We're sitting down with local journalists to review the results of Nevada's 81st legislative session this week on Nevada Week.

♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt and additional supporting sponsors.

(Kipp Ortenburger) The final month of our state's 81st legislative session appeared to be a busy one as hundreds of bills and budget considerations made their way through both houses.

Now, this flurry of activity coincided with our legislative buildings relaxing COVID-related, in-person restrictions, news of encouraging economic projections and also a healthy sum of federal relief coming to our state.

We'll discuss how successful the legislature was at finalizing the state's two-year budget.

Also, with roughly 1,000 bills and resolutions introduced this session, we'll discuss some of the big wins and losses and what moves the legislature made that might matter to you the most.

Also, many bills signed by the governor today could have implications years or decades down the road.

We'll talk to our journalists about what bills might have significant long-term impact on our state.

And finally, what's next for our legislators before midterm elections and the 82nd legislative session gets underway in 2023?

We'll talk about this as well.

Please welcome Riley Snyder, a reporter for the Nevada Independent; Colton Lochhead, a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and Michael Lyle, a reporter for the Nevada Current.

Well, welcome to Nevada Week, and welcome.

Thank you so much.

Welcome back, I should say, Michael, Riley and Colton for joining us again.

What a last busy week, of course I think that was expected, but let's not forget that we had three full months, three and three quarters full months before that last week.

So let's think of this more collectively.

Michael, I want to go to your first.

Big takeaways this session, what should the public be most aware of here?

(Michael Lyle) I think the session was supposed to be a response to a couple different issues.

One, the pandemic, and also the racial injustice that happened throughout the summer and all the protests.

They declared last summer in a special session that racism was a public health crisis, so I think the takeaway was the followup to that.

As far as pandemic legislation, one of the bigger bills that transpired at the end of the session was one to connect the eviction proceedings to rental assistance applications.

As you know the eviction moratorium just lifted on Monday, so there was a lot of anxiety throughout the session leading up to what legislators and lawmakers and activists knew was going to be the end of the moratorium.

So I think a big takeaway is how they responded to COVID and the housing crisis and the eviction crisis that happened in the last year.

So the big bill that came out of that was this bill connecting eviction proceedings and rental assistance, making sure that people that are waiting for rental assistance-- I think the last numbers, Clark County was backlogged by 9,000 applications.

So connecting the application process to get rental assistance to eviction proceedings so you do not get locked out while you're waiting for eviction.

So that was one of the bigger takeaways, I think, in the session.

-Michael, if I can jump in.

I just want to ask you, that was one of the bills, one of the last-minute bills.

Of course we saw similar bills throughout our entire legislative session that were not maybe as successful there or were not successful.

Let's talk about this bill, particularly from the tenant perspective and the the property manager perspective.

Does this bill get it done enough so that when we get into this major-- the meat of these eviction cycles here, both are going to be protected?

-I think legal groups feel that this is the solution.

This is the answer to the question how do we safely lift the eviction moratorium and help both the renter and the property manager?

I mean, landlords want to get paid, so this ensures that people that are seeking rental assistance that have their applications in queue not only get their backlog of rent paid but making sure that landlords also have access to these funds as well.

So I think this is the solution.

Some of the other tenant bills that failed were long-term solutions that answer the other question, what happens after the eviction moratorium?

What happens months down the road from the eviction moratorium?

What's the future of housing issues and tenant protections?

So those didn't make it across the finish line.

Those barely even made it out of committee in some cases, but I think in the short term, yes, we kind of answered that question that solves both landlord concerns about getting paid and renter concerns of how not to get forced out.

-Yes, one of those bills you're talking about of course is the bill on summary evictions that then went to a study and still wasn't successful.

We'll talk about that at the end of the show.

Colton, I want to go to you.

Again, what are some big takeaways for you?

(Colton Lochhead) I think for me, really going into the session dating back to last year and even during the special sessions last year, everything was looking forward to-- looking at what the budgets were going to look like, how bad the pandemic was going to hurt the budgets and how bad the state's coffers were going to be pinched due to the, you know, economic downturn and the fact that pretty much casinos were shuttered through a good chunk-- if not shuttered, completely empty through much of 2020.

