Running for mayor of Henderson was never quite like this.
Friday afternoon, Dina Titus unleashed a piece blasting Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson for taking $10,000 from Triple Five Development -- the outfit that Erin Kenny named as one of her bribers during her G-Sting court testimony this week. And within two months of taking the money, Gibson voted for a zoning change Triple Five wanted, Titus said.
Cross-referencing Gibson's campaign finance reports with Henderson City Council minutes, Titus also counted up "$248,500 in contributions in October-December last year from 13 development interests whose projects he voted to approve between October 2005 and February 2006."
Gibson "has refused to endorse my ethics plan that would prohibit local elected officials from accepting campaign contributions from developers while their projects are under consideration and for one year after,” Titus said in her release. “Now, we are starting to understand why. The Triple Five Nevada contribution and vote were not an isolated instance of ‘pay to play.’ They are part of a pattern."
Gibson fired out a response Friday afternoon saying he was already returning Triple Five's money. He said when he got the contribution, "I had absolutely no knowledge of any alleged improprieties involving the corporation or any of its members. I've read the newspapers today like everyone else."
As for the "pattern," as Titus called it, Gibson said that "for Dina Titus to suggest in any way that my votes on the Henderson City Council have been related to anything other than the best interests of the people of Henderson is unconscionable and totally false. My vote has never been, is not and never will be for sale. I will match my record on ethics against that of Dina Titus anytime."
Yes, well so far, it looks like Titus is the one doing the matching.
The 13 examples of what Titus calls "pay to play" campaign contributions, and those contributors' projects that won Henderson approval within weeks or months of the contributions, are listed after the jump. We feel confident that a similarly damning list of seemingly tit-for-tat relationships could be drawn for virtually every elected city or county official in Nevada -- perhaps even the father of a congressional candidate -- though not with such gaudy numbers. And the timing of these contributions, coming so very, very near to so many project approvals and zoning changes, has every appearance of being exactly the type of government of the industry, by the industry and for the industry that voters have come to cynically expect.
Which is to say that if the Titus campaign can whip this stuff up on Gibson, the staffers for GOP gubernatorial frontrunner Jim Gibbons can, too. And will. Moreover, Gibson's response (also posted in full after the jump) consists of a) defending the honor of his development industry campaign contributors, and while we may be wrong, we suspect that of all the feelings voters might have about development industry campaign contributors, sympathy isn't one of them; and b) dragging out the same lame attacks on Titus that Gibson lodged the other day in his response to her ethics package, highlighted by a free ticket to see Celine.
Let's see, on the one hand, there's a Celine concert. On the other hand, there's a quarter-million dollars in contributions followed within weeks by actions that favor those contributors. For a guy who says he welcomes matching up their records, he sure is getting his clock cleaned.
Democrats are going to have a donnybrook among themselves, as is Democratic custom, over where they think the party should go. It's a national fight, and the Titus-Gibson race might reflect that fight as well as any primary in the country.
But while there will be those who will accuse Titus of being too mean, of, as Gibson put it Friday, "sullying peoples’ reputations for the benefit of her opportunistic politics," Titus is doing Nevada's Democrats -- all Nevada's Democrats -- a favor by taking this guy out now. If she doesn't do it, Jim Gibbons will.
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