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Transcript of interview with Stavros Anthony by Claytee White and Stefani Evans, July 24, 2017

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2017-07-24

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Born of humble beginnings to a sheep farming family in Cyprus, Greece, Stavros Anthony embodies the legacy of the American spirit and ability to reach as far as one can to achieve personal greatness. His family came to the United States in 1955 and moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where his father started working in the restaurant business as a cook until 1967. Moving to Detroit proved to be a benefit for the family, as his father became the executive chef for the Grosse Point Yacht Club, one of the most exclusive clubs in the country. He went from sheep herding, to peeling potatoes, to the executive and afforded his family a typical middle class lifestyle. He graduated from high school in 1975 and attended Wayne State University, earning is B.A. in criminal justice and starting his career in policing with the university’s police department. Upon graduating in 1980, he faced a frozen job industry in Detroit due to a very bad auto recession. He applied for and secured a position as a po

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    Anthony, Stavros Interview, 2017 July 24. OH-03209. [Transcript.] Oral History Research Center, Special Collections & Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada.

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    i AN INTERVIEW WITH STAVROS S. ANTHONY An Oral History Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2016 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editor: Stefani Evans and Vishe Y. Redmond Transcribers: Kristin Hicks, Frances Smith Interviewers: Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Project Manager: Stefani Evans iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of the UNLV University Libraries. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank the university for the support given that allowed an idea and the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University Nevada, Las Vegas iv v PREFACE Born of humble beginnings to a sheep farming family in Cyprus, Greece, Stavros Anthony embodies the legacy of the American spirit and ability to reach as far as one can to achieve personal greatness. His family came to the United States in 1955 and moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where his father started working in the restaurant business as a cook until 1967. Moving to Detroit proved to be a benefit for the family, as his father became the executive chef for the Grosse Point Yacht Club, one of the most exclusive clubs in the country. He went from sheep herding, to peeling potatoes, to the executive and afforded his family a typical middle class lifestyle. He graduated from high school in 1975 and attended Wayne State University, earning is B.A. in criminal justice and starting his career in policing with the university’s police department. Upon graduating in 1980, he faced a frozen job industry in Detroit due to a very bad auto recession. He applied for and secured a position as a police officer in Las Vegas. By the early 1980’s, Anthony was a family man with ambitions of rising through the ranks of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. As a patrol sergeant and working on his master’s degree in political science, he started the first gang unit in 1985 with another officer in the midst of the drug epidemic. He became the first person in the department to receive a Ph.D. in 1999 and his dissertation, Structural Dimensions of Community-Oriented Police Departments, made him the go-to expert on community policing for various departments across the nation. In 2002, he made vi the decision to run for the Board of Regents to shape higher education policy. He won and subsequently spearheaded the change from the University and Community College System of Nevada to the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE). Under his leadership, remedial coursework was shifted away from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to the College of Southern Nevada as well as building Nevada State College in Henderson. After retiring from Metro as police captain after twenty-nine years of service and being on the Board of Regents for seven years, he decided to do something different—he ran for city councilman and won by ten votes. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Stavros S. Anthony July 24, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Claytee D. White and Stefani Evans Preface………………………………………………………………………………..…………..iv Cyprus to US; Wayne State University Police Department; Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD); from sergeant to captain; first gang unit; back to school for master’s degree; Rodney King and the Westside;1980’s drug wars; Structural Dimensions of Community Oriented Police Departments…………………………………………………………………..1-10 City growth and race; racial demographics of LVMPD; stigma attached to the Westside; running for Board of Regents; development of Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE); running for city council…………………………………………………………………………..……….11-19 Sun City Summerlin; last term and the homeless epidemic; downtown redevelopment; Fremont Street Experience and buskers; Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbechev; zoning……….