Thursday, January 22, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Quick and Dirty: A notebook of news and politics

For the defense

Harry Claiborne was one of the finest lawyers to ever prowl a Las Vegas courtroom, the Oscar Goodman of his day, a shrewd legal mind camouflaged by a down-home, folksy drawl. Unfortunately, the obituaries that will be written about Claiborne will likely be dominated by the recounting of his impeachment from the federal bench.

Claiborne used a gun to take his own life earlier this week. At 86, his health was fading fast. Associates say his finances were a mess as well. But for decades, he was a high-flying defense attorney, THE lawyer to get if you were a powerful person in a lot of trouble. He was appointed to a federal judgeship in 1978 and never seemed to adjust to a government salary. Longtime locals may recall seeing Claiborne on television, railing against the federal agents he claimed had been following him around, presumably in pursuit of evidence that he might have accepted bribes while on the bench. (In the interview, it appeared Claiborne had consumed a liquid lunch.)

His suspicions about the feds proved accurate. Claiborne was indicted on charges of accepting bribes from fugitive brothel baron Joe Conforte. The trial ended in a hung jury. A second trial focused only on tax evasion charges, and Claiborne was convicted. He was sent to prison, and also suffered the ignominy of being impeached by the U.S. Senate in 1986.

All was forgiven within the Las Vegas legal community, however. Despite the conviction and the impeachment, Claiborne was welcomed back into the fold by the Nevada bar and resumed his law practice, a practice, by the way, that began in 1946.

Love him or not, Harry Claiborne was a Las Vegas original.--GK

Shiver me Timbers

On the row of TVs lined up above the bar inside the Timbers bar in northwest Las Vegas, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean flashed his snappy eyes, shouted and snarled feistily like a cheerfully challenged Barney Rubble. From his exuberance and the sound of cheering supporters, you'd think he'd won Monday's Iowa caucus. But he'd placed a far-off third behind the Johns, and was merely giving his "We have just begun to fight, we have just begun to fight!" speech. It took a few moments for some of the Nevadans for Howard Dean packed in here to watch the caucus results to notice just how poorly he'd done. And then: disbelief. Diane Lee Hart, a precinct captain for the local Dean campaign, shared the moment with Joseph Kosuda.

"I'm kind of shocked," said Hart.

"I'm shocked, too," said Kosuda. "But Kerry's a very good man."

"Any Democrat is superior to Bush," said Hart.

"No, Lieberman isn't," said Kosuda. "But he's not a Democrat. Ha hah hahaha."

Then the Golden State briefly hijacked their conversation. "I'm from California--I've been here five years," said Hart.

"So you didn't get to vote for Schwarzenegger," said Kosuda, cutting in.

"Schwarzenazi," grumbled Hart. She paused, her mind returning to the presidential race. "I'm going to make a bumper sticker that says, `Democracy Not Theocracy.' I mean, how can someone tell me what to do with my own body? I'm really nervous. Bush terrifies me."

At a different table, a man who didn't want to be identified said he, too, was shocked by Dean's poor finish. He's been a supporter since the beginning. "You know how they were supposed to get all the young people out?" he asked. "That didn't happen."--HW

Coyote Springs, Part 1

It looks as if the brief, soaring hope held by environmentalists that developer Harvey Whittemore might be willing to sell his Coyote Springs property back to the U.S. government for preservation has crashed and disintegrated on impact. There's just too much money at stake, and the government couldn't possibly scare up enough funds to buy it, says Whittemore spokesman Mike Ford.

In October, we reported how Whittemore was, for the first time, entertaining the notion of unloading the property. For more than four years he's been moving ahead with plans to develop the 41,000 acres, which straddle the border between Clark and Lincoln counties, into the state's largest master-planned community: possibly 100,000 homes or more plus golf courses, all fed by underground water. Some people worried about what would happen to the remote valley's wild qualities, its desert tortoises, its bighorn sheep and the springs downgradient in the Moapa Valley. Then suddenly Whittemore approached the Friends of Nevada Wilderness and mentioned he might be willing to sell the land back to the Bureau of Land Management if the BLM could drum up enough Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act funds to buy it.