And then around the middle of session, we get the-- around May, I think it was actually, early May we get the economic forum number, and all of a sudden there's 600 million more dollars to work with.

The budgets are looking quite a bit rosier, and all of a sudden, we go from looking at how the state's going to be cutting, cutting, cutting to what do we do with all this money?

And, you know, rather than looking at big cuts to education like we were looking at in 2020 in those special sessions, now it was looking at how can the state better fund education?

Where they can they put more money, how can they better protect people?

And that's not even talking about, you know, the $2.7 billion or so coming into the state from the new federal relief package, and it really kind of-- in a matter of four months, we really managed to completely flip that conversation on its head and look-- now we're really looking at how can the state kind of prepare itself financially for the future?

-Yes, and let's talk about some of the cuts and then the balanced budget, as you mentioned, one of the requirements of our legislature.

Of course the unemployment trust fund was a $2 billion part of the pandemic that was almost depleted.

We had $400 million in our rainy day fund, gone, and then additional state cuts.

Riley, let's go to you with this question.

With the balanced budget, have a lot of those funds that had been depleted been replenished here?

(Riley Snyder) So there's been a lot of questions and discussion about what kind of the plan is for that $2.7 billion of federal American Rescue Plan money that the state is in line to get, and that's only like kind of a small part of the money Nevada is going to holistically get from the federal government through the American Rescue Plan.

I think the actual dollar, when you count out all the buckets and direct appropriations is closer to $6 billion.

So lawmakers were kind of in a weird spot where we have a 120-day session, we knew we had to end on Monday at midnight, but we didn't have the Treasury guidance and kind of the answers to all the questions as to how the state can spend this money: What are the appropriate uses, what would you get in trouble with with the federal government if you spend it for certain things.

So in kind of the final days and weeks of session, lawmakers introduced a bill that they call a funding waterfall.

It's basically just like a line-by-line list of like here's what we know we want to spend the federal money on once it's transferred to the state, and the first thing on that list was refilling the unemployment trust fund.

I think there was a desire among the governor's team and among lawmakers to refill that because when the state's unemployment trust fund is depleted, we borrow money from the federal government, and businesses that pay into the unemployment trust fund have to pay a higher unemployment rate to help make up for those payments.

This is something we saw in the last recession in 2008, right, where that higher rate affected businesses negatively because they were trying to make up like a pretty massive deficit because we've been paying out millions and millions in unemployment benefits every month.

So that's sort of like the top-line thing that lawmakers want to use that federal money for was to balance that.

There were other discussions about how to balance the rainy day fund or restore that.

We kind of tapped into our $400 million in the reserve account during the summer special session to balance the budget.

There's a small problem where the guidance says you can't use the federal money to backfill that, so there's I think a little bit of creative accounting that's going to go on between now and any potential future special session on how they're going to meet that financial need.

-And Colton, maybe we just jump ahead and let's talk about the future of a special session.

We have this waterfall bill; of course it doesn't sound like that's going to take care of allocating all of our American Rescue Plan funding particularly.

So are we going to be seeing a special session particularly for some of this federal relief?

-It sounds like there's a-- I think even Speaker Frierson said on sine die, on the final day of the session right after everything ended, he indicated that waterfall bill is not enough to kind of get them through-- to allocate all the money eventually.

In talking to the governor the day after, it sounds like the plan is that this will kind of bridge the gap or bridge a few months, and then we'll probably see a special session sometime, you know, late summer, early fall.

At least that's kind of sense that I get, specific to the American Rescue Plan or kind of spending that money, and then obviously potentially another special session later in the year for redistricting.

-Let's transition the conversation here.

I want to talk about of course our legislators, the leadership of our legislature both Senate and Assembly majority and minority leaders prioritized certain bills, of course our governor does as well, and other executive leadership like our attorney general also prioritized bills.

Let's talk specifically about what some of the big wins or losses have been there for our state leadership.

Michael, let's start with you.

-Kind of going back to that public racism as a public health crisis declaration, I think some of the response that we saw from our elected leaders addressed that issue.

I think from Attorney General Ford we saw a partial ban on no-knock warrants that actually just sets up more stipulations before law enforcement can carry out a no-knock warrant.