…..20-29 1 Good afternoon. Today is July 24th, 2017. Claytee White and Stefani Evans are here with Stavros Anthony. Councilman Anthony, would you please spell and pronounce your first and last names? Sure. My first name is Stavros, S-T-A-V-R-O-S. My middle initial is S, for Steve. And my last name is Anthony, A-N-T-H-O-N-Y. CLAYTEE: That's Ph.D. Yes. None of my friends care if I have a Ph.D. or not. We're going to start out with your early life. If you could tell us about your childhood, where you grew up, what that was like, siblings and that kind of thing? Yes, sure. I guess I'll start with my parents. My mom and dad are from the island of Cyprus. In the 1950s, my mom was twenty years old. They had a very small farm where they had some animals and grew grapes, very poor. My dad was in his thirties and he was a sheep herder, again, very poor. They really had nothing. They didn't know each other on the island. They both decided at the same particular couple of years to immigrate to the United States. So they went through the proper paperwork. They ended up in the United States around 1955 or so. They met and they got married. They ended up in Kansas City, Missouri, where my dad's uncles/cousins lived. They bought a very small house; it was probably five hundred square feet. My dad started out as a potato peeler. He just needed some work to pay the bills. My mom didn't work. I was born pretty much right away, January of 1957. We didn't have any money. My dad was just a worker. He was a potato peeler and somebody said, "Hey, you want to become a cook?" Then he became a cook and started going through the cooking, kind of that industry, and worked in restaurants. 2 Again, didn't make a lot of money. Then a couple of years later my sister was born and then a year later my other sister was born, so '57, '58, '59, '60, right around there. Then a couple of years after that my dad was finally making some okay money. We bought a bigger house, probably fifteen hundred square feet. We stayed in Kansas City until 1967. So at that point I'm around ten years old, nine or ten years old. I ended up getting rheumatic fever. Both my legs were paralyzed; one became paralyzed one day, the next paralyzed the next day. So they took me to the hospital. They diagnosed me with rheumatic fever. I had a disease in my heart. They were able to cure me. It took about a month and I finally got the feeling in my legs back and I got to walk. Then I had to take a penicillin shot once a month for the next twenty years. Today I'm fine, no heart problems. It ended up it kind of went away, but that was a kind of weird part of my life. So in 1967, again, my dad was working in a restaurant as a cook; my mom was staying home raising three kids. My mom decided that she wanted to be closer to her two sisters who lived in Toronto. They had come over. I guess they looked at a map. Again, I'm ten years old, so I'm kind of paraphrasing some of this. They looked at a map and said, "You know what? Detroit is about the closest we can get to Toronto without leaving the country." So they ended up just moving to Detroit in 1967 that summer. My sisters and I went to Toronto, lived with my aunt and uncles. They bought a house in the suburbs in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. We came back and that's where I basically lived until 1980. So we were just your typical middle-class family. My dad ended up becoming the executive chef for the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, which if you look that up is one of the most exclusive clubs in the country. All the auto industry empire folks belong there. He went from a 3 sheep herder to peeling potatoes to the executive. So that's kind of the American dream. We just had your typical middle-class life and went to elementary school and high school. I graduated in 1975 from high school. I enrolled at Wayne State University, which is right in the middle of Detroit, Michigan, a great school. They don't have any sports teams, so nobody has really heard of them, but they have a great medical school and law school. So I started out in pre-optometry. I wanted to be an optometrist. I started taking all the organic and inorganic classes and I was getting C's and not doing very well and I wasn't really interested. Again, I was paying my way through school. I was working at a restaurant bussing tables and washing dishes just to make some money and I needed a second job. So Wayne State Police Department was hiring police cadets, which they're unarmed, basically college students in a uniform. You just walk around campus and if something is going on, you call it in. It paid a little bit of money to help me through school. I went on some ride-alongs and I got the bug and decided this is my career. So I switched from optometry to criminal justice. I graduated in 1980 with my bachelor's degree in criminal justice. Now it's now 1980. I'm twenty-three years old. I decided I wanted to be a police officer. In 1980 there was a very bad auto recession in Detroit and nobody was hiring anywhere. All the police departments had hiring freezing. I decided, you know what? I'm twenty-three years old. I had been living at home the entire time just to pay my way through school. It's time to get out of the house and go do something. So I went to the placement office and they had these criminal justice books where people were looking for police officers. So Las Vegas was hiring; Dallas was hiring; Houston was hiring; L.A. was hiring. So I said, "I'm going to apply to those four." So I applied to all of them. Las Vegas was the first one that actually