But the course change worked out well for Skancke, president and chief executive of the Skancke Co., a Las Vegas–based government and public affairs strategy company. He's become an expert in transportation matters and is sought nationwide to lobby on behalf of governments and organizations.

Skancke has been involved with the past three major transportation funding reauthorization bills and Sen. Harry Reid, D–Nev., appointed him to the 12–member National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission.

Former Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn appointed him to the Nevada Blue Ribbon Task Force on Transportation, which made recommendations to the Legislature after completing its work in December 2006. He also was a part of Gov. Jim Gibbons' transportation transition team, which made recommendations on infrastructure.

He belongs to a number of other transportation–related organizations and advisory groups.

Skancke is no one–trick pony. In his work, he also addresses telecommunications regulations, local zoning and entitlement matters, regional flood–control facilities, education funding and other growth issues throughout the West. But with In Business Las Vegas, Skancke talked primarily about the future of transportation in the state:

Tom Skancke STEVE MARCUS / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Answer: We represent the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority here in Southern Nevada. I represent the Riverside County Transportation Commission in Southern California. I represent the city of Corona. I have, in the past, represented the county of San Bernardino. I represented the San Bernardino Redevelopment Authority briefly. And I'm probably forgetting a few. I've done a lot of transportation work for Station Casinos. I get hired to do certain projects now all over the country that are transportation–related. The last two years I volunteered at the request of Sen. (Harry) Reid on the National Transportation Commission. That was 22 months of volunteerism, unpaid. I didn't even take any expense money because I wanted to hold myself to a higher standard of not being at the public trough, so to speak, of getting reimbursed. If there was travel for a field hearing, we had people pick up that expense, but I don't believe we invoiced the commission for any of that travel. It's that important.

No question, the United States has the preeminent surface transportation system in the world. In fact, China, India, Russia and the U.K. are in the process of building their own infrastructure system. In fact, China is in the process of doing a 53,000–mile interstate highway system. Ours is 57,000 miles. And they're spending hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, trillions of dollars in infrastructure. (Vladimir) Putin in Russia said he was going to spend $2 trillion over the next 10 years in infrastructure. They're all realizing the economic backbone of the United States has been our transportation infrastructure system. While it was originally designed for military mobilization, it has become the economic lifeline to our country, both Class 1 (freight) rail and our highway infrastructure. What we haven't done is we've not kept up with the growth and so we've got deteriorating highways. If we don't keep up, if we don't have leaders that have the courage and intestinal fortitude to step forward and say, "This is a problem," then we'll be No. 3 to China and India, and we won't be the economic superpower that we are today.

Two things. One is workforce mobility. Moving, by the year 2018, which is just 10 years from now, the numbers vary, but some are between a half million and 600,000 employees, on and off Las Vegas Boulevard with the growth of the projects. You know, everybody likes to point to gaming and say it's the problem, but the last time I checked, this is a community — not a gaming community, but a community as a whole — and we all benefit from that growth. But I think if we don't institute some type of major transit component in the construct of our transportation solutions, we're going to have a huge workforce mobility problem. Nationally, it's goods movement and ports. From an economic development perspective, our commission's report says we need to build a Seattle port every year for the next 25 years to keep up with the demand of the goods that are being imported into our nation. We can't build the infrastructure system to keep up with the demand of the goods we're importing. So when you look at the competition, as in Mexico — Mexico has put out a (request for proposals) for the Punta Colonet in Guaymas that will include two deep–water ports that will be able to handle these super–super–supercargo ships that L.A. and Long Beach and Oakland and Seattle can't handle today because of environmental regulations, (our West Coast ports are) not going to be deep–water ports, they can't go any deeper. There's no land mass to expand the ports in L.A., Long Beach and Oakland, so they're landlocked. We're not preparing for what's happening in Mexico at the Tijuana crossing or the Nogales crossing in Arizona. So you know, we're going to lose some of those jobs. So really, it's goods movement, and, locally, it's this workforce mobility problem, the congestion that we have.

