We're sitting down with local journalists to review and get updates on Nevada's ongoing 81st legislative session.

That's this week on Nevada Week.

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(Kipp Ortenburger) It's the final lap, the fourth quarter, or the third period-- whatever sports analogy you care to use-- on Nevada's 81st legislative session.

Less than a month to go now, after three months of lawmaking already in the books.

The first half of April saw a flurry of activity as bill passage deadlines came and went, then a lull, and then some surprises and new activity as we saw new bills introduced and hints of more to come in this final month.

We'll talk about the prospects of some of these bills, including expanded public healthcare coverage and education funding.

Also, our state's economic forum and governor reported some encouraging revenue projections, and let's not forget, our state awaits some federal guidance on how to use $2.9 billion of relief via the American Rescue Plan.

What does all this mean for the final month of key budget and bill decision-making, and will our state need a spillover into another special session to balance out that budget?

We'll get our local journalists' perspectives on all this and what key bills might or might not make it to sine die.

To discuss all this, please welcome James DeHaven, a reporter for the Reno Gazette-Journal; Michelle Rindels, a reporter for the Nevada Independent, and Colton Lochhead, a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

I wanted to start the conversation by talking about what looks like some very encouraging news.

The state economic forum reported this week positive projections on tax revenue; as a matter of fact, specifically $586 million more than budgeted for the two-year budget for the state.

If we use a reference point of the economic forum's report in December, that forecast was $500 million less for the two-year projected budget.

James, I want to go to you first.

That seems like a significant swing.

Can you give us some insight of what this means for the legislative session over these next 20 days?

(James DeHaven) Well, primarily it gives them breathing room to accomplish what they've said they want to accomplish since last summer when they had to do a bunch of coronavirus-related or, you know, pandemic-related budget cuts.

They've said ever since then, we want to restore the 6% cuts to Medicaid, we want to backfill all these cuts to services, and then eventually get around to fixing DETR.

So this extra half billion gives them some some leeway to do that, more even than they expected, and just kind of makes this final three-week sprint easier, in my opinion, from a budget perspective.

It just seems like it'll be a lot less tense in the building by the end of the month.

I think that's the primary immediate effect.

-And DETR being the Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation or the organization in charge of unemployment.

Colton, I want to go to you also.

Let's talk about this last part of the legislative session.

Bills of course are being finalized, but there's so much more conversation usually around budget.

How does this windfall of projected money then affect those budgetary conversations?

(Colton Lochhead) I kind of like what James said, it's just going to make things a little easier.

They're just going to have more options as to what to do, especially between kind of this windfall of a half billion dollars and expecting the incoming money from the American Rescue Plan, you know, the about $2.9 billion that'll be coming in, some of which has started to come in.

But now they can start figuring out where they want to kind of pick and choose from: Are they going to start using some of the money-- and this is I think where a lot of the conversation over the next three or four weeks is really going to be-- is where do they start using this?

Where do they start pulling money from?

Are they going to start using it from that $586 million or are they going to start figuring out-- which that 586 million is a lot more flexible.

It's obviously just general fund revenues versus the American Rescue Plan which has-- it's probably going to have some limitations as to how it can be spent, where it can be spent, what kind of programs.

So now they get to do a lot more kind of wiggling around, figuring out which money can go where, kind of basically a game of tic-tac-toe trying to figure out which money can drop into which buckets.

-And let's talk more about the American Rescue Plan money, Michelle, $2.9 billion expected for our state to get, but we are awaiting the Treasury Department really giving us specifics on how that money can be used.

The state has put together somewhat of a plan, a broad plan, of how they might use that money.

What more can you tell us about that?

(Michelle Rindels) Yes.

So there's the 2.9 that the state sort of general fund is going to get and, you know, in a general fund that's only a little more than $4 billion a year, that's almost like a whole additional year of money coming into the state, so it's a huge number.

But I think one of the other game changers is the American Rescue Plan has more than 90 different pots of funding, so Nevada is going to be getting all sorts of other types of funding.

There's funding that's earmarked for schools, there's funding that's just earmarked for rental assistance or for mortgage assistance, so there's actually a lot more than 2.9 billion coming into the state and, you know, that's in part what's driving the idea the economic forum has that it's just going to be a real-- the economy is really going to accelerate.

So I think it's a big question.

They need to kind of slow down, take a breather and figure out what's already covered and what's going to be dealt with, and then what do they need to use this very flexible funding for?

I think they're going to try to gather a lot of various input from different groups to see where people want to see it spent, and my sense is that right now, they do have a framework of priorities.

But there's still a lot of decisions to be made about how to use this money, and it might be a months-long process.

-A months-long process, and we'll talk a little in the future about maybe that process being extended and if we are going to have a special session.

The governor, as you mentioned, has already talked about these pet projects that come across when we're talking about budget and some flexibility, as Colton had mentioned, something that might or might not be part of the discussion.