went through the testing process. I came out here. I tested. I didn't know if I passed and everything because they don't tell 4 you that. Then I went back and I was getting ready to go to Dallas to test with them and they called up and said, "You're hired; you passed everything; the academy starts in three weeks; so if you want the job, you've got to be here in three weeks." So I go, "Okay, I've got to make a life decision here." I had a Chevy Chevette at the time. So I packed up my Chevy Chevette. They don't even make that anymore; it's such a piece of junk. So I got in my Chevy Chevette and threw some stuff in the back, some plates and forks, and I borrowed a thousand dollars from my dad, and I drove out here. I didn't know anybody. I didn't know a soul. I stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights downtown. Which one? I don't know if it's here anymore and I can't remember which one it was, but it was one of these just little hotels downtown. It was just someplace to park for a couple of days. They had a pre-academy orientation and I went to that and I met a guy that was going through the academy that was going to bunk up with another guy, but he ended up dropping out before the academy started. So I said, "Can I move in with you?" No problem. That was over at UNLV, those apartments right across the street on Maryland Parkway right at the entrance where that light is by Einstein Bagels. Behind Einstein's? Yes, in those apartments over there. So I moved in there and I went through the police academy and I passed. Prior to that while at Wayne State, I was going out with a gal named Bernadette. We were studying. We were boyfriend/girlfriend. When I finally got the job, I went to her and said, "Hey, I'm moving to Las Vegas." She'll deny this story, but I'm going to record it anyway. "I'm moving to Las Vegas and I would like you to come with me." She says, "Well, I'm not 5 coming with you unless we get married." And I said, "Well, will you marry me?" Then we got engaged. So I came out here. I went through the academy. I went through field training. When I got my first assignment and I was able to take a week off, I flew back. So this would have been January I flew back. We got married in the Greek Orthodox Church. She converted to Greek Orthodox. We had a big fat Greek wedding at the church right in downtown Detroit. There was a Greek Church right in downtown Detroit. Then we took her car, which was an old Mustang II sedan and we drove a back in the winter to Las Vegas. I've been here ever since. So where did you and your wife live when you first brought her back? So the first place we lived, since I knew that area where the apartments were, we found another apartment complex right next door. We rented an apartment. We rented an apartment for about six months. This was the time when interest rates were like 20 percent to get a mortgage. You just couldn't get a mortgage. So six, eight months into the apartment, there was a guy on the police department that had a house that had a VA fixed interest rate of 13 percent and he wanted to sell it. He just wanted somebody to take over the loan because he was going off to do something else. So we ended up purchasing our first home, which was just taking over the loan, up on Old Castle Road, which is near Craig and Rainbow, and I can't think of the exact address. It was a single-family home and it was eighteen hundred square feet. It was a great starter home and we ended up moving in. We took over the loan, so we were paying the mortgage on it. So this would have been right around late 1980, early 1981; something like that. So I'm working as a police officer. I'm a brand-new police officer. My wife, I think her first job was at The Limited, a clothing store. I think it was at the Meadows Mall. So we're just two working adults. We ended up having our first daughter in 1984. She got pregnant and had 6 Irene Anthony in 1984. She would kind of work part-time and stay with Irene. Then we had our second daughter, which is our second child and then we were done, in 1987, which was Elizabeth Anthony. Then she decided to open up a gift shop called It's the Ritz over at Spring Mountain and Decatur. There's a shopping center there at Spring Mountain and Decatur. So she opened it up. It would be easier for me, she thought, to run my own business and raise two kids. So she did that for about three or four years and it just wasn't making any money and we closed it. She just stayed home basically for the next twenty or so years and raised the kids. So I stayed a police officer for about ten years and then I took the promotional exam for sergeant and came out number thirteen on the list and I was promoted. The department was growing quite a bit back then. So I was promoted to sergeant. Then five years later—we'll just stick with the police department—so five years later I tested for lieutenant and came out number one and was promoted. When I was promoted they sent me to the University of Louisville Leadership School. It's a ten-week leadership school called the Southern Police Institute. So you live there for ten weeks. It's all law enforcement leadership related classes. So I went through that and passed. So I came back and I was a lieutenant and four years later I tested for captain. I came out number two on that. I was promoted pretty quickly to captain. I was then sent to the FBI National Academy, which is kind of a big deal, another police leadership school. That was ten weeks long. It's held at Quantico, Virginia where the FBI agents