sen. John Lee, Assemblywoman Debbie Smith and Assemblywoman Marilyn Dondero Loop, all incumbent Democrats, are running respectively.
So, why aren't the hyper-partisan NSEA union bosses endorsing these Democrats?
Let's read in between the lines here. Last year, NSEA released its Legislative Report Card. Unlike NPRI's Legislative Review and Report Card, which graded lawmakers based on votes and had a reviewable methodology, NSEA union bosses based their report card on undefined "weighted system" and other factors like "accessibility" and "the experience of the NSEA Lobby Team." Basically, the NSEA's "grades" were a joke. It should be noted that a low score from NSEA is a badge of honor - it means you stood up to the biggest opponent of meaningful education reform.
Sen. Lee received an F; Assemblywoman Smith and Loop both received Ds. Speaker John Oceguera, who also didn't receive the NSEA's endorsement in his Congressional race, scored a D.
And why did these legislators receive those scores? Because they supported such minor education reforms as making it take three years, instead of one, for teachers to earn tenure and allowing ineffective teachers to be fired after three consecutive years of poor performance. Some of the reforms, like ending last in, first out, were subject to collective bargaining, which recently allowed CCEA union bosses to effectively gut the law and preserve seniority-based layoffs. So while these reforms were a small step forward, that's all they were - a small step forward. But NSEA union bosses are fighting tooth and nail even these small improvements.
This isn't just happening in Nevada. As Reuters reports, union bosses around the country are fighting to prevent reform-minded Democrats from enacting proven education reforms, all in an attempt to preserve their own political power.
The email did not mince words. It came from an officer at a California teachers union, and he was irate.NSEA union bosses did endorse four other Assembly members who received a "D" on its report card. I don't know why the NSEA union bosses treated them differently than the legislators listed above, but I know Nevada's parents and children hope the NSEA endorsement doesn't limit these legislators push for real education reform.
President Barack Obama's re-election team had just hired as a spokeswoman a veteran Democratic operative who had spent the last year at a nonprofit, pushing education policies that the union did not like. ...
Meanwhile, the union's attempt to oust her [Linda Serrato] was reported by a Los Angeles Times columnist this week, sparking outrage among the emerging faction of Democrats who see teachers unions as obstructionist bullies rather than essential allies.
"They seem to be demanding a bizarre loyalty oath of every member of the president's re-election campaign: Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of an education reform group?" said Ben Austin, an education activist and Democratic operative in Los Angeles. (Emphasis added)
Students vs. union. Your child vs. union bosses. An effective education for your child or dues for the Nevada State Education Association.
Those are the stakes. Those are the sides.
We stand with students.
Where will these Democratic candidates stand?
What are they trying to hide?
Every week, NPRI President Andy Matthews writes a column for NPRI's week-in-review email. If you are not getting our emails, which contain our latest commentaries and news stories, you can sign up here to receive them. Just enter your email in the box on the top right.
Today, Andy wrote a great column on the NPRI and Nevada Press Association's transparency survey, and the candidates who did and did not respond.
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Citizens have a right to know how their government spends their money and makes other decisions. The reason for this is spelled out clearly in both the Declaration of Independence and Nevada's constitution. The Declaration says it this way:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. - That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...Nevada's constitution states:
All men are by Nature free and equal and have certain inalienable rights among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty; Acquiring, Possessing and Protecting property and pursuing and obtaining safety and happiness[.] Sec: 2. All political power is inherent in the people[.] Government is instituted for the protection, security and benefit of the people;Our forefathers formed government to protect their rights, and government must be accountable to the citizens it was created to serve. This accountability can't exist without transparency.
This is why NPRI and the Nevada Press Association teamed up to conduct a legislative candidate survey on six transparency issues ranging from open meetings to campaign-finance reform to open records. We released the results of that survey earlier this week, because we wanted you and every voter in the state to know what these candidates thought on specific transparency-related issues.
I'm happy to report that of the 60 candidates who responded, overwhelming majorities supported increasing transparency in important ways, ranging from increased penalties for officials who violate open-records laws to applying the open-meetings law to the Nevada Legislature.