That was inspired by the Breonna Taylor case out in Kentucky who was tragically killed last March of 2020 during a no-knock warrant raid, and then also a patterns of practice bill that allows the Attorney General to look at systemic issues within police-- within law enforcement.

So I think those are some big wins that directly respond or are a direct response to what was happening over the summer and some of the racial injustice that we were seeing.

-And I wanted to note one successful bill, AB116, decriminalizing minor traffic tickets, a clone of several other bills that have been proposed throughout previous sessions.

It seems like I think four was the count prior to it being successful, and then we got a unanimous vote in both houses, close to unanimous vote I should say.

What was the difference this time versus some of the past sessions?

-We definitely had way more support.

I mean, from the get-go, we saw that Speaker Frierson and Majority Leader Cannizzaro were both sponsors, so I think that signified that was a huge will to actually get this bill passed.

So I think that was the biggest.

Like you said this has been something that activists and lawmakers have been trying to push through for about four or five sessions, so I think just more data around it.

We also saw Carson City essentially did this.

They essentially decriminalize it for the most part and don't send out warrants on minor traffic violations.

So we saw the data on that, and we saw it was working in one smaller city, so I think a combination of that, plus a new group actually set up too.

I mean, Mass Liberation was working on that ahead of time to get decriminalization of traffic tickets for years, but we saw the Fines and Fees Center also set up shop here in Nevada trying to get that bill passed.

So I think a combination of things, wanting to respond to racism as a public health crisis because we saw traffic tickets and warrants for traffic tickets were overly burdened in black and brown communities.

We saw more lawmakers signing on, we saw more data, and we saw more activism.

So I think that combination inspired this bill to actually get across the finish line.

-Yes, great points, and it seems like there were other bills that hadn't been successful in previous sessions that also followed similar attributes there and were successful.

Colton, you wanted to add something.

-Yes.

Just kind of to Michael's point about the Carson City aspect of this.

The biggest opponent to decriminalizing these have actually historically been the courts.

The courts have been-- they basically build a lot of the budgets off of these traffic tickets, and they've been worried for years that by reducing these to civil offenses that they're going to see a drastic cut in their budgets.

And then when Carson City did it, at least from the data we've seen, they've actually seen an uptick in collections overall because people, they don't lose their jobs, you know, they don't lose their homes, they're able to pay the tickets rather than getting stuck in a cycle of kind of perpetual incarceration stemming from, you know, a traffic ticket, a busted taillight or something like that.

They're actually able to pay those eventually over time.

So I think Carson City ended up seeing, I think, what was it, like an 8% uptick in collections by switching to this.

So of course we're actually seeing a little bit better collection overall.

-Interesting.

Riley, I want to get your perspective too.

Big wins, big losses for state leadership this session.

-Yes.

So two I want to mention.

One big healthcare one that my colleague Megan Messerly has done a great job covering is the state-based public health option.

This was a huge push.

It got a ton of pushback from hospital associations and a lot of healthcare providers.

It was one of the bigger battles of the final days of session.

But what it requires essentially is for insurers to offer and have a state-sponsored public option on the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange starting in 2026.

There's an actuarial study built in.

The governor told us on Tuesday I think-- it's been a long week-- that he plans to sign it.

But Nevada is going to be either the second or third state, Colorado has similar legislation, to adopt a state-based public health option.

So that was a big push for a lot of progressive groups and a lot of folks.

That was a bill from Senator Nicole Cannizzaro, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader.

That was one of her big priorities to get done this session.

And the other one I wanted to mention, you know, we track everything that Governor Sisolak put forward in his State of State address and kind of his campaign promises on our website.

We call it the "Sisolak Promise Tracker," and he got almost everything he wanted.

I think the big one we're probably going to like talk about a little bit more is Innovation Zones.

It was kind of fleshed out.

There was a draft bill that sort of circulated around in February, but it never got the support it needed.

It turned into a study, still a lot of questions around that proposal.

A lot of skepticism from Storey County, from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle about this idea to let companies set up their own counties within a county.

So I think that's probably the biggest, you know, black eye on the governor's legislative agenda.

He did get most of it done, which is helpful when your political party controls all three branches of government, but yes, I think Innovation Zones is probably one of the bigger misfires for the governor the session.

