KVIG Informative

North Las Vegas hasn’t elected a new mayor. The two finalists hold serious power: a councilman who defended a consulting payout later ruled illegal, and a state Assembly leader with fewer documented issues. Neither has been accused of wrongdoing related to the ethics case. This outlines who’s vying to run the city.

North Las Vegas voters will pick a new mayor on Nov. 3, the first time in nine years the city hasn’t had Pamela Goynes-Brown or her predecessor, John Lee, at the top of the ticket. The choice comes down to two people who already run large chunks of local and state government: Scott Black, the city’s mayor pro tem and a two-term Ward 3 councilman, and Daniele Monroe-Moreno, a nine-year state assemblymember who chairs the Nevada Democratic Party and the Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee.

Both campaigns’ cash-on-hand totals are on file with the Nevada Secretary of State’s campaign finance portal; the June 9 primary’s certified vote totals are on file with the Clark County Election Department.

The contract that raised the most questions

The clearest test of Black’s judgment as a public official so far isn’t about him directly — it’s about what he defended.

In February 2024, City Manager Ryann Juden announced he was resigning. Before his last day in mid-May, the City Council approved a three-year, $630,000 consulting contract for Juden’s own newly formed company, Edge Strategies — $15,000 a month plus $30,000 in annual expenses, per the council’s own May 2024 meeting agenda and contract exhibit. Combined with severance and unused leave, Juden walked away with close to $1 million from the city in a single year.

The contract wasn’t debated in open session. It was approved as part of the consent agenda, the bundle of routine items a council votes on together without individual discussion, with Juden’s name appearing only in the backup contract materials rather than the agenda item itself. Councilman Richard Cherchio said afterward that he hadn’t even realized the contract was in the bundle until after he’d already voted, and that it should have gone through an open session where the public could see and weigh in on it, rather than being folded into routine business.

Black took the opposite position, on the record. He said he had been briefed on the arrangement beforehand and defended it, saying the city wanted to retain access to a share of Juden’s time and expertise as the city continued to grow. Goynes-Brown and Councilman Isaac Barron said the same.

Pamela Dittmar, a former city economic development specialist, filed a complaint against Juden with the Nevada Commission on Ethics. A review panel found sufficient cause, and the full commission’s stipulated agreement, Case No. 24-148C, found that Juden had committed a non-willful violation of state ethics law — the law that bars public officials from using their office to arrange future contracts for themselves. It’s a rare, concrete finding in a story that usually stays at the level of suspicion: the city’s own outgoing manager was found to have improperly engineered his own payday on the way out the door, and the man who may be the city’s next mayor was one of the officials who signed off on it and continues to defend the decision.

To be clear about the limits of that finding: nothing in the ethics case, or anywhere else, alleges Black personally profited from the Juden deal. What’s documented is narrower — that as second-in-command at City Hall, he vouched publicly for an arrangement regulators later found the beneficiary had illegally set up for himself, and he hasn’t walked that support back.

It may not be a one-off. Jared Luke, the city’s director of government affairs and economic development for six years, announced his retirement in a Dec. 9, 2025 post on his own LinkedIn page. Within weeks he had formed Sandhill Consulting Group LLC, registered with the Nevada Secretary of State on Dec. 29, 2025, which was later granted a city contract worth up to $228,000 over 18 months at a July 2026 council meeting. Unlike the Juden case, there’s no public evidence Luke lined the deal up before he left — the specific conduct that got Juden in trouble — so this reads for now as a pattern of retiring officials cycling into paid city consulting work rather than a second proven violation. Black’s specific position on the Luke contract isn’t on the record anywhere we could find.

The lawsuit that didn’t stick — and the woman who sued and also donated

In the spring, a North Las Vegas resident named Karín Rodriguez sued in Clark County District Court to keep Black off the mayoral ballot entirely, arguing that North Las Vegas’s city charter — unlike Las Vegas’s — counts a councilmember’s years in that seat toward the state’s 12-year term-limit cap. Add a four-year mayoral term to Black’s nine years on the council, her attorney argued, and he’d blow past the limit.

Eighth Judicial District Court Judge Jacqueline Bluth acknowledged from the bench that the law wasn’t clearly written and that the question was a close one, but she sided with the city’s math and denied the complaint. Black will have served exactly nine years when his council term ends, she found, which keeps him under the cap through a first mayoral term. She dismissed the suit. Rodriguez’s attorney, Bradley Schrager, didn’t rule out further action when asked.

Whether Rodriguez has any financial tie to Monroe-Moreno’s campaign isn’t established in any court record, campaign finance filing or named source found so far. Monroe-Moreno’s disclosures are on file directly with the Nevada Secretary of State’s campaign finance portal for readers who want to track that question.

A pattern that predates this race

This isn’t the first time Black has ridden a sitting mayor’s coattails into office. In his first council run in 2017, then-Mayor John Lee endorsed him over the incumbent, Anita Wood. Black said at the time that as a political newcomer with no name recognition, the mayor’s endorsement had given him the early momentum his campaign needed. Lee agreed that his endorsement had likely played a significant role. Wood, running against him, put it more bluntly, describing Black as someone with no political background who was simply riding the mayor’s coattails into office.

Nine years later, a similar shape is visible: the Vegas Chamber of Commerce endorsed Black on April 30, 2026, in a statement from Government Affairs Committee Chairman Hugh Anderson.

The rest of the field

Three other candidates ran in June and didn’t make the cutoff, per Nevada Secretary of State candidate filings and the city’s own election records. Gary Bouchard was making his third attempt at the mayor’s office, running the same anti-union, anti-waste, hire-locally platform he’s run since 2017; his specific vote share each cycle is on file with the Clark County Election Department’s certified results. Henry Thorns has also run previously as a Democratic candidate for governor. Zaire Langdon’s public campaign presence, as of this writing, amounts to an Instagram account, with no completed candidate profile found on the county’s official candidate-filing system.

What’s still missing

The natural next step in a story like this is the money: who, specifically, is writing checks to Black and Monroe-Moreno, and whether any of it comes from the developers currently building out North Las Vegas’s warehouse and data-center boom — the same industry Black, as a sitting councilman, votes on zoning and incentives for. Nevada’s campaign finance portal holds that data as donor-by-donor filings; matching it against active development projects in the city is the natural follow-up reporting still to be done.