But I'm extremely disappointed by two things. First, the lack of incumbents who responded. We had 10 incumbent Republican lawmakers respond and only two incumbent Democrats, including former state senator Sheila Leslie. I urge you to ask every candidate in your district to complete the survey and send us the results. You and other voters deserve to know where they stand - before they get to Carson City.
Second, as reported in the Las Vegas Review-Journal article on the survey, a "Democratic Party source said his candidates boycotted the survey because of NPRI's involvement. He called the Las Vegas think tank a 'right-wing organization' ..."
While NPRI is certainly a free-market institute - and proud of it - this survey wasn't and isn't about NPRI. It's about candidates telling voters where they stand on transparency issues before they get to the insulated world of Carson City.
Besides, transparency isn't - or at least shouldn't be - a partisan issue. For all the talk we hear from those on the Left about "dialogue" and "compromise," here was a chance to "dialogue" on one issue that should bring people from all sides of the political aisle together - transparency - and those Democrats didn't want to tell you, the voters, where they stood.
Now, if those Democratic candidates want to conduct and publicize their own survey on these significant transparency issues, great. Never let the messenger get in the way of the message.
But unless they do that, their en masse refusal to take a stand on these vital transparency issues makes it clear that they'd rather leave the public in the dark.
Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time.
Andy Matthews
NPRI President
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Remember, if you'd like to receive the latest from NPRI, sign-up for our emails here. Enter your email address in the box on the top right.
Thursday's appearance on "The Agenda"
Earlier today, I went on "The Agenda" with Elizabeth Crum and Hugh Jackson to discuss the results of the transparency survey released this week by NPRI and the Nevada Press Association:
Brookings scholar: Principal reductions the wrong approach
Conservatives and libertarians have long understood that a government-mandated principal reduction for underwater homeowners is the wrong approach to solving the nation's and Nevada's housing problems.
Now, even the liberal Brookings Institution has agreed. In Sunday's Las Vegas Review-Journal, Ted Gayer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Phillip Swagel, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, wrote that principal reductions would do more harm than good for the housing market.
Targeting principal reduction to the 20 percent of underwater borrowers with delinquent Fannie and Freddie loans (approximately 600,000 in total) does have the potential to prevent some foreclosures, but at far too much a price. It is extremely difficult to target federal help to a select group of borrowers without providing an incentive for other borrowers to stop paying their mortgages. Indeed, research by Christopher Mayer, Edward Morrison, Tomasz Piskorski and Arpit Gupta of Columbia University found a statistically significant increase in such strategic increase in strategic behavior in response to principal reduction announcements. ...In economics, they call this a moral hazard - government incentivizing bad behavior.
As the housing adjustment continues, we should avoid taking actions that accomplish little while providing incentives for borrowers to renege on obligations. Such efforts will only prolong the problem. (Added a link the study)
There's also another reason to oppose government-mandated write-downs - it's morally wrong.
It is unjust for the government, which exists in part to protect property rights, to take away property from someone (the banks and their stockholders) and give it to someone else (underwater homeowners) by rewriting a contract. Property rights aren't optional or applicable only when the economy's doing well. Imagine the outrage if a bank tried to increase someone's mortgage, because the value of his house increased. A contract is a contract is a contract. Government's role in that contract should be to enforce it, not rewrite it because of political pressure
Protecting and enforcing property rights is an essential role and duty of government. If we lose that, we've lost something much more valuable than any number of houses.
Jonah Goldberg goes Face to Face with Jon Ralston
And it leads to a really interesting interview and discussion of political philosophy and Goldberg's new book, The Tyranny of Clichés. Enjoy.
In case, Piers Morgan is looking for interview tips, here's one. Read the book.
Goldberg was in Reno to give the keynote speech at NPRI's Spring Celebration. He gave a great speech (even if we did have some problems with the lighting) to a packed house and a good time was had by all. It was great to see our some of our many friends and supporters in Reno, and we look forward to doing more events in Northern Nevada.
Candidate survey on transparency released by Nevada Press Association and NPRI
Ever wondered where legislative candidates and current elected officials stand on transparency issues ranging from open meetings to open records? We've got answers for you.
LAS VEGAS - The Nevada Policy Research Institute and the Nevada Press Association today released the responses to a legislative-candidate survey on government transparency - available at http://transparentnevada.com/2012-transparency-survey/.If you know one of the politicians who didn't answer the survey, ask them why they didn't answer and if they will do so now. We'll be updating the survey as more candidates and lawmakers respond.
