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Election 2008: Our look at five city and county races
Reno News & Review
By D. Brian Burghart and Dennis Myers
This article was published on 09.25.08.
County commission 4: Larkin v. Schmidt
All gadflies are not created equal. Many get little accomplished. Gary Schmidt isn’t one of those. He may annoy those in power, but the noise he has made over the years has penetrated the walls of government and even caused change. On one occasion, the city of Reno set up classes to teach its employees the ins and outs of public records requests. That happened after a city employee refused to give Schmidt a copy of a Harrah’s business license, to the city’s regret. The per-copy cost of photocopying in local government offices is lower because of Schmidt. In 2003, he was even appointed to the county equalization board, which hears property tax appeals. If the county commission, by giving him that appointment, thought to settle him down, it didn’t work—a couple of years later it censured him, an action later overturned by the courts. A week ago, a meeting of the Sparks City Council had to be halted after he and another citizen pointed out that the public had not been properly notified of the meeting under the posting requirements of the state open meeting law.
Why would such a figure want to be in public office?
“I’m offering my service as a kind of payback for the opportunities that have been given me in my lifetime …” he said. “I’ve been involved in county government heavily for a couple decades, been in the county for 35 years, and I’ve watched a lot of ebbs and tides. You know, we have severe problems right now that I think I know and understand. And I also think that the people know and understand them, but the people are being ignored by the officials.”
This last is a sore point for Schmidt. A small thing for him symbolizes one of the problems with county government: The Washoe County Commission under his opponent reduced the amount of time each citizen could have during the public comment period from 3 to 2 minutes. Schmidt says the commission has the shortest public comment period in Nevada, and it speaks to his differences with his opponent, incumbent Bob Larkin. He says members of the public are not even allowed to applaud speakers—unless the commissioners first start the applause.
Schmidt says his differences with Larkin focus on two areas—process and substance. The process as followed by the current commission, he says, is contemptuous of the public, and the public comment period typifies the problem.
“That’s just symbolic—I mean, that’s only a one-minute thing. He’s also extremely disrespectful of the public, antagonizes the public, he discourages the public, and never listens to the public.”
He says he has a variety of disagreements with Larkin on substance—the Ballardini Ranch, lawsuit settlements, the commission’s handling of citizen initiative petitions. He said his biggest disagreement with Larkin is on the notion that growth pays for itself, which Schmidt considers a myth.
“When you have runaway growth, whether it’s sprawl or infill, when you have a big burst of growth, you get this income from the sales tax—from the furniture, and the carpeting, and the new cars that people tend to buy when they’re buying new houses, they’re new people that come into the area. But that’s a one-time shot. … And the governments, all three of them, have been using those revenues to run their daily government.”
Gary Schmidt is running against Bob Larkin for Washoe County Commission in district 4.
Then, when the burst of initial spending dies down after growth happens, he says, local governments have no funding to pay for the negative impacts of growth.
Frequently his positions on substantive issues still come back to process. He complains that regional plan settlement arrangements went around the public hearing process, he objects to the treatment of citizens who came before the commission with petitions.
Bob Larkin, Schmidt’s opponent, is the insider to Schmidt’s outsider. Still in his first term, he became county commission chair a year after joining the board and has held the job ever since. In real life, he’s a flight instructor.
Larkin says he is not disrespectful of the public but that part of his job as commission chair is to maintain decorum when members of the audience—who, he says, sometimes include Schmidt—disrupt meetings. He concedes that the rule on commissioners controlling applause does exist.
Larkin says he has never said what Schmidt quotes him as saying—that growth pays for itself. (He refuses to say whether he thinks it does or does not.) But he does say that he thinks “concurrency"—a requirement that a developer provide an infrastructure facilities plan and timely financing for those facilities—has negated the issue.
He is more comfortable talking about his own reasons for being on the commission than responding to Schmidt. He says he ran for the commission to do four things—to get the Tahoe/Pyramid highway link constructed, get a flood control project authorized by Congress, continue collaboration among local governments, and get a Spanish Springs analysis completed. The first two have not yet been completed, so he wants to continue the effort. He believes that cooperation among the two cities and the counties is working, and he wants to add the school district. And he says the Spanish Springs project is about two years away from completion.
For his second term, if he is reelected, he wants to add another goal—more water resources that are funded by developers as part of new developments.
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