James, I want to go to you.

Senator Ben Kieckhefer had said, and this was prior to the American Rescue Plan money being finalized, but he said the federal government is going to send us billions of dollars to fix a $500 million problem.

We're going to have to be very disciplined to ensure we don't get too far out over our skis and put the state in a precarious fiscal position in years to come.

A very important part of this discussion of course is not just what's happening now but what's going to be happening in future legislative sessions, depending on how we allocate this money.

Can you give us some perspective on the Republican side here, what they're saying about use and allocation of some of this money?

-Yes.

That's an interesting quote from Senator Kieckhefer because in many ways, it echoes what the governor was saying yesterday.

It seemed to me he was urging caution, that people take a-- you know, that the legislature namely take a long-term approach to spending this money because it may be more federal money than we're ever liable to get, hopefully it is, because, you know, we'd require a much larger disaster to get more money than this.

So I think the sense on both sides of the aisle is proceed cautiously, do what we said we were going to do as far as backfilling cuts, then we'll figure out what to do with the rest of this money, and that's where you're going to wind up probably having a long summer, as you mentioned a minute ago, as far as special sessions and whatnot.

But yes, it is interesting, the parallels, the bipartisan parallels, I guess, in the approach to this windfall.

-Colton, I want to come to you.

One thing about the economic forum's forecast that was interesting and maybe a little surprising is positives across all tax revenue, except real property transfer tax looked like it was leveled out or maybe decreased a little bit and that might be surprising given where our real estate market is right now.

Any word from legislation at all?

Are they finding this a surprise?

Is this working into potentially any conversations around housing or the potential eviction crisis we see before us?

-I'm not really sure that, you know, the real property transfer tax is factoring in the talks of the evictions or really the housing market.

You know, it's been-- I think the housing market has really helped buoy I think the market and some of the taxes this time.

I think we saw kind of a bigger than-- a bigger than expected increase for this current fiscal year from that tax, but really I think a lot of the focus now is on how do we deal with the evictions, especially this pending eviction backlog that we're going to be dealing with now, especially that the-- there was a federal judge that struck down the CDC's moratorium on it and kind of the confusion now that's going to be surrounding that.

There was a bill from Senator Selena Torres that was going to outright ban summary evictions, and that was turned into a study earlier in the session, and there's a few other ones that deal with some more smaller tweaks to the eviction process.

I think some of it, Howard Watts has the bill that would kind of require more time depending on how long you've been in a unit.

So those I think that's really where the conversation on the housing, especially the rental, the renters and tenant protections are really starting to steer towards how do we deal with the evictions now, which it seems like it's going to become maybe an accelerated problem, even faster than we thought.

-Michelle, I want to get your perspective on this.

There has been talk of additional eviction bills coming forward, and again now we've got this windfall of money, a lot of money, that could maybe be allocated for relief, more relief for rental assistance.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

What are you hearing from legislators right now?

-Well, I think they have so much money from the rental assistance; I think the number that Treasurer Zach Conine gave yesterday was something around $360 million in rental assistance.

Clark County has been running their rental assistance program for almost a year, and they've only been able to get out less than $100 million into the ground.

So you're looking at we only have potentially two more months left of this eviction moratorium before we're starting to see a lot of people getting booted from their homes, and yet we're only able to approve-- I mean, the pace they're at right now is 1,500 applications a month, so it's just well behind what they thought they would be at right now.

It's a logistical issue.

They don't have enough people.

They don't have enough people looking at the applications, people are not providing the proper documentation and then you have the back and forth and you lose them in that process.

So it's really a situation where there's a lot of money, there's a lot of people that need help, and the state is having a very difficult time putting two and two together.

So we're hoping, you know, the lawmakers say they're working on some other bill that would smooth out this process on the back end to try to give more time to get this rental assistance out so we don't end up with hundreds of millions of dollars that goes unused and people really suffering.

-James, let's turn the conversation a little bit more to just the last month of the legislative session here.

In April of course we had some significant voting deadlines that passed.

We saw a flurry of activity for a while.

Big surprises for you, either bills that did make it or bills that didn't make it?

-The biggest surprise for me was Innovation Zones, the Innovation Zones proposal just becoming an interim study.

It seemed to me the governor's office put a lot of chips into that particular basket, so to see it become a study is something that in my experience, you know, for a governor to back a bill and then his partisan allies in the statehouse to basically not show that much interest in it and it just kind of quietly disappears doesn't happen every day.

So that was the biggest surprise to me, and I don't like to make predictions about the legislature ever, especially in the last month.

But yes, I'm sure there'll be some surprises ahead as far as the death penalty and this public option bill that came out the other day, Cannizzaro Care.

So I can speak to the biggest surprises, but I don't want to try and predict what other ones might be coming in the next three weeks.