are trained. So I was there for ten weeks. Then I was a captain for about ten years. Then in 2009 I retired. So that was twenty years. Twenty-nine years, 1980 to 2009. Wow. That was a long time. 7 So as a police officer I worked patrol. I actually started the first gang unit with another police officer. This was in like 1985 they allowed us to start the first gang unit. Then I was a training officer in the field. As a sergeant I was a patrol sergeant and I also was the in-service training sergeant. So I did patrol duty for a couple of years and then I was the in-service training sergeant for a couple of years. As a lieutenant I was a patrol lieutenant for a few years and then I was in charge of the Training Bureau for a couple of years where I had the academy and in-service training. One of the interesting things is when I was a sergeant. So backtrack a little bit and I'll get to this because this is kind of cool. So in 1984, I decided to get my master's degree. So I was doing well as a police officer. I went to UNLV. Then in 1987, I graduated with my master's degree in political science and we're done with that. I did my master's thesis; it was on the Greek community in Las Vegas. Really? Yes. Actually, UNLV was doing kind of a push to document the different ethnicities in Las Vegas. So they knew I was Greek and said, "Hey, why don't you do the Greeks?" So that was my master's thesis. So did you write the chapter for Dr. Wright's book? Yes. Yes, that's me. I ended up doing that later on, yes. Very good. I'm impressed. Small, small world. So now I'm a sergeant and I'm in the In-Service Training Bureau. Then we obviously had that Rodney King incident and there were a bunch of riots that occurred in L.A. and we had a pretty significant one here. People didn't really understand the extent of the rioting and the civil unrest that occurred in Las Vegas. People just didn't understand how big it was and the response by the 8 police department and what happened in the aftermath and the community trying to get together to solve these problems. So it was kind of all over and done with and then Eric Cooper, who was the undersheriff, called up and said, "I want to see you in my office." This would have been in like 1993; something like that, '93 or '94. This was a big deal, a sergeant talking to the undersheriff. You just don't do that. You don't even wave to him. So I was scared to death. You're thinking you're in trouble with something. So I went up to his office and he said, "Hey, I heard you're a really articulate guy. I think you're the first one to get a master's degree in our department." I would write articles for our in-service training manual. He said, "I heard you're pretty good writing." And he gives me a stack of all these papers and says, "This is all the memos and officers' reports that people did during the civil unrest and it's all over the place and I want you to compile it into something that can really give people an understanding of what happened in Las Vegas. I want to take it around the country and show people what our response was, the mistakes that we made, the good stuff that we did." So this is what I ended up writing. So I want a copy of that. I do. Let me see how many copies I have. So in the 1980s when you became a police officer, drugs were coming into the community like they had never come in before. Yes, yes. What was that like and what happened? Actually, it was PCP. Prior to that it was drugs, but at least it was natural stuff; it was marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. PCP was a chemical and it made you crazy. So that's what we were dealing is the PCP epidemic where they would dip a Sherm, a Sherman cigarette, in it, and they'd smoke 9 it. They were zombies. I remember one time going on a call when somebody put their arm through a window, and it was just hanging, just this piece right here, and he didn't even know it. This is my first contribution to your study. Thank you. So I ended up doing that. So that's what he took all around the country. Yes, he took it all over. We made like five thousand copies. They were printed and he took them everywhere. So that was kind of a big deal for me to do something like that. So that was when I was a sergeant. Then in 1995, I decided to go for my Ph.D. I did three years of classes and then one year writing my dissertation. You can pull this up on the Internet, but this is my dissertation. We probably have a copy of that in the library as well. Yes, you do. Yes, there is. I ended up doing that and I was the first person on Metro to get a Ph.D. Were you? Yes. How many have done it since? Only a couple. I think only two or three since then that I know of. So what is the title of your dissertation? It's the Structural Dimensions of Community-Oriented Police Departments. I did organizational theory. My dissertation was on studying. I studied thirty to forty what were concerned community-oriented police departments to find out how they were structured, what the similarities were, and then based on that I came up with, if you wanted to be a 10 community-oriented police department, this is what you need to look like, and that's what the book is on. Fantastic. So I got a lot of calls from all over the country from police department, "Hey, can we get a copy of it because we're going through community-oriented policing?" This was kind of the beginning of community-oriented policing. Hopefully every department in the country should be doing it now, but this was at the beginning. I want to talk about the