-We have of course two years until our next legislative session; as you mentioned, we might have a special session here.

A lot of time to talk about Innovation Zones and potentially start some of the pieces that are in that bill related to the study.

Are we going to hear about Innovation Zones here moving forward quite a bit, Riley?

-So Innovation Zones are going to be studied by this interim panel of lawmakers and stakeholders.

The idea is to kind of dig into some of these issues.

My colleague Daniel Rothberg at the Nevada Independent did some wonderful reporting during the legislative session about potential issues with water management for Blockchains LLC, the company behind this Innovation Zone proposal to build their like idealized technology utopia city out in Storey County.

So there's going to be a lot of those meetings and more discussion about the concept.

I just think that the governor's team and the legislative leaders knew kind of like heading into April or May that the votes weren't there.

This was going to be too heavy of a policy lift with everything else that the legislature has to take care of over the final weeks of session.

-You mentioned water.

Let's talk a little bit more broadly just about climate strategy here.

Colton, I want to go to you to talk about this.

We did have some successful bills that pushed through on water management and also climate strategy, probably the biggest one being SB448 that provides this larger infrastructure that could allow more renewable energy to come into our state.

But there were some failures too, the biggest one being a planning bill for the removal or slow removal of natural gas, one of the big pieces of the governor's climate strategy.

Talking to some of the environmental groups as far as an overall look at this, was this a winner or loss for climate strategy?

-I think overall, it's probably looked at as at least a step forward.

With the climate strategy, they have time with the governor's climate strategy.

It's like a-- I think especially with the natural gas kind of rollback or kind of reduction, that's a 30-year plan effectively.

But overall, you know, with transmission lines, kind of expediting the transmission line projects, kind of the addition of the electric vehicle charging stations, creating this like electric vehicle highway, I think they're looked at generally as a win.

Some groups have been a little more critical.

Some of the more progressive environmental groups are a little more critical of it.

But overall I think it's a win.

But it is that-- you know, a lot of people do look at that bill that you mentioned, it was Assembly Bill 380 from Leslie Cohen, that in part helps-- it would have kind of aligned with the governor's climate strategy to reduce natural gas usage in commercial and residential buildings by something like 95% by 2050, and that bill just didn't really garner enough support.

And even though it looked like it aligned with it, the governor actually said on Tuesday there was some concerns about kind of the costs associated with that and about the effect that could have, especially on lower income residents, just effectively trying to force that implementation.

-Yes, and so much retrofit that would need to be required to do that.

Riley, you wanted to add, please.

-Yes.

So I've covered energy issues like since 2017, and I think my big takeaway from this legislative session is like kind of the low-hanging fruit in the clean energy world, it's getting plucked, and now it's kind of the harder thing.

We did a lot of reporting on this really intense lobbying campaign that Southwest Gas did to kill this Leslie Cohen natural gas planning bill, and they were successful.

You know, they got a bunch of labor groups, rural communities.

They were able to, you know, kind of convince lawmakers this was the wrong step at the wrong time, and as Colton said, Governor Sisolak kind of doubled down and said I still believe in the state climate strategy.

But I think lawmakers are starting to run, and we started to see it this session in the death of bills that would have required more energy efficiency planning on NV Energy's behalf that like kind of the easier, quote unquote, things like raising the renewable portfolio standard and of moving towards more solar energy.

We're kind of tapping out on that, and to meet carbon reduction goals that are in state statute to get to zero net carbon by 2050, there's going to be a lot of these kind of hard conversations.

You know, it's a question of is Nevada going to follow California and ban gas combustion engines at a certain point?

Are we willing to take that step to ban natural gas in commercial or residential buildings?

So it's something that I'm very interested in, and I think this is going to continue to be a conversation probably a little bit more heated heading into the future legislative sessions.

-Yes.

And as you mentioned, there needs to be some big moves whether it's natural gas or some other type of fossil fuel to get to those numbers.

Last conversation point I want to bring up here.

What bills, big or small, we've talked about some of the big bills here, but let's not forget that there are hundreds of bills that have been passed, will have, could have the biggest impact down the road.

Michael, what have you been tracking?

-I think going back to the eviction proceedings, that's going be a huge thing coming out of this session.