-Well, let's jump to the public health insurance expansion then, Cannizzaro Care, as you mentioned.

This is a bill that in some way, shape or form has been proposed twice, 2017 and 2019; 2017 it was approved, it was vetoed by the governor, Governor Sandoval at that time.

In 2019 the bill moved more to a study.

Colton, let's get your perspective.

What's the difference between this bill in this session as opposed to those previous bills?

-I think the major difference, especially the 2017 version from former Assemblyman Mike Sprinkle, was a Medicaid buying option of something that people could just buy into the Medicaid system.

That was effectively what it was, but as you mentioned, it passed in the legislature, vetoed by the governor.

And then this one is more.

It allows-- it requires healthcare providers that are participating in Medicare-- or participating in Medicare to provide another option that could be purchased by individuals or small businesses.

That's the main thing, and what this does, it's supposed to give more options for Nevadans.

You know, we have roughly 350,000 uninsured Nevadans, and the state is one of the-- I believe we still rank seventh highest in terms of uninsured rates in the nation.

So it's supposed to be a way to provide more health insurance, more options, and hopefully, in their hopes, provide a more affordable option down the line as more options come online.

-The Republicans have been opposed to this type of bill in the past saying exactly that, that it might not actually make a big mark on providing insurance for those 350,000 that are uninsured.

What are Republicans saying about this bill?

-I don't really know offhand.

In the past they've been staunchly opposed to anything that even resembles a public option, and I think that's what you're seeing broadly in the argument over this bill.

It's not a traditional public option like we used to recall when they would talk about a fully state-subsidized alternative to a private health insurance thing.

It's not that.

So I think Republicans are in a tricky spot of opposing something that, you know, had it been coming from their side, maybe they wouldn't be, you know, so upset about or-- you know what I mean?

I think that's why they've been quiet.

-Michelle, let's come back to you.

Let's talk about the death penalty bill, AB395.

There have been some hints, there could be amendments, there could be a watered-down version is how it's been reported.

Give us an update on that bill.

-Yes, that bill is still in purgatory right now.

We're waiting to see if the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold the hearing for it in the Senate.

You know, of course Melanie Scheible, chair of the Judiciary Committee over there, is a prosecutor, so is Nicole Cannizzaro, Senate Majority Leader.

So there's some, you know, thought that there's resistance to that because the prosecutors are not in favor of it in general.

You know, we're waiting to see if there's going to be talk between the bill sponsor and the governor about a potential way to make it palatable for the governor.

He hasn't shown his cards much since last week on this issue.

We know he thinks there should be a death penalty in the cases of very extreme situations, but he's also not wanted to speak too much on it and commit himself I think publicly to anything in particular.

So I think we've got another week, and we'll see what exactly happens with a hearing to this bill.

-Yes, it's interesting how the influence or lack thereof all seems to be, you know, noncommittal, so to speak, and I know also Congresswoman Titus has also given her support of ending the death penalty but hasn't gotten as far to support this bill itself.

Colton, I want to go to you with these different dynamics here when we're talking about bill influence, really.

You've got the governor that is somewhat opposed, not all the way opposed.

We have some of our federal leadership that's kind of weighing in, and then of course we have this dynamic, as Michelle mentioned, District Attorney's Office and District Attorney Wolfson being vehemently opposed to ending the death penalty.

How does this all work, and what kind of influence does this have on legislators making a decision?

-It kind of all stops, starts and stops, with what the governor says.

If the governor says-- if the governor signals that he's going to, you know, he's opposed to a bill, especially specifically like this, it kind of puts a big mark on that bill and they need to-- if lawmakers really want to get it passed and get him to sign it, they're going to have to make some sort of a change to it.

I remember in 2017, something similar happened with cannabis lounges back then.

Senator Segerblom was kind of pushing something through, trying to push that bill through.

Sandoval said I don't like it, that bill died.

I'm kind of seeing a similar thing now with the death penalty happening here.

The governor gave a comment basically saying-- responding to a question saying I'm not-- you know, I'm opposed to it in most situations but, you know, I want to leave a carve-out for-- you know, I think he described it as like the most extreme circumstances.

So I think that's a really interesting dynamic.

How do you abolish something but not fully abolish it?

I think that's the big question for lawmakers is how do they navigate this?

And you mentioned the influence and kind of the different influences.

Well, the governor is kind of-- he's got the veto pen effectively, he's got the power of that veto.

When you see other notable Democrats, especially specifically Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson testifying in person, advocating to keep the death penalty and, you know, at the same time is moving a process to execute a person convicted of mass murder 20-something years ago, it really throws this interesting dynamic into the pot as lawmakers are trying to pass this thing that is, you know, part of-- effectively part of the national Democrats' platform to abolish the death penalty.

Even at the constitutional level, we're seeing kind of differing opinions.