Congestion pricing and express lanes and tolling are a solution to the problem. These express lanes will take people from (Interstate) 215 directly to Sahara Avenue — you don't pass go. You get in and you go. The express lanes are going to be critical to congestion management along the I–15 corridor. What people don't understand is that you're connecting three systems. You're connecting the (I–215) system, using the I–15 corridor as the connector to the northwest with the (U.S.) 95. So we've got two ways around. You can take (I–215) around the community or you can take (U.S.) 95 to I–15 to the 215. Think about what the congestion would be today if the beltway hadn't been completed. So the express lanes are a critical solution to moving people quicker through the corridor. Hopefully if the Legislature allows tolls in this state, then we can toll those lanes eventually. I have survey research that shows tolls are not that unpopular in Southern Nevada. In fact, they're very popular if we would implement them and the people that think they are not popular would be amazed at who the constituency is that understands that tolling works.

Not at all. In fact, as we all know here, I–15 is the economic lifeline to Southern Nevada. About 13 million people a year from Southern California drive to Southern Nevada, 80 to 85 percent of our goods come along I–15 or along the Union Pacific rail line. Our partner in Southern Nevada from an economic development standpoint is Southern California on every level. We don't make steel here, we don't grow any corn here. We're a tourism–based economy, and the tourists who come here come in two ways, by road or by air. So it was easy to sell that. In fact, the clients developed from Southern Nevada know the importance of what's happening in Southern California.

We have two right now. The most important project that we're working on, which is a project that is 20 years out, is the High Desert Corridor, which is another east–west corridor that connects Palmdale–Lancaster to Victorville and will be a full utility corridor with potentially high–speed rail, superspeed or high speed. It'll be six to eight lanes of interstate highway system with potentially truck–only lanes to get the goods movement off the general flow lanes. It'll be part of an intermountain connection in the high desert of San Bernardino and L.A. counties. It's a two–county partnership, actually a bistate partnership because when you fix those linkages you create additional capacity out of the L.A Basin. It's a Homeland Security connection. The High Desert Corridor connects two L.A. world airports, Palmdale and L.A. And, it creates another east–west corridor that is safe, futuristic and designed for the 21st century. The second project that we're working on that is going to become extremely important to us in the next authorization in 2009 is the I–215 and I–15 interchange in San Bernardino County, known as the Devore interchange. If you recall, we've had a couple of projects in Devore over the last few years involving resurfacing and lane expansions through the corridor. But that interchange was designed in the late 1950s and was designed for about 20,000 trips a day. There are 60,000 people from the High Desert Region commuting on I–15 with a three–hour commute down and a three–hour commute back, if they're lucky. In addition to the 13 million tourists who drive to Las Vegas from Southern California every year, that interchange is at capacity every afternoon and beyond capacity at about 2 p.m. until about 8 at night. So we are focused on that in the next authorization. That's a $2 billion project. In addition to what happens with connecting L.A. through there, it also connects Riverside County, it connects Orange County to San Bernardino, and it is a critical goods movement linkage between Southern California and Southern Nevada. So there's a lot of work there, and it's really No. 1 on our priority list next year and the next couple of years.

This will be the first piece of interstate highway built in 20 years. I'm still doing the research on that. Phoenix and Las Vegas are the only megatropolises that are not connected by an interstate highway system. The vision is to connect Las Vegas and Phoenix with an interstate highway. And people ask, "Why an interstate highway?" Interstate highways get priority over national and state highways. There are different regulations for them, there are different financial and funding opportunities for them. And quite frankly, an interstate highway and not a U.S. highway should be connecting two metropolitan areas in this country. Could you imagine Las Vegas and L.A. not being connected with an interstate highway? Or Phoenix and L.A.? It's unconscionable to think that these two megaregions are not connected by an interstate highway system. They asked us, "How do you connect it?" It has to be designated in the next authorization as interstate highway. We would likely use the U.S. 95–93 corridor as the alignment. We have a lot of private–sector support already. As a private–sector investment, we have some people in Phoenix who want to dedicate the right–of–way already. In these tough economic times, when people are dedicating right–of–way through property, you grab it as quickly as you can because in good economic times, people don't dedicate right–of–way as easily. They want it purchased.

