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) Nevada's 81st legislative session is roughly halfway over now.

Legislators and the journalists covering their proceedings are still working under COVID-related restrictions, but it appears the slow, early pace has quickened as bills are heard and begin passage out of committee hearings before fast-approaching deadlines.

We're going to talk to our panel this week about how the session is progressing.

Also, we've seen some larger bills introduced in areas initially expected to see some big moves like criminal justice, election reform and housing, but there's been hints of some bigger bills yet to surface as critical deadlines approach.

Our journalists will discuss some of these key bills already introduced and yet to be introduced, and of course what they're tracking as the session moves into the third quarter.

Please welcome April Corbin Girnus, journalist for the Nevada Current; Colton Lochhead, reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and Riley Snyder, journalist for the Nevada Independent.

Thank you so much for joining us again; we really appreciate it.

It seems like Colton, I want to go to you first.

We had you on our show last time talking about the first month of the legislative session.

We talked about the slow process.

It seems like things have sped up quite a bit since then.

I want to get your take on that.

Give us a little bit of insight on how the session has been progressing thus far.

(Colton Lochhead) Things have definitely picked up, especially as now we've gotten into this first mini-passage deadline week.

Things have really picked up in terms of the amount of bill hearings, bills getting out of committee, especially this week.

We're seeing kind of these marathon five-hour hearings on bills as they kind of crank through and try to get through as many bills as possible.

So it's starting to feel a lot more like a normal session even if the building is closed still.

-And to that point too, it seems like there hasn't been any major reopening here.

We talked on the last show about just the journalist side of this, and I think you and Michelle both mentioned peeking through the porthole into some of the committee sessions.

Anything changed there or is it still the same on coverage on your end?

-The coverage right now is pretty much the same.

It's still mostly virtual, and the only time that we really get to have kind of that normal access to lawmakers outside of scheduling interviews is when we can grab them when they're coming off the floor.

You know, the committee rooms are still-- they're all doing their committees virtually in their offices for the most part, so the building itself is still relatively quiet.

But there's signs that they're getting close to reopening.

You know, they put in the metal detectors in the front and most of the building as of this week should be vaccinated or hitting that kind of full vaccination point, the two weeks after the second dose.

So there's kind of signs that we're getting back and we're going to be reopening potentially pretty soon.

-And Riley, you mentioned that in a story as well that was looking like early April, it looks like, when reopening would happen.

To Colton's point, a lot of bills right now in committee.

Can you walk us through what the process is and the different stages?

Of course we've had a lot of bills introduced, we're still having bills introduced, now we're in committee, kind of where we are.

Where are we at in the process at this halfway point here?

(Riley Snyder) Yes.

So we're in the lifecycle like step three of bills, right?

So there's introductions and there's hearings, and Friday is kind of the great culling off point where the bills that aren't going to make it forward don't get a hearing and don't get voted out of committee.

So what we're seeing a lot of this week is we'll see many bills come forward with substantial amendments.

There was a rather big one recently on a bill that would have banned summary evictions, and now it's a study-- excuse me-- on summary evictions.

So the vast majority of bills coming forward this week, I think I looked and it was like out of 80 that passed over the first three days, around 60 had been amended and passed out.

But this is just kind of a clearing step to get rid of the bills that don't really have a chance in the legislature.

You're going to see probably 70% to 80% of bills proposed by Republicans not make it thus far.

This doesn't necessarily mean it's the end of the process for any of these ideas or bills.

There's additional chances for amendments as they move into the next deadline which is first house passage, that's on April 20, and then there's always the chance that lawmakers can exempt the bills.

Any bill that has a fiscal impact on the state can get what is called an exemption, and then it's sort of free from legislative deadlines because the budget process operates on a different track.

So really what we're seeing this week is a lot of very long hearings, a lot of votes on what people call conceptual amendments, which can be actual language or it can just be like a general idea on a piece of paper.

But the idea is like let's keep the ball moving on ideas that we think will have traction, that we can get passed this session, and then figure out any of the finer details later on.

-Now, you mentioned that date and bills being introduced and some deadlines that are coming up.