More than 55 candidates addressed some of the most pressing transparency issues facing Nevada.
Six questions were asked, including: "Do you support civil and/or criminal penalties for government officials, in their personal capacities, who violate Nevada's public-record laws?"
Another was: "Do you support placing local-government negotiations with public-employee unions under Nevada's open-meeting law?"
"Nevada's citizens have a fundamental right to know how their government is operating and how their elected officials are spending their money," said Andy Matthews, president of the Nevada Policy Research Institute.
"Nevadans from across the political spectrum are demanding more transparency from their state and local governments, and this survey is a chance for citizens to examine the beliefs of those who are - and those who want to be - elected officials.
"Do these individuals value transparency or do they prefer to leave citizens in the dark? I think these survey answers, as well as the chance to see who chose to not answer the survey, are very revealing."
The bipartisan list of candidates who responded to the survey includes both current Democratic Senate candidate and former senator Sheila Leslie and current Republican Assembly Minority Leader Pat Hickey.
The release of the survey results also comes just two days after Hickey proposed a series of campaign-finance reforms, one of which deals with a survey question topic: "Do you support requiring paid lobbyists to file reports concerning lobbying activities at the end of each calendar quarter in which the Legislature is not in session?"
"From these responses, there's clearly an appetite for more open government in Nevada," said Barry Smith, executive director of the Nevada Press Association. "They also show there is much work that can be done by the Legislature to help ensure the public isn't kept in the dark."
Agreeing on the importance of transparency in government and public understanding of the stance of elected officials on these issues, NPRI and the Nevada Press Association partnered to conduct this Transparency Survey.
As a public service, NPRI also runs the website TransparentNevada.com, which contains a wealth of public records, including hundreds of thousands of public employee salary records.
The survey and candidate answers are available online at http://transparentnevada.com/2012-transparency-survey/.
A list containing just the candidates who responded is available at http://transparentnevada.com/2012-transparency-survey/responded/.
Questions:
1. Do you support civil and/or criminal penalties for government officials, in their personal capacities, who violate Nevada's public-record laws?
2. Do you support applying Nevada's open-meeting laws to the Legislature?
3. Do you support giving the public 72 hours to read all bills before they go to a floor vote?
4. Do you support placing local-government negotiations with public-employee unions under Nevada's open-meeting law?
5. Do you support requiring paid lobbyists to file reports concerning lobbying activities at the end of each calendar quarter in which the Legislature is not in session?
6. Will you sponsor legislation in support of any of the above items? If so, please specify which item.###
Teachers acting like children
Every week, NPRI President Andy Matthews writes a column for NPRI's week-in-review email. If you are not getting our emails, which contain our latest commentaries and news stories, you can sign up here to receive them. Just enter your email in the box on the top right.
On Friday, Andy wrote a great column on the unruly and unprofessional behavior of a few union bosses and teachers at last week's CCSD board meeting, and I wanted to share the column with you.
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After being involved with politics and public policy for quite a few years, it takes a lot to surprise me. From politicians lavishing taxpayer-funded favors on government insiders to government agencies trying to avoid transparency, it's tempting to conclude you've seen it all before.
But something happened at this week's board meeting of the Clark County School District that shocked me. Egged on by their union bosses, a handful of teachers acted like petulant children, interrupting the meeting with shouts and even profanities.
One local news station described it this way:
Disruptive teachers at Wednesday night's board meeting behaved in the same way they tell their students not to. Teachers with CCEA stood in defiance with their backs to speakers and trustees while coughing collectively to drown out the microphone. Trustees barely started to make their case when the teachers started shouting and stormed out of the room in protest.Before we go any further, it's important to note that most CCSD teachers are talented and hard-working professionals who undoubtedly are embarrassed by the childish display organized by the union bosses of the Clark County Education Association. And it's a good sign that even though CCSD has more than 17,000 teachers, union bosses could only round up between 100 and 200 people for this "protest."
Unfortunately, even a small number of individuals can have a destructive impact. These union officials decided to make a scene, and in doing so they set a terrible example for the hundreds of thousands of students in Clark County. How many students went to school the next day and thought, "If a teacher can interrupt a school board meeting, why can't I interrupt this class by talking to my friend or not paying attention?"
