Never before in the history of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department — which dates to 1972 — has a member of the budget-setting fiscal affairs committee been removed for the way he was going to vote on the agency’s budget. But that’s precisely what could happen on Tuesday, as the Clark County Commission is set to remove Commissioner Tom Collins from the five-member committee.

Why? Collins supports a proposed agreement with the Police Protective Association, the officer’s union, to grant officers raises estimated at 10 percent. And many of his colleagues on the commission don’t, according to a story in the Review-Journal.

So, in order to avoid a 3-2 vote on the committee that would approve the pact, commissioners have an item on Tuesday’s consent agenda to bounce Collins from the board in favor of Commissioner Rory Reid, who doesn’t support the pact as proposed. With Reid on the board, joining fellow Commissioner Chip Maxfield, there are at least two and probably three votes against. (Other members include Las Vegas Councilmen Gary Reese and Larry Brown, and private citizen Peter Thomas. (According to the R-J, Reese and Thomas support the proposed agreement, and Brown hasn’t made his views clear. On the council, however, he’s known as a fiscal hawk.)

“Tom Collins is always passionate and he believes strongly about this, but he’s not representing a majority of the board, and it’s an important issue,” Reid said. And that gets to the heart of the issue: Are Fiscal Affairs Committee members supposed to vote the way their colleagues on the City Council and County Commission feel about the Metro budget, or are they supposed to vote their conscience, the way they would on the commission? (There are no rules whatsoever on the subject, probably because the Legislature that created Metro never considered this kind of a scenario.)

Collins, for his part, believes the agreement is fair, and even if the matter goes to binding arbitration, it will end up being the same agreement. Why antagonize the cops when you’re going to end up in the same place, Collins asked in the R-J. It’s a darn good question.

But equally good is the point made by County Manager Thom Reilly, who says salary and benefit costs are becoming an increasingly large part of the county’s budget, which is a dangerous thing, given the automatic increases in salary for government employees. Sooner or later, Reilly has argued, those costs may crowd out other things the public wants, like parks, hospital care or roadway maintenance.

So what’s a county to do? Collins can vote his conscience, and do something his colleagues don’t like; or he can simply act as a delegate and vote the county’s majority view. (It seems his colleagues haven’t been able to persuade him they’re right thus far, so gestures like passing a “sense of the County Commission” resolution probably wouldn’t do the trick.)

But removing him from the committee is a drastic, radical step that sets a very bad precedent. What if a majority of the commission doesn’t like the latest R&R Partners ad campaign? Will they yank the commissioners who serve on the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority? Will they recall their delegate to national associations if those groups adopt resolutions on policies with which a majority of the commission disagrees? It’s something the commission should seriously consider before they drop-kick Collins out of his seat on the Fiscal Affairs Committee.

And, given that Metro and the PPA seem to agree on the pact, there’s the matter of tensions between Sheriff Bill Young and the commission to consider, too. He’s already somewhat peeved, given that he had to go to the voters to get a sales tax approved to pay for more police. (Maxfield almost screwed that deal up when he said — to several different members of the media — that hiring cops with sales tax meant more general fund money for the county to spend.) Now commissioners, including Maxfield, are opposing this new deal, and saying Metro will be able to hire fewer officers with that sales tax money as a result. Check the R-J’s letter pages, and you’ll see some voters are starting to think Metro and the county pulled the old bait-and-switch. None of this can make Young happy.