EDITORIAL: Tom Collins: Lost Time, Lost Opportunities

By all accounts, County Commissioner Tom Collins should have been the overwhelming favorite of the Moapa Valley community over the past eight years. He and his wife Kathy moved to Logandale shortly after he was elected. The future seemed good. He seemed to have the capacity for setting an ambitious agenda and a reputation for getting things done. He seemed to be primed to go to battle for this little community and to make real headway in areas where no one else had prevailed. He came into his seat with the potential of being the most influential, effective and beloved County Commissioner this community has ever seen.

Unfortunately this was not to be. Instead, Collins’ two terms in office has been the most bitter, divisive, contentious and injurious years this community has experienced in its relationship to its local government. What happened? Why has Collins sunk to such an abysmal approval rating among Moapa Valley voters?

There is no question that Collins has gotten some things done, and some public money spent, here in the Moapa Valley. But its no trick to spend money. The question comes in whether these things were what the community most needed or wanted.

Sure, it was nice to have a new $4 million bridge at the Gubler crossing in Logandale. And it will be nice soon to have another $11 million bridge at Cooper Crossing in Overton. Those kinds of things are great to shout about from on high in re-election campaign ads. But as expensiove as they were, they don’t even begin to solve the central flood control problem that has been looming over this community for decades: the plight of the Stringtown residents along Cooper Street and in the area just below Overton. That is the real problem that would require a Commissioner to really roll up his sleeves and go to work.

Sure, it was nice to have new stables and arena improvements at the Logandale Fairgrounds. But what is really needed is a locally-oriented mechanism for promoting the fairgrounds facility to major regional and even national events directors. Such serious promotion would bring untold revenues to this community’s business sector and to the County coffers. Unfortunately, another need that has gone unmet.

Fortunately these examples were relatively good things. They are examples of the times when Tom’s agenda happens to coincide with a relatively positive outcome. But heaven help us if the wishes of the community ever come cross-wise to those of the Commissioner. On occasions when Moapa Valley residents have dared to express open dissent to the Collins agenda, they have immediately become subject to the full wrath of the Commissioner.

When the results of the 2008 straw poll among local voters did not coincide with Collins’ ideas of who ought to sit on the Moapa Valley Town Advisory Board (MVTAB), he appointed his own preferences in opposition to the community’s wishes. He was within his lawful rights to do so. But when the community, feeling utterly disenfranchised, questioned the decency and morality of such an action, Collins responded back with anger, insults, condescension and spitefulness toward the people of Moapa Valley.

In 2009, the County reviewed the boundaries of its northeast rural townships. This should have been a fairly simple and routine process. The leaders in all three communities agreed generally on what they and their neighbors wanted. The path forward should have been clear.

But for some reason, Tom had his own ideas about how the lines should be drawn. Instead of using his prodigious political abilities to build on the general good will and consensus between the three communities, he sowed bitter seeds of division and pitted one community against another. By the end, everyone was screaming at each other and nothing could be accomplished.

Finally Commissioner Chris Guinchigliani, an utterly uninvolved third party, had to step in to clean up the mess. Interestingly, she did so with ease in one relatively brief meeting.

In another telling episode, Collins decided to get the community a soccer field by commanding County staff to tear out a number of old trees on the fairgrounds. This created an uproar in the community.

A long public discussion was held before the MVTAB. Commissioner Collins was present at the meeting. The Town Advisory Board did its job in “advising” the Commissioner that the community was not happy with his unilateral actions in this matter. They were most upset that the Board and the community had not been consulted at all before this abrupt action had been taken.

Was there an apology, an empathetic response, even a listening ear from the Commissioner for the way this unpopular edict had been carried out? No. Collins did not want to hear the board’s “advice”. Instead he was enraged and came unglued before the board and the community, right there in the public meeting.

Admittedly this was a minor issue. But it is just another instance that illustrates what happens when the community’s wishes are at odds with those of this Commissioner.

Sadly, we have seen these types of scenarios play out again and again. Over the past eight years Collins has often brought his considerable abilities to bear against the community and its members rather than for it.

Collins could have, and should have, worked in a substantial way to ease the county requirements and regulations on small business and development. To do so would have encouraged small town commerce and mitigated the impact of a dismal regional economy on the rural areas in District B. Instead he has merely played politics on a few token gestures while the local economy continued to sour to the point that commercial growth in the rural Northeast has all but died on the vine.

This community is full of small business owners, many of whom are fearful to even come forward, who have in the past gone to Collins seeking a common sense solution and were met instead with the full force of the County code being thrown in their face. Indeed, Collins has proved tremendously adept at rooting out all of the 1,001 bureaucratic reasons that any ambitious and goodly enterprise in this community can NOT be done.

Even relatively simple matters that would clearly benefit the community; like opening a youth gymnasium, rebuilding an essential business after a fire or opening a new restaurant have become so complex that they were often abandoned as an impossibility.

Rather than fighting for his constituents against the bureaucracy, Mr. Collins has often lined up that bureaucracy in opposition to commercial endeavors. He has encouraged a “can’t do” climate among County staff. Where some common sense might have once been applied to accomodate rural differences, now the over-cautious County staff is bound hand and foot to every letter of every law in the urban-centric County code. As a result, everything in the rural communities has ground to a screeching halt.

Occasionally Mr. Collins will put on his white cowboy hat and ride in to do battle, scattering confused county staffers around him as he does. He is quick in those times to announce that he has solved the problem, cut through the red tape and saved the day.

But in reality he has only knocked down the straw soldiers that he himself had set up, overcome obstacles that he himself had raised, and solved problems that he himself had caused.

It is true in the last year or so, since District B was reapportioned, that Tom seems to have dusted off his hat, put on a clean shirt and tried riding in a different direction. He has actually taken to consulting closely with some of the right local folks who could clue him in on the real community needs. This has resulted in some positive things happening lately.

But it has taken him nearly eight years to get to that point! Eight years of divisiveness, bitterness and contention. And that has come only because of a forced shift in the political realities he faces in District B.

A Commissioner that had the ability to just listen to his constituents should have reached that point within only a few weeks of being elected. Someone with Collins abilities should then have spent his eight years in office moving this community forward at full gallop in a positive direction. But with all of his abilities, talents and skills, that is one thing Mr. Collins runs short on: the simple ability to listen.

That is the one reason why Tom Collins has such an abysmal approval rating in the Moapa Valley. That is the reason he did not find much sympathy among local voters in the last election. And that is the reason why the Progress cannot endorse Commissioner Tom Collins in the upcoming election.

Next week we will discuss the reasons why we are, instead, endorsing Collins’ opponent Ruth Johnson in the race for Clark County Commission District B.