I had occasion last week to sit down with a newcomer to
Incline Village who wanted to discuss the local political landscape. This
gentleman is no stranger to politics – he is a retired professor of
International Relations at a major university, a position he took following a
career in Washington DC working in the Pentagon, the State Department and the
Congress.
Our conversation was wide-ranging, covering everything from
local to national issues, and we were both struck by what seemed to us to be
parallels among those levels.
Take the gridlock in the Senate caused by the filibuster
rules – most recently we saw Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) waste thirteen hours of the
Senate’s time to no good purpose - he spent the time talking mostly about the
issue of drones. Now this is an issue that deserves considered debate, but the
context for Paul’s semi-coherent rant was the President’s nomination of James
Brennan as CIA Director, and the sole purpose of it was to delay Brennan’s
confirmation which eventually passed 63-34 vote after a vote of 81-16 to end
Paul’s filibuster.
IVGID Board meetings don’t allow for the possibility of a
filibuster as such, but we’ve seen again and again how one or a few individuals
both on and off the Board can bring the Board’s ability to transact the
District’s business to a grinding halt. Most recently, in the meeting week before
last, two trustee’s objection to the General Manager’s long-standing policy of
copying the Chair on any correspondence he has with Trustees was the occasion
for stopping the meeting for an hour amid insinuations of open meeting law
violations and general nefarious skullduggery.
I’ll grant that the GM’s using blind copying (bcc) rather
than open copying (cc) was an error of judgment, one that he was quick to
apologize for. Notwithstanding that, the policy makes sense on a number of
levels, not least of which is the GM’s partnership with the Board Chair and the
Board’s oft-avowed commitment to transparency. The attorney who was present as
the Board’s Counsel did not offer any indication that this was a violation of
Nevada’s complex open meeting law, and the matter could have been put to rest in
minutes with the GM’s apology and a request that in future these communications
be openly copied. Instead the conversation was contentious and often on the
edge of belligerence – all in all another unprofessional performance by this
Board.
Legislative deliberations, from the Senate to the IVGID
Board are, by custom, polite to a fault. Often in the Senate we will hear one
Senator refer to another as “my friend” while excoriating that person in the
most vitriolic terms. Proponents of this pretense of civility argue that it
keeps things from getting personal, and I’m willing to allow that that might be
true. An unintended consequence of this custom, however, is that it mitigates
against anyone openly pointing out that the emperor has no clothes or that
something someone is saying is factually incorrect. It also makes it very
difficult for leadership to keep things moving efficiently.
It’s still early days for the 2013 Board – in practice that
means that inefficient and ineffective practices can still be nipped in the bud
before they become ingrained and harder to change. Doing that, however, will
take real leadership on the part of the Chair and those Trustees who have the
courage not to be intimidated by those who aggressively push their point of
view as if it were divinely inspired, whether that is the small, non-representative
number of members of the public who have been working to cow the staff and
Trustees for several years now or it is another Trustee who insists on his
interests overriding those of the other Trustees, the District, or the public.
Just as the Senate, tiring of Sen. Paul’s nonsense, voted
81-16 to end his tirade, the Chair and the other Trustees need to speak up and
intervene when one or two individuals try to dominate the conversation at the
expense of getting real work done.
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