DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

A couple of weeks ago I published a cover story on my friend and occasional coauthor, Guy Louis Rocha, who retired this week as the chief of Nevada's state archives and records management program. In his interview with me for that article he was rather candid about his unhappiness with the state's treatment of the archives program, treatment he said was similar to that experienced by most state agencies. It was one of several interviews he gave on the subject and I wondered if all that venting had relieved him of some of his anger, so I called him last Sunday, the day before his last day on the job.

This is a state agency director who, over three decades, has experienced three different state budget directors recommending that his agency be shut down altogether to save money. He has repeatedly rebuilt the agency after losing substantial ground during the chronic budget crises (1981-1982, 1991-1992, 1998), lost ground that resulted from hard times (not preventable) and the state's unstable tax system (preventable).

Twenty-seven of his years in state service were devoted to the archives and to defending it and the people who worked for him while serving the public. (Over the years the archives has done things like provide records to protect a rancher's water rights, get veterans qualified for health care, protect the state's boundary line from a lawsuit by California, help U.S. citizens prove they were qualified for payments from being interned, and aid former residents of the state orphanage in learning whether they were subjects of radiation experiments.) And on Sunday, it seemed that a few interviews were not enough to do away with 27 years of seeing his agency and its mission treated like chess pieces.

In this budget crisis, as in earlier ones, the legislators and executive officials who always held down the budgets of state agencies now demand cuts, prompting Rocha on Sunday to say, "We ran it so lean over the years that when hard times come, we have very little extravagance to cut." So the cuts are having to be made in the bone instead of the fat.

Rocha is hardly the only one leaving state government. It has always been known as a farm team for Nevada's local governments because the state has always been so "lean" that workers were driven away (prison guards often go to work for the state to get the experience necessary to work for county governments).

That was in normal times. Add to that the current financial meltdown that has caused state revenue to fall dramatically. Then add a profound conviction by state workers that the governor does not respect their work and the exodus from state government has become dramatic. Job training is a big ticket item in Nevada state government because it cannot hold onto its workers.

Rocha described his employees as "aching, tired, haggard, demanding" because of the pressure they work under in a time of cutbacks and disrespect from the elected folks at the top and citizens who come to Nevada to avoid being citizens and paying taxes. "They want to move here, they just don't want to be Nevadans," he said. (This is not urban folklore -- the Nevada Department of Education has in the past done opinion surveys showing that older voters have no interest in voting for school bonds.)

The cuts into the bone of the state archives are not particularly visible. It's too small an agency for it to come to much public attention. It's more apparent when higher education is cut by a third and branches of higher education are cut in half (UNLV 52 percent, UNR 47 percent) as is now being proposed. Many Nevada agencies, such as Child and Family Services and Medicaid and the Office of Disabled Services, are more important than the archives, but the same kinds of things happens to them, with a concomitant effect on efficiency and morale, which is part of why Rocha spoke out, to give the public an inside look at the shortsighted, spending-dollars-to-save-dimes fiscal policies of the state.

I suspect most people will simply dismiss Rocha's comments as coming from a bureaucrat and forget all about it. We have become very skilled at assigning derogatory labels to avoid dealing with problems. Meanwhile, one of the predictions Rocha made the day before he stepped down is all but certain to come true: "It's only going to get worse."