growth of the city from the time you joined the police department to twenty-nine years later, just sort of an overall picture of the changing city. And how that impacted what you did. So in 1980 when I came here there were about four hundred thousand people here. There were very few Hispanics. The Westside was strictly where the African-American community was. It was an all-African American community and then the rest of the valley was kind of white. That's kind of how it was set up. Very few Hispanics back then. Then the Strip was very small. I mean, it wasn't that big of a deal. Downtown was kind of big. The casino industry was here, but it wasn't—I mean, it was a big deal, but it wasn't until the Mirage was built and the megaresorts started that things started to change. So if you were a young cop and you wanted to do police work, then you worked on the Westside because that's where they had the housing projects, over there. The way people lived there was just terrible. They lived in these housing projects that were just concrete and there was nothing inside. The PCP epidemic started and families were getting destroyed because of it and people were committing crimes and that's where most of the crime was occurring back then. 11 Since then, obviously the city has grown. It's become more diverse. You have whites and blacks and Hispanics all living in different parts of community. You still kind of have an area where it's mostly Hispanics. The Westside is, I guess, predominately African American, but not completely like it was in 1980. Yes. It's like 30 percent Latino now. Right. It's diversity all over the valley. So that's changed obviously for the better. The Strip is a big deal because there is so much money and the economy there is a big deal. So there has to be more time spent on the Strip and policing that area. We went from four hundred thousand to two million people. Back then the rich part of town was Rancho Circle; that was it. Today it's all over. Southern Highlands, Summerlin, those are kind of rich parts of valley. So the valley has completely changed. You didn't have really any gated communities back then. Now you have more gated communities, HOAs. People feel like they have to kind of take some of their public safety into their own hands and that's why they do these gated communities. The police department was primarily white males in 1980. I don't remember any Hispanics, a couple of African Americans, a couple of women, and that was it. Obviously that's changed completely. Back then it was more of a cowboy, Wild West type of thing. There was training and you had equipment, but the supervision was a little bit more lax. You just kind of went out there and did your own thing. Today it's different. There's more supervision. There's more equipment. There's more training. Back then you really didn't spend much time talking to the community, you just did police work. Today you spend more time talking to the community and finding out what they want from their police department. So the police department has changed quite a bit. So, yes, that's kind of some of the big changes from a police standpoint. 12 So do you think the stigma that was attached to the Westside community evolved or changed as the community changed? Yes. I thought the biggest change was getting rid of those public housing projects, getting rid of those and putting in more apartments and single-family homes. I think that's what really changed West Las Vegas because those housing projects were just a mess. They were just on top of each other. It wasn't a place that people should have lived in, but that's the way it was back then. They tore all those down and they put in regular apartments. They were renting, but at least it was something nicer. They put in single-family homes so people could actually buy stuff and have ownership. So I think that was really the biggest changes in how people lived and they had a little bit more respect for the place that they lived. People had more ownership that way. Then obviously the town just changed and the way diversity was looked at has changed. I remember driving past those housing projects and what struck me was that they looked unsafe in terms of just kids running around. The wrought iron was rusty. Yes, it was just dirt. There wasn't any grass. It was not safe. No, it was terrible. But we didn't have any control over that. We're just cops. We're just trying to keep the place safe. So then that takes me to 2009. So as a captain, my first assignment was Transportation Safety Bureau. I had the motorcycle officers and then I had the Northeast Area Command for a couple of years and then I had Vice Narcotics for two years, Personnel for one year, Internal Affairs for one year, and then Financial Crimes my last two years. So you were being prepared for chief? I kind of had it in the back of my mind I may run for sheriff one day, but I wasn't really thinking about politics back then. But now that you bring that up, so the Board of Regents. So I'm a 13 captain with Metro. I have my master's and Ph.D. and I'm kind of considered the education guy at Metro. So everybody is coming to me. Hey, I want to go back to school. Can you help me apply to UNLV? Can you help me with my application? What do you think I should do? That was great. I had no problems doing that. So this would have been probably 2002, I think it was. This is a true story. I just woke up one morning. I'm reading the paper and there was a little article in there about redistricting the Board of Regents. They were