No question about that, not only from a tourism perspective but purely from a vision perspective. If and when the Port of Guaymas is constructed in Sonora, it's part of the CanaMex corridor linkage and the Mexico 15 connects Guaymas. It's a national and international connection from Mexico. When that port opens and they use Mexico 15 to come into Arizona, we've got to have a four– to six–lane highway just for the goods movement aspect. In addition to tourism, it's a Homeland Security corridor, it connects the new bridge between here and Phoenix. It just makes logical sense for us to connect these two communities with an interstate highway.

As you know, for the 20 years that I've lived in this community, one could accuse me of being provocative and one could accuse me of being controversial. I don't walk away from controversy. I joke around the country that when I get through talking about an increase in the fuel tax that I've got to start my car from a remote location. The fact of the matter is the fuel tax is the most predictable and reliable source of revenue into the highway trust fund. The problem we have with the highway trust fund is there's no trust in the trust fund. The American public doesn't believe we can do it. And the reason why is that we have earmarked the program to death. And that's why we make a recommendation in our report to decrease the number of programs, index the fuel tax, increase the fuel tax, return the trust to the American public in the trust fund and deliver projects. I'm not opposed to earmarks. But as I said earlier, do we really need to have a Historic Covered Bridge Preservation Program in the highway trust fund? I'm not against historic covered bridges. I'm saying is this the best place to get the funding? Should we be using transportation dollars to research racial programs on interstate highways? The answer to that is no, we shouldn't. I'm opposed to racial profiling, nobody's in support of that. The fact of the matter is where should that money be coming from? Should we be granting universities and colleges across the country money from our transportation trust fund? No. We should have an outcome–driven, performance–based program whereby you compete, and if we fund the system to the highest levels, we won't have Boise, Idaho, competing with L.A. for transit dollars. And the way you fund the system is with the financing mechanisms the commission outlined. Look, nobody wants to pay more. But nobody wants to sit in congestion. Everybody sits in their car in Southern Nevada and says, "This drive used to be 10 minutes. Why is it taking me two hours?" We've underfunded the program. We've earmarked the program with special projects. We need to look at a performance–based, outcome–driven system doing cost–benefit analyses and restore trust to the highway trust fund that the American public funded 50 years ago.

The national highway trust fund is going to be in red ink before the end of this year. They overspent it. That's a good thing, because for every $1 billion in infrastructure investment, it creates about 47,000 to 50,000 jobs per year. If you just look at the economic stimulus package that Congress passed, think about the number of jobs that could have been created with that $186 billion economic stimulus package with the rebates to people. People don't want a handout, they want a hand up and they want their jobs back. If we fund the highway trust fund to the level it should be funded, think about the number of direct and indirect jobs that are created by transportation infrastructure — from engineers to contractors to designers and the list goes on. It's critical that we spend the money, but we must restore the trust to the American public that we can get it done. If you look at (Interstate) 215 as an example, we didn't put any federal money in that program. Why? Because for every $1 you put into a transportation project, the program requires an additional five to eight years on project delivery. So a $1 billion project today, at the end of 12 years, becomes a $3 billion to $4 billion project. Who wants to pay for that? The process as a whole — not just the environmental process — from the time you start planning until the project is complete is 10 to 15 years. Before you start construction, it could be 10 years.

A lot of it's environmental, but a lot of it's just lack of cooperation among departments.