These union bosses should be ashamed of themselves for instigating such embarrassing behavior, and the teachers who participated ought to feel the same way about playing along.
Of course, shouting down those with whom they disagree is a common tactic for many on the extreme Left. From using physical intimidation, to attempting to censor the speech of their ideological opponents, to resorting to name-calling, what some liberals consider "dialogue" often amounts to simply expecting those who disagree to shut up and fall in line.
Now, NPRI is fully engaged in the battle of ideas. Our studies, commentaries and blog posts offer information, analysis and solutions to the problems Nevada faces and are inspired by a commitment to preserving individual liberty. And we are happy to debate and discuss those ideas on the merits, any time and any place. But we won't be shouting anyone down.
Union bosses certainly may win some short-term victories through intimidation and disruptions, but I firmly believe that the more the average citizen sees a few union members acting like children, the more he will wonder why our society is rewarding the kind of behavior that would get a child punished.
Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time.
Andy Matthews
NPRI President
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Remember, if you'd like to receive the latest from NPRI, sign-up for our emails here. Enter your email address in the box on the top right.

Is it possible to get fired in Clark County?
(***Not applicable in Clark County***)
Donald Munn, the poster boy for Clark County's battle against sick leave abuse by firefighters, won an arbitrator's decision to get his job back Tuesday.Of course, in the other outrageous story of the week, we learn that it is possible to fire someone, but only if taxpayers are forced to give them half a million dollars as a, err..., parting gift.
While it remains unclear exactly what Munn could get from the ruling, the decision will cost the county at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in back pay, benefits and legal compensation for Munn. ...
That evidence included emails from Munn to colleagues in June 2010 about his plans to leave for the summer using sick leave and vacation time. The co-worker asked how someone can get the entire summer off.
"Between being sick & vac it will seem like most of the summer," replied Munn, who had used 333 hours of sick leave in 2009.
During the time of the email, Munn worked seven out of 18 scheduled shifts from the beginning of June to the end of August 2010. He called in sick 11 times and took 15 vacation days during that time.
Rappaport's decision differs from an arbitrator's ruling in January 2011, which favored the county in a union contract dispute and highlighted firefighter emails as proof of sick leave abuse.
A dispute over the firing of a former assistant parks manager is costing Clark County almost half a million dollars.If you want all the unbelievable details on this, Glenn Cook did a great job detailing them here.
The County Commission approved a $499,000 settlement Tuesday for former Assistant Parks Director Terry Lamuraglia, who was fired in 2008 for what county officials said were publicized emails indicating he created a plan to leave almost 90 parks unguarded by park police during Memorial Day weekend.
The plan was scrapped.
Thinking about all of this waste is making me ill. Anyone have some extra sick days? I think I need to take the summer off.
CCSD layoffs no reason to increase education spending
Five years into the worst recession since at least the Great Depression, the union bosses at the Clark County Education Association had a choice. Accept a pay freeze for two years, which actually included one year of pay increases for education steps or choose to increase teacher salaries and force the Clark County School District to lay off 1,000+ teachers.
Think about that. Five years into this recession, which has hit Nevada harder than any other state, CCSD wouldn't have had to lay off a single teacher if CCEA had agreed to a salary freeze that actually included a one-year salary increase from some teachers! (Ironically, laying off CCSD's 1,000 worst teachers would have been a boon to student achievement, except that CCEA union bosses ensured almost all layoffs will happen by seniority.)
We all know people who've lost their jobs. Nevada has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. NPRI has heard from businessmen and women who've had 60+ percent drops in revenue, have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and been forced to lay off dozens of employees.
Even so, in the midst of this economy, there would have been no teacher layoffs if union bosses had been willing to accept a pay freeze that actually included a one-year pay increase for some employees.
And this is going to be the evidence that Nevada's education system needs more funding? Because CCSD couldn't afford two years worth of raises five years into the worst economy in decades and union bosses decided they'd prefer salary increases to saving teacher jobs?
You've got to be kidding me.
And this is on top of Nevada nearly tripling inflation-adjusted, per-pupil spending in the last 50 years while educational achievement has been stagnant.
Educational improvement will only come from real education reforms, not rewarding CCEA union bosses for choosing pay increases over teacher positions.