going from nine districts to thirteen districts. They were adding four more districts because the state legislature decided to do that. I'm looking at it and one of the new districts I happened to live in. I said, "That's kind of interesting, the Board of Regents. I looked it up. It's a non-paid position, which was great. It was a part-time position, so it wouldn't interfere with my police work or my family. They only met six times a year. So I looked at it and I said, "Well, this is kind of neat. I have my master's and Ph.D. It would be great to get in there and shape higher education policy. It's not going to interfere with what I'm doing today." But you have to run for it and I never even thought about it. So I got around a table with six of my friends and I said, "Anybody knows anything about running campaigns?" They said, "Nope." So I said, "All right, well, you guys are going to help me get elected to the Board of Regents. I don't know what the heck I'm doing. You guys don't know what you're doing." So I ended up hiring someone for like a thousand dollars just to help me with stuff. I ran against two other people and I won. So I won my first term on the board. We had our first meeting and it was July. I was elected in November and our first meeting was somewhere in the spring, I think it was. So we had our first meeting and the chair was Doug Seastrand. His dad was the mayor of North Las Vegas. So we had our first meeting in the spring, and then after the meeting he sent out a letter saying, "Hey, the next officer positions, which we vote on, is in July, 14 and I'm the chair now, but I don't want to be chair anymore." So he sent out a letter letting everybody know he doesn't want to be chair and good luck to the next chair, whoever that's going to be. So I'm six months on the Board of Regents and I had a couple of people call me and say, "Hey, you should do it. You're a captain. You know how to run stuff. You supervise two hundred people. Obviously you know what you're doing." I said, "I've only been on the board six months. I'm not going to be chair." So I said, "I'll just leave it up to you. I don't want to violate the opening meeting law, so I'm not going to call anybody." So we had our meeting and they selected me as the chair six months into my term. So I ended up being the chair for the next two years. Jane Nichols was the chancellor at the time and she had some health issues and she had to resign. So we're looking around for a chancellor. I'm getting on a plane to fly to Elko because that's where our next board meeting was going to be. I'm on the plane and I'm walking down the aisle and Jim Rogers was sitting there. He goes, "Hey, Stavros." I had met him once and I didn't really know who he was. He goes, "Hey, Stavros, I've got to talk to you about something." I said, "Well, the plane is getting ready to take off. I'll talk to you when we land." So we landed. We were going to Salt Lake City to catch another plane to Elko. So we land and he gets me and says, "Hey, listen, I'd like to be your next chancellor. I'll do it for free. I'm really big in education." Which I ended up finding out he was once I looked into it. "I want to be the chancellor and I love higher education and I've contributed a lot." I said, "Okay, thanks for letting me know." I can't tell him he's going to be the next chancellor; the board has to vote on it. I landed in Elko and then a couple of people of significance in the valley called me and said, "Hey, you really need to think about Jim Rogers as a chancellor. He'll do it for free. He's doing it just because he loves higher education." 15 So at the next board meeting we ended up unanimously approving him as the next chancellor. So I was the chair with him for a couple of years. Then six years later I ran for my second term—no, four years later because I was finishing out a term. The way it was staggered my first term was four years. I ran for my second term, which was six years. Then in my second term is when I decided to run for the city council. So when I was on the Board of Regents, I did have some people, "Hey, you should think about running for sheriff." I kind of thought about it, but it never happened. It was just not in the cards. So tell me about the growth of education in Nevada over that time period that you were on the Board of Regents. So we're talking about building Las Vegas. What would you say? It was a big building explosion. When I became chair the first thing I did was—you have to define at the top what higher education is going to be. So we ended up changing the name to NSHE, Nevada System of Higher Education, from the University and Community College System of Nevada because we put online Nevada State College and that didn't even fit into the title. So we changed the name. We came up with a set of values. We came up with a mission statement. So that's the first thing I decided to do. We've got to get that stuff done because that's what everybody looks at first is, what's your mission? So we ended up doing that and then we ended up building Nevada State College. We decided to focus on the College of Southern Nevada. So we took all the remedial courses away from UNLV and put them all in the college. The university should not be doing remedial training. You should be applying to UNLV and hit the ground running right away. So any remedial stuff, we're going to send you to the community college because that's their job. So we ended up building a student union building and an engineering building. We funded a bunch of buildings u