Absolutely, and they should be. I'll share with you some statistics that the Nevada Department of Transportation got in a survey it did last fall. You know, people like to call toll lanes "Lexus lanes" and I will say to you, you're right, they are. Rich people do drive in toll lanes. And they should because they can. The irony of it is that in Southern Nevada, it's the people that make less than $50,000 a year, it is the African–American and the Hispanic–American communities that toll lanes benefit. It's not because they're going to use them, but the people who make more money a year will actually get in the toll lanes, which frees up capacity in the free lanes for people to get to where they need to go quicker. If you look at the California (Highway) 91 and 55 tolling facilities in Southern California, they are a complete success. If I have a child in day care and I'm running late from work and I live in Summerlin and I work in Corporate Center and I've got to pay that hourly fee afterward. Would I pay $2.50 to jump into an express lane to get home quicker to get my child out of day care to save $25 or $30? Would I pay $2.50? You're damn right I would. Wouldn't you? Everybody would.

Critical. Mass transit is the future of our valley. I think the Regional Transportation Commission has done a superb job of creating a futuristic plan of putting together a phenomenal program that will take us into the 21st century that will get the job done. What we need now are some elected officials and some leaders in our community to step up and say, "Transit is the future of our community." Light rail, I'm not sure. Technologies can all get worked out. Right–of–way can all get worked out. In my opinion, it's bus rapid transit. We can expand some of our existing rights–of–way on Sahara, on Rancho Drive, on Boulder Highway. I had a meeting with North Las Vegas, and (city officials) have a phenomenal plan on the Fifth Street corridor. I gave a speech at (National Association of Industrial and Office Properties) a couple of weeks ago and said, "You know, nobody's planning transit in this town," and (North Las Vegas) Mayor (Mike) Montandon said, "I don't mean to call you a liar, but we're doing it." And that's just the first phase of really connecting our community. By the way, transit is not buses. Transit is transit, buses are buses. If you go to any major metropolitan area in this country — Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Washington, Boston — they have a subway system that connects to a transit system that connects to a bus system. In Washington, D.C., people take buses to the Metro stops and they take Metro to work. They get off at the Metro stop and they get on a bus or walk to work. It's an integrated system. We don't have that. What we're doing in Southern Nevada is we're using our bus system to act like a transit system. And buses aren't transit. And it's critical to moving 600,000 employees on and off Las Vegas Boulevard in the next 20 years, but it's also critical if I live in Henderson and I work at Citibank. I've got to get in my car an hour and a half before I have to be at work and drive to work. Transit is a cultural shift, a mind shift, it's getting people out of their own horse and buggy. But really, when you live west of the Mississippi River, unless you live in San Francisco or Seattle or Portland, you're not used to using a transit system. We've got to make a cultural shift, we have to educate the public that we can do it, but then we have to deliver a system that can get people to and from work in a safe and timely manner.

I think what the RTC has done with the CAT bus system to take it from just bus service to the Deuce and now Jacob (Snow) is starting the Ace — the Deuce system has provided a phenomenal amount of service on Las Vegas Boulevard to cut down on the number of trips from people getting in their rental cars and driving from the Sahara to Mandalay Bay. I think with them taking it out into the neighborhoods more people are willing to ride it, it has higher capacity and I think the CAT bus system has come a long way from where we were 15 to 20 years ago when I first moved here when it was just "the bus company." I think the RTC has done a superb job of getting out into the community and providing service. Can that continue and sustain? I don't know the answer to that because I think the bus system provides bus service.

I think that is the next phase of where the community needs to go to get into bus rapid transit. Jacob Snow has done a superb job with the RTC and his board and the leadership of Bruce Woodbury in incrementally building the program and building a transit system one step at a time. With the amount of funding that's in new starts and small starts, which if you look at how the funding is done, 2 cents of the 18–cent gas tax goes to transit and all 50 states compete for that. A lot of it is done from the private sector and most transit is funded by state and local funding. There's not a lot of federal funding in transit. We're competing with New York and Philadelphia and San Francisco and L.A. and Boise, Idaho, and Sioux Falls, S.D., so at the end of the day a lot of people are competing for that pot of money. But I think we've done a superb job of incrementally funding what we can fund and taking the transit program to the next levels in our community.