You mentioned the governor has this carve-out, but even the attorney general, you know, a prosecutor himself, and the lieutenant governor have signaled their support for abolishing the death penalty and wrote a letter together, I believe it was in March in a local Democratic magazine, about why they should abolish the death penalty.

I don't think they necessarily mentioned the bill in that letter, but it was a very strong signal from the state's top prosecutor that they want lawmakers to abolish the death penalty.

-James, let's take the conversation, let's move into this last 20-some days that we have left of the session.

Of course we can talk about, as you've already mentioned, the potential for a summer session, specific bills or specific budgetary items.

What are you tracking?

What is really interesting to you over the next 20-plus days?

-Well, all the ones we've already mentioned as far as the death penalty, Cannizzaro Care.

Education funding is not something that I'm particularly a specialist in, but it seems to me that there is still a lot of interest in reworking the funding formula somehow before we wrap up.

I don't know how that's even remotely plausible, so I'm starting to suspect that, you know, A, there's going to be a special session to figure out the federal stimulus funding, and then B, maybe a separate special session, almost just to like collaborate, get together all the stuff they weren't able to get done this time, perhaps including mining taxes, I don't know.

Again, I do not like to prognosticate because I'm usually wrong.

But I'm tracking all of this stuff because there's three weeks left, and they're probably only going to have time to do like half of what we've discussed today.

So that's kind of what I'm looking at.

You watch all of it and expect only half of it to come through, if that.

-Well, let's talk specifically about education funding.

Michelle, let's go to you.

First off, the Nevada Commission on School Funding did report recently, $2- to $3 billion of an investment over a decade to get us to per-pupil averages at the national level.

First off, I have to ask a question, and this goes with the economic forum report too.

Why are these reports coming out kind of in this third-quarter period of our legislative session where then it seems like there's such a scramble afterwards, is that strategic?

-I'm not sure the Commission on School Funding's timing was strategic or not, but I will say that they tend to not deal with the biggest tax issues-- you don't see those necessarily publicly until the very end.

So we still haven't seen any public movement on the mining tax.

There's been no hearings on these constitutional proposed amendments that would raise the mining tax.

There's also talk of maybe an alternate deal that mining could get on board with and it would kind of avert the issue of going to the ballot, but to date nothing public on that and it's a little bit of a concern that the influx of federal money and the great economic forum report might reduce the political will to do anything on that issue.

But as you were saying, this commission report is calling for huge amounts of money, and really it's kind of important to start teeing that up because that is a huge political lift.

But I think there's not a whole lot of interest with all the money coming in to get started on some very dicey political tax-raising questions.

-Yes, and the mining tax of course is right at the top of that list.

Colton, let's get your perspective as well.

The governor has said that this will be discussed in some way, shape or form before the session ends.

What are you hearing?

-Before the session, Senator Cannizzaro, Majority Leader Cannizzaro, had indicated that they were going to be working on something that was not-- something like Michelle mentioned as a way to avert sending any of these things to the ballots so it gets something done in a more immediate fashion too because those ballot measures would take several years to really even take effect.

The question there is how do you pass something like this?

You need a two-thirds.

Democrats are in a little bit more of a dicey situation.

They lost a few seats since that special session, but it does sound like there's still a lot of negotiations going on.

I know Speaker Frierson just recently said there are talks going on with stakeholders, including the mining companies, and they're looking to, as he called it, an olive branch.

They're looking to find some sort of olive branch to kind of bridge the gap and come up with some sort of a solution.

The question is is there enough time for something like that in the next three weeks?

And then to Michelle's point, exactly.

Is there a willpower to raise taxes now that there is, you know, almost a $600 million increase, which is I believe at least one of those proposals was calling for about that much money to kind of fill a gap.

So it'll be interesting to see whether or not they're willing to take that step and whether or not Republicans would be willing to take that step given this new kind of windfall funding that's coming in specifically from the economic forum, but also this massive influx of federal money.

-Michelle, we have about 30 seconds left.

Let's go back to the education funding part of this conversation as well.

That commission report did recommend increasing property taxes, increasing sales taxes.

We've heard this previously in the session of course with bills.

Any of this go through, and let's move on to the special session here.

First off, are we really-- is it looking like we will have a summer special session?

-I think it is.

I think they're really going to have a lot of work to do not just with the budget and dealing with the ARP money, but also they're going to have to do something later in the year for redistricting.

So I'm sure we're in for some time in the summer here in Carson City.

-And do you think in that special session we could potentially be talking about property tax, sales tax increases?

-There is a pretty strong signal that they don't want to get into that right now and they want to do a big effort to try to get input and maybe find some sort of consensus plan, and to me that sounds like something that's going to take years and not weeks.

So if I had to guess, I would say they're probably not going to take up that heavy lift in a special session.

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

For any of the resources discussed on this show, please visit our website at 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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