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COVER STORY Carolyn Goodman, UNCENSORED by Steve Green | photography by Christopher DeVargas brothel idea. While not outright endorsing it, Goodman expressed concern about teens being exploited by illegal prostitution but also said “there’s merit there’’ and “there are pros and cons to everything.’’ C 20 Now, Goodman is a lot more careful about the subject. And she’s making it crystal clear: She opposes bringing legal prostitution to Las Vegas. “It’s illegal and I’m certainly opposed to prostitution. I’m a mother and a grandmother,’’ Goodman said. With that issue out of the way, Goodman is telling voters and the business community that her experience in creating the private Meadows School shows she’s qualified to be mayor. Goodman headed the elite, nonprofit, K-12 private school for 26 years—without pay. She retired as its president last year. Goodman says that if she’s elected she’ll portray the city to the world as a classy place to visit, live and do business. That compares to her husband’s headline-making remarks about brothels, shipping the homeless to prison in Jean and chopping off the thumbs of people defacing highway bridges with graffiti. Goodman recently discussed her background and her plans for the city with VEGAS INC. What’s your background in terms of why the business community should support you? I started a business—it happened to be an educational organization, but it was a business. I established a budget to carry the business and to set up a mission and a philosophy of what the business was going to be. And then I watched that business grow over a period of 26 years, supervising the entire organization and being involved in building the pieces—hiring faculty, hiring staff, creating curriculum and then finding the land to build the physical structure. We were in the city limits and had to deal with the facets of building buildings and working with union and nonunion groups. We dealt with OSHA and created the entire physical plant, which is to this day debt free. We went from zero to about a $17 million (annual budget) business. We grew from four employees to just under 150 now. Over the years, having been very involved and working eight-to-ten-hour days including weekends, I spent most of my time not only in the development of the operation, but on occasion where there was territorialization, I brought people together to see the other side of the business. They were very concerned—nobody was dealing with their issues— so I always had an open door. In the first and second years, nobody got a raise. But for the next 26 years everybody’s had a raise. We had a short-term plan of operation and we had | 23 MAY 2011 | arolyn Goodman, candidate for mayor of Las Vegas, is walking a tightrope. ¶ On one hand, she’s running to carry on the legacy of revitalization of the city overseen by her husband and the mayor for a dozen years, Oscar Goodman. On the other hand, she’s careful to distance herself from Oscar’s flamboyant, martini-toting image and his more controversial thoughts, such as bringing legal brothels and a red light district to downtown Las Vegas. ¶ In one of her first interviews as a candidate for mayor, Carolyn Goodman was asked Feb. 3 by Las Vegas Sun columnist Jon Ralston on the TV program Face to Face With Jon Ralston about her husband’s