You know, I think the monorail system could have played a more integral part of servicing the community if it would have been implemented differently. I appreciate the vision. I appreciate the project. I think that the potential may have been underestimated. I think there are opportunities for the monorail as an integrated piece of the transit solution to Las Vegas Boulevard but, more important, workforce mobility. Our airport today is not set up for a connection. However, I'm an optimist. I think there is a solution to every problem, and I think the solution is an integrated transit system where we all work together to solve the same problem. And I'll give you an example of that. If we had an integrated intercity passenger rail system between L.A. and Las Vegas and then a transit system in Las Vegas that connected to an intercity passenger rail system — whether that's superspeed or high–speed steel wheel and rail, I don't care about the technology — you then start selling Las Vegas as a different type of destination. We become even more of an international destination. The airport can sell the airport differently. The convention authority can sell Las Vegas as a destination differently because of intercity passenger rail and transit. A European or an international or a Far Eastern traveler is not used to getting out of the plane and into a rental car. They're used to getting off the plane and getting onto a train or getting onto a transit system. And I think our community could do much better if we had the investment in transit and intercity passenger rail, we could then sell this as a different type of destination. I'm not saying that people aren't coming here because we don't have it, I'm saying we could get more people to come here if we had it.

I think two things have to happen there, and I'm not a monorail expert. One, the type of car has to change. Two, the entry point to the casinos has to change. They have to reorient their check–in because the monorail does not come to where the registration desk is. And it's a little bit of a haul if I'm schlepping a couple of kids and I'm schlepping two or three bags and I'm coming from the airport and I get on the monorail, the design of the cars have to change because they're not designed to handle the type of luggage and the capacity of people. We've got to work with the gaming properties to reverse where their registration is, or at least put a registration desk in the back. And the gaming companies, of course, are going to do a cost–benefit analysis to see what's that going to do to adding personnel to the back of house. So there has to be a cooperative effort of how we're going to integrate that into the type of travel our customers are used to and willing to do.

There are three ... maybe four. I don't support any of these technologies, I'll just talk about them. There's the superspeed maglev, which has been talked about. I think it was (former Las Vegas Mayor) Bill Briare that first said we should connect Anaheim with Las Vegas. What do I think about maglev? I think it's a great technology. I think there's opportunity for it in this country. I'm not sure that this country, as a nation, is willing to make the investments that are needed to be made. There's the Desert XPress from Victorville to Las Vegas. I'm not going to start a train war, but I think it has merit. But I'm not certain that people are going to get out of their cars in Victorville. I think what we really have to look at is the long drive is really from Los Angeles to Victorville. That's the congestion. That's I–10 to I–15, no matter how you get to Victorville, you're in traffic. That's the three–hour portion of the drive. From Victorville to Las Vegas, heading north, that's not the long portion. People start to fan out and people move at a pretty good pace. When I get to Las Vegas Thursday or Friday afternoon, we don't have an integrated transit system to get people from wherever that destination is. If it's 115 degrees outside, let's say that the Desert XPress stop is at the Rio, how do we get them to the Rio, to the MGM? There's no rental car facility there. There's no transit or bus system there. Now, we have a metropolitan mobility problem with people taking the train. It's going to increase rental cars. If it goes to the airport, even, the airport isn't set up for that type of travel today. I had a three–hour meeting recently with Amtrak. They'd like to open up a line here to show that intercity passenger rail works between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The question is, can they get the Union Pacific to be their partner? I had another meeting with a group of people that wants to run an alignment that I've been talking about for years, which is L.A. to Las Vegas. I'm not advocating and I don't have a horse in that race, but what we really have to look at is that the problem starts here. We can bring as many people as we want from Southern California via train. What do we do with them when we get them here? We don't have a mass–transit system in place to handle the metropolitan mobility once they get here. If that rail stops at the Rio, great. Can the Rio handle 13 million customers? No. Does Harrah's Entertainment want to build a rental–car facility at the Rio? No, they don't have the land for it. Is the RTC set up with a bus system or a transit system to move them from the Rio if that's where the stop is? Let's say it's at Echelon or at the Sahara. We're not equipped to do it. We have to really put the cart before the horse on this one. We have to reverse the ideology and solve the problems here locally before we bring people here on a train. Even if they ride the train ... let's say the train comes to McCarran. How do we get them from the airport without them going over to the rental–car facility and rent a car? So what do they do? They rent a car. It forces the gaming industry to build more parking structures when we should be creating a local metropolitan mobility program of how we move our tourists from the airport to the Strip and not negatively impact the taxis or rental car facilities. It's just got to be a fully integrated plan.

