Leaving Las Vegas: Fallen Nevada political star becomes LR deputy city attorney (2024)

Deepti Hari

The city of Little Rock has hired a deputy city attorney who was a rising political star in Nevada 20 years ago, before her political career crumbled amid a campaign scandal and a criminal conviction.

Little Rock city attorney Tom Carpenter hired Lynette Boggs-Perez in November and promoted her in March to chief deputy city attorney, where she earns a salary of $142,800.

In 2007, Boggs-Perez was charged with two felonies for perjury and two felonies for filing false documents related to whether she lived in a house in a particular district as she claimed while running for county office in 2006.

Boggs-Perez pleaded guilty to a gross misdemeanor for filing a false declaration of candidacy, which was punishable by up to a year in jail. She got a $2,000 fine and, in 2015, the conviction was expunged. Boggs-Perez pleaded guilty through an Alford plea where she did not admit guilt but admitted the state could prove its case.

In Nevada, gross misdemeanors are a category of crimes between simple misdemeanors and felonies. They carry a potential sentence of up to 364 days in jail and a fine of up to $2,000.

Aaron Sadler, spokesman for the city of Little Rock, said Carpenter has hiring responsibility for the position and that the city’s standard background check did not turn up anything that would have prohibited Boggs-Perez’ employment. Sadler noted Boggs-Perez is licensed to practice law in Arkansas and Texas and is in good standing.

Sadler said Mayor Frank Scott Jr. has a “long-standing policy of not discussing personnel matters.”

Boggs-Perez was once a big name in Nevada Republican politics, landing a seat on the Las Vegas city council in 1999 and winning a Republican primary for a Nevada congressional seat in 2002. Boggs-Perez lost the general election but was later appointed to the Clark County Commission, the board that governs the county that includes Las Vegas. In 2004, she won a two-year term in the seat, according to a report in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

In 2004, then known as Lynette Boggs McDonald, Boggs-Perez served on a committee for the reelection campaign of President George W. Bush and gave introductory remarks at an event welcoming First Lady Laura Bush to Las Vegas. McDonald’s praise of the first lady brought the crowd of 1,000 “to its feet with wild cheers,” the Washington Post reported.

Then McDonald’s luck in Sin City turned sour.

In 2006, Boggs-Perez ran for reelection to her seat on the Clark County Commission, but the politically powerful culinary union and the Police Protective Association had other ideas. The Las Vegas Review-Journal said it was believed that Boggs-Perez was expected to oppose a new police contract and that she had ties to a casino group that the culinary union opposed.

Private investigators working for the police and culinary unions captured Boggs-Perez on camera taking out the trash in a pink bathrobe at a house in Summerlin, Nevada, which was outside her district.

Boggs-Perez claimed the owners were letting her test out the house to see if she liked it, the Review-Journal said.

Boggs-Perez had been favored to win reelection but, after the housing scandal, she lost the three-person race.

In a statement to the Arkansas Times yesterday, Boggs-Perez said she is a candidate for the city of Little Rock’s open city manager position and defended her record. Her cover letter for the city manager job refers to the Nevada scandal as a “politically motivated prosecution” and says she lived at two residences at the time because she was going through a divorce.

Boggs-Perez was an assistant city manager for the city of Las Vegas from 1994 to 1997.

Here is her statement:

I don’t have a gross misdemeanor conviction or any type of conviction. I am an attorney in good standing in two states and in several federal jurisdictions and have never had a grievance filed against me in any jurisdiction in my role as a lawyer. In my current role, I have already saved the citizens of Little Rock millions of dollars by bringing closure to outstanding Metropolitan Housing Alliance lawsuits as well as litigation involving the City. I have served this state as a felony prosecutor (the first person of color to ever serve as a prosecutor in the history of White and Prairie Counties) who has tried capital murder cases and other serious offenses, represented the most vulnerable residents in communities I’ve lived in, including undocumented children from Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala. So to answer your question: Yes, I am qualified to be Chief Deputy City Attorney and I’m qualified to be the next Little Rock City Manager.

In 2006, President Bush appointed Boggs-Perez to the board that oversees the U.S. Naval Academy where she served alongside several United States Senators, including Arizona Senator and future Republican Presidential nominee John McCain.

A former Miss Oregon who competed in the 1990 Miss America Pageant, Boggs-Perez was also named to the board of directors of the Miss America Organization in 2006.

Veteran Nevada political reporter Jon Ralston summed Boggs-Perez’ ordeal up this way in 2009:

Many will not agree, but a $2,000 fine was a just penalty for former rising star Lynette Boggs McDonald’s criminal case. That’s not really the price she paid — public humiliation (the infamous pink bathrobe) and her political demise (she was crushed in her County Commission reelection bid) were the real sentences.

In 2015, under the name Lynette Boggs Quintanilla, Boggs-Perez wrote “Finding God in Sin City: A Woman’s Journey from Losing it all to Discovering Life’s True Riches.” The book’s description on Amazon says Boggs-Perez dealt with thoughts of suicide and her personal website says that “justice ultimately prevailed” when the case against her was dismissed and expunged.

Boggs-Perez moved to Texas and graduated from law school in San Antonio in 2012. In 2018, Boggs-Perez ran for a children’s court judgeship with endorsem*nts from two former Las Vegas mayors. McDonald did not make the ballot when the number of signatures obtained came up short of the requirement.

In the lead-up to the race in 2017, McDonald was caught up in another bizarre scandal in which she took ownership of a 12-year-old girl’s missing dog. Police in Converse, Texas, eventually served a search warrant at McDonald’s residence and, when the door opened, the dog ran down the street to its previous owner, according to the Review-Journal.

Boggs-Perez and her husband later filed a civil suit against the officer in the case, the police chief and the city of Converse. The case went to mediation before Boggs-Perez dismissed it in 2022. A settlement agreement Boggs-Perez shared with the Arkansas Times shows the owner of the dog paid her $800 and Boggs-Perez dropped any claims to ownership of the dog.

In 2019, Boggs-Perez was elected trustee of Judson Independent School District in Live Oak, Texas, outside of San Antonio.

That year, the San Antonio Express-News reported Google had received six requests to remove links to some negative articles about Boggs-Perez, including stories about her political demise in Las Vegas and the dispute about the puppy. Boggs-Perez denied she was behind the requests.

In 2020, Boggs-Perez moved to Arkansas and was hired as a prosecuting attorney in Prairie and White counties. Boggs-Perez said she was the first person of color to work as a prosecutor in that judicial district. In her job application with the city of Little Rock, Boggs-Perez said she prosecuted criminal cases involving domestic violence, sexual assault and murder.

Boggs-Perez left that position in 2022 to take a job with the state Department of Human Services and was hired by the city of Little Rock last year.