Las Vegas Weekly

Interview Issue: Virginia Valentine

Photo: Richard Brian

Virginia Valentine

Clark County manager

Interviewed June 29 by phone

You began your career as an engineer. What was most helpful to you as you moved on to city manager and now county manager?

Since engineering is primarily about problem-solving, the approach or the training in engineering is geared around outcomes. I think those problem-solving skills are probably the part of my engineering that has helped me the most in my city and county manager jobs.

What have you learned the most about the county now that you run it?

That county government is large and complex and delivers a wide array of services to county residents. It is in some ways much more integrated with the state in delivering those services than other local governments.

An example?

Child welfare, child protective services and adoption and foster care, we’re really partners with the state. Social services, also. The assistance that we provide at the county is really the front end, or the emergency assistance provided to those who eventually become recipients of support and services from the state. UMC, through Medicaid and other programs, is the safety-net hospital here, and has a relationship with the state on many levels. And in terms of the whole of the Medicaid program and other programs, so we’re connected to them in many ways. The courts, the state basically funds the District Court judges, and the county pretty much funds the rest of the system. … So there are all kinds of different areas where the county system connects with the state system.

If you were writing a new task-force report [to follow the county’s growth task force in 2005], what would you focus on?

We would be talking about local government financing and sustainability of local governments, particularly after the Legislature took so much revenue from the county.

What would you recommend?

We have to look at whether we continue to provide services that are not mandated. I think we would have to look at mandated services and determine whether those were services we needed. Because the county is a creature of the state; in many ways we don’t have home rule on a number of issues, and we have to go to the state. So we would probably also want to look at those things that the state mandates us to do and whether or not we need to try to ask the state for relief. And of course you have to look at the state and local tax structures. … The discussion needs to encompass not just who gets what revenue. It needs to include who provides which services.

An example?

When we agreed to child-welfare integration, the expectation was that when that became a county responsibility that the state would fully fund the back end. And that didn’t happen this session. We now have the obligation and the responsibility, but we don’t have the funding. So the funding and the responsibility needs to go hand in glove.