I do. And I think it's got to be a public–private partnership. The private sector is going to have to work with the federal government and the federal government is going to have to make passenger rail a priority in our nation. The problem we have is that passenger rail is not a priority. It was and it's not. There are three champions, (New Jersey Sen.) Frank Lautenberg, (Delaware Sen.) Joe Biden, who rides the train every day, and (Nevada Sen.) Harry Reid. I sat in a meeting with Sen. Reid where he looked at the freight–rail guys and said, "I need passenger rail between L.A. and Las Vegas." These were freight–rail guys. So those are the three champions. It's a proven fact on air quality, it's a proven fact on movement that rail and transit reduces the carbon footprint. We can add more (train) cars. All we need is for someone to be our partners. And here's the partnership: We have to free up the bureaucratic political red tape around trains and change the way people look at transit and intercity passenger rail. We have to provide the necessary right–of–way. The federal government needs to be our partner in goods movement and in moving people. It's not. Everybody loves to talk about greenhouse gas emissions and reducing people's carbon footprint, but how do you do that when it takes 20 years to deliver a program? It's not a priority. If rail became a federal priority, do you think for 30 seconds that this country couldn't get it done? When there's a real crisis in this nation, we fix it. They fixed a bridge in California in 26 days. That's historic. They're going to fix that bridge in Minnesota in two years. That's historic. It probably took them 50 years to build it. So when we put our heart and minds to something in this country, we can get it done. It just hasn't been a priority.

I certainly hope so. I'll give you a classic example here locally. When fuel was $4.50 and $4.60 and diesel was $4.90 a gallon, I happened to drive (Interstate) 215 south in the afternoon. Six weeks ago, there were fewer cars on the road when gas was $4.60 a gallon. More people were carpooling, more people were taking the bus. When gas dropped below that $4 mark, there was more congestion on the 215 in the afternoon at 5 o'clock than there was three weeks prior to that. The key to transportation is providing mobility options. I think if our community made the investment on a 21st century technology transit system that delivered on time and was safe, it would reduce congestion. Follow the logic with me for a minute. If I could take a train from Summerlin to Henderson in 15 minutes, I'd take it, wouldn't I? And so would you. What does that do? That requires less investment on highway infrastructure at $1 million or $5 million or $10 million a mile. So I'm reducing congestion, I'm reducing my carbon footprint. It allows the (Transportation Department) and (Regional Transportation Commission) to catch up on highway infrastructure that we need. It allows for more goods movement and it gets more people out of their cars, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Fewer people are buying less fuel ... you can see the positive effects of having intercity passenger rail and a transit system that is integrated and has a systemic approach to it.

I do surface transportation, but I travel about 20 days a month and since I've been on this commission, I've been in a lot of airports. I think McCarran is one of the best run airports in the country. I haven't been to Denver since the new airport there opened. I hear it's quite spectacular. But L.A. still has problems. It was never designed for this new type of security. It's trying. Chicago's trying. D.C. has done a decent job. JFK and LaGuardia have done a decent job, but you know our airports weren't designed for this. McCarran has the space. And I'll tell you what, (Clark County Aviation Director) Randy (Walker) and (Deputy Director) Rosemary (Vassiliadis) and that team out there have stepped up and they have revamped that airport in a very short period of time to make lines shorter and move people quicker. By the way, that's our congressional delegation working with Homeland Security. When you've got 50 million people a year moving through your airport, you need a little help from your federal partners. But I'll tell you what, this is one of the best run airports that this country has since the 9/11 episode.