So I think the passing of Assemblyman Howard Watts' Assembly Bill 141 that automatically seals eviction records for nonpayment of rent that happened during the pandemic, I think that's going to have a huge impact on the community.

This other bill is going to have a huge impact, but it's going to have an impact on inmates, and it's not something that's talked about a lot, but Senate Bill 22.

Last September the Department of Corrections increased deductions, taking about 80% of inmates' accounts.

So if a family member sends them $100, the Department of Corrections would take 80% off, and a bill actually capped that.

It's something that will probably fly under the radar, not a lot of reporting on, but it's a huge thing for adding some protections to your prisoners and giving them some protections.

That's a huge win, I think.

I know it's a smaller bill, but I think it's a big win for that community.

-Yes, absolutely.

Colton and Riley, I want to go to you.

We haven't talked about the mining tax bill.

I'm hoping you'll bring that up simply because a lot of legislators have said it is one of the signatures or the signature landmark bill of the session, but I'm not going to put words in your mouth.

Colton, let's go to you first.

What's a big bill that you've been tracking that could have big impact in the future?

-So the mining tax has obviously been called a historic kind of moment, especially for Democrats.

It's one of the bigger taxes.

But there's a bill I think on the environmental side that I think will have one of the biggest impacts, and even environmental groups are saying it's one of the biggest water conservation efforts they've seen in the state potentially in, you know, decades, and that happens to be another bill from Assemblyman Howard Watts.

It's AB356 which will require effectively the removal of commercial, quote unquote, non-functional turf.

So the turf that you see in like street medians and commercial plazas and things around like community neighborhoods, like the HOA communities that have grass, like nonfunctional decorative grass, it basically requires the removal of all that grass that can't be used.

Colorado River water cannot be used to irrigate that starting in 2027, like January 1, 2027, and that will potentially save 12 billion gallons of water annually.

That's a big number considering that's about 10% of the water that Southern Nevada is allocated by the Colorado River, and the Colorado River makes up more than 90% of all water in Southern Nevada, like all water usage in Southern Nevada.

And that's huge, especially since we are in the middle of this decades-long drought.

We are facing a federal water shortage for the first time since Lake Mead is now expected to drop to a certain level, and that'll trigger a reduction in how much water Southern Nevada gets.

So this is a bill that down the line talking not just five years from now, 10 years, 20 years, this is something that will have a massive impact on Southern Nevada's ability to conserve water.

-And as you mentioned, just commercial.

That does not affect personal homeowners.

Riley, we have about a minute left.

I want to go to you too.

Big impact down the road.

-Yes.

Let me try to summarize mining taxes in one minute.

So this was the big compromise legislation.

It was intense negotiations at the very end.

I think it was surprising, I wrote about this in a story that published today, but tax discussions have often failed at the end of legislative sessions because there's a lot of asks and sort of like the sausage making goes a little haywire, and the plane landed smoothly this time.

So the mining tax bill is going to, you know, in future budget cycles allocate about $300 million between this new excise tax on gold and silver mines and dedicated net proceeds of minerals tax to education specifically.

It goes straight to the distributive school account, or whatever the education budget is now, and I think it's helpful to think of this in tandem with the K-12 budget change that we haven't really talked about, is that we're moving to a new education funding formula for the first time in 50 years.

This is like years and decades of work to try to get us to this point, but I think there's going to be a lot of talk and discussion about how do we ramp up K-12 base funding, like the per-pupil funding to a level that's near the national average.

We saw the Commission on School Funding, which is dedicated to looking at the formula, and they said you know, we need up to $2 billion over the next 10 years to get us to the national average on per-pupil funding.

So lawmakers took a lot of steps this session, but that's going to be something that we see moving forward as a discussion point.

-Absolutely.

And we ran out of time.

I apologize.

Maybe we have some of you back and we talk about the mining tax related to education funding in general.

Michael, Riley and Colton, thank you so much for joining us.

We appreciate it.

-Thank you so much for having me.

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

-Thank you as always for joining us this week on Nevada Week.

Now, for any of the resources discussed on the show, please visit our website, vegaspbs.org/nevada-week.

You can also find us on social media at @nevadaweek.

Thanks again, and we'll see you next week.

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