But Whittemore has decided to plow ahead with the project after all. "We always knew [selling it] would be a long shot," says Ford. "The amount of money that it would have taken to purchase the property is probably more than the federal government would be willing to dedicate to a single property." He wouldn't name the price, except to say it "probably would be in excess of a couple hundred million dollars."

To date, Whittemore has the permits and water rights to develop the 6,000 acres on the Clark County side, which could see up to 50,000 homes, maximum. (There could be even more homes on the Lincoln County side.) The company is working on a habitat conservation plan with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and a draft plan will be released in about five weeks, says Ford. By this spring, he says, Coyote Springs Investment might begin "pushing some dirt around" out there. "The idea is to do it slowly, at first: a couple of golf courses and a couple thousand units," says Ford.--HW

Coyote Springs, Part 2

Meanwhile, the Southern Nevada Water Authority is also moving along with its Coyote Springs Valley project--building a 15-mile pipeline from there to the Moapa Valley Water District's water system. And it's strange to say that so matter-of-factly. After all, this pipeline could someday transport the first drops of rural Nevada groundwater that the Las Vegas Valley Water District filed for rights to back in 1989. The furor then was deafening: "Remember the Owens Valley!" cried opponents. And now? Water under the bridge.

The SNWA already has rights to 9,000 acre-feet of groundwater in Coyote Springs, mostly purchased from developer Harvey Whittemore. Its 1989 application had asked the state engineer for the rights to 27,512 acre-feet in the valley. The state engineer ordered the authority to conduct a five-year montoring study of the impacts of water extraction, including a two-year pump test. "Before we do that, we have to have a place to send [the water]," says water authority spokesman J.C. Davis. That's where the pipeline comes in. During the pump test it will transport water to the Moapa Valley Water District. The same pipeline, depending on the outcome of the study and the state engineer's decision, would eventually carry water regularly from Coyote to Moapa (which gets a share of the water). From there, some of it would make its way to Las Vegas.

Davis says the authority expects to get the environmental permits this spring, then the right of way, and by 2005 the pipeline should be completed. Then the pump test will begin, the outcome of which the state engineer will use to decide how much water to permit the water authority out of its 1989 applications.--HW

Cyber-county

Been subjected to the new Clark County website yet? Okay, that's kinda mean of us. Subjected might be a bit of a strong word; then again, the revamped website, which launched last Thursday, sure comes on strong with the information. It's laudable the way the county erred on the side of giving citizens more information rather than less; on the downside, at first glance (and, yeah, second and third), the new county page is a veritable morass of links upon links. Links that scroll! Links that look like buttons when you brush your cursor over them! Links that open sublinks!

While it won't win any awards for elegance in design, the makeover focused on getting more information to citizens, says county spokesman Erik Pappa. "We knew that the bottom line was that we had to make ourselves open and accessible," says Pappa, who adds that the website gets more hits than any government site in the state. "We have an obligation to let the citizens know what we're up to. We have some great information on our website, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the front page of the website in its former incarnation." Additions include extensive information about the drought and a link to the Clark County coroner's office that entices with the line, "Identify Human Remains Online."--AK

Pundit promoted

This election season, if you don't read in the news any insights from scholar and political pundit Michael Bowers, it's not because he's been kidnapped by the Erin Kenny Liberation Army. Rather, the UNLV professor has been promoted. On Jan. 1, Bowers was boosted from chairman of the political science department to vice provost for academic affairs.

Bowers, author of The Sagebrush State, a political history of Nevada, might be best known as an oft-quoted pundit with savvy takes on city, county and state politics. "I tried to come from an academic perspective as opposed to a partisan one," says Bowers. "I tried to look at [politics] in a way that most people probably don't have the opportunity to do, that is, look at it on the basis of what the research tells us, what political science tells us."

Bowers' new gig doesn't officially forbid him from delivering his insights; he's just exhibiting a quality that, alas, many local politicians lack: circumspection. "It's simply the case that, as a senior administrator, I don't want people to confuse my position with any political comments I might make."--AK