We had a deadline of when bills could be introduced.

They removed that deadline.

I'm assuming bills can still be introduced.

Do you think there's going to be any extension of deadlines on the committee hearing side, as you mentioned, or potentially the floor passage side?

-I don't think so.

I think at this point, the vast majority of bills have been introduced.

There's always a chance that one of the four legislative leaders can put in what's called an emergency BDR, which sort of operates independent of that normal traction and deadline structure.

But I think if there is like a big concept that lawmakers or the governor want to take on, they can introduce a bill at any point in time.

I think in 2017 or 2019, there was an issue where there was a bill that would have implemented a payday loan database and that bill died, but then a week before the session ended, the speaker brought forward an emergency BDR that did the exact same thing, made it through the Assembly but died in the Senate.

So the rules get a little wonky as we get closer to the end of the session, but I think the vast majority of bills have been introduced and we kind of know who all of the chess pieces on the board are at this point, of course always with the caveat that weird stuff happens at the end of the 120-day session.

We're not sure what's going to go on there.

-And April, a perfect segue to you.

We saw this in our last legislative session in 2019, our 80th legislative session, with the education funding formula proposal that came through; the 25th hour is when hearings were happening and when approval happened there.

Is this common?

I mean, we've already talked about a couple things here, late bill introduction, taking a bill and gutting it and revising the entire bill to go from one purpose to a study.

Do we see this a lot in our state legislation?

(April Corbin Girnus) Yes.

I think that's the short answer.

I mean, there are going to be topics that legislators don't want to introduce early.

I think a lot of these bills, like the education funding formula from last session, probably could have been introduced earlier.

I don't know that they were working on language right till the very end, but it's just something that because of how controversial something is or even how weighty it is or for many political reasons, they're just not going to release it early and they don't want-- they secretly don't want robust discussion on something, so they're going to push things at the last second.

I think that's just the nature of the game and I think we're all used to it, and there's no doubt in my mind that we'll see that again at the end of this session.

-Because we're talking about this bill in particular, Riley, I want to go back to you and a story you just wrote yesterday, actually, at time of recording here, that it looks like that education funding formula process, which Governor Sisolak had said was going to be multi-phased and take multiple years, it looks like the Ways and Means Committee at least is saying that they're going to try to expedite this and potentially finalize everything in this session.

Am I reading that correctly?

-Yes.

So just to back up a little bit, in 2019 lawmakers passed this big change to the state's education funding formula, the first major change in over 50 years, with the idea of implementing it for this upcoming two-year budget cycle.

However, in the State of the State address in January, Governor Sisolak said let's take a pause.

Things are weird with COVID and reopening.

We don't know how the economy is going to work, so we're going to do a phased implementation of that funding formula, the idea being that the state side of education funding will start moving towards that new formula, but the local side will remain as it is and then we'll do the full thing two years from now.

But in a budget meeting yesterday, lawmakers basically said the more questions that we asked about this, like the worst idea that it seemed and we had more and more questions, so it's just going to be easier to do the full implementation right here and now, pull the trigger.

Yes, there are 55 days or 54 days left in the session, but I think these are conversations that as April was mentioning, have been happening behind closed doors for quite a while.

But I think the point of the hearing yesterday and the story that I did was just to lay down this marker that hey, this is what we're doing.

We need to make this decision now because we need to start going down this way in the road and start making these decision points on how that's going to work.

There are a ton of questions remaining on how this is all going to work, everything from transportation funding to cost-of-living adjustments to what hold harmless means.

There's this whole concern that smaller school districts are going to be hurt by this so they'll be held harmless and get base funding from the last year, but what if they have enrollment increases.

So there are like a bunch of balls they're juggling, but the main thrust of what was said yesterday was like we're going full speed ahead on this.

We're not going to try and do this delayed, two-year phased implementation.

-Colton, let's come back to some key bills right now that you're tracking, that have gotten to that committee session, have been passed through committee or will be going to one of the houses now.

Anything that you're tracking that you think is really key?

-I think one thing that actually just kind of got scheduled is the bill that would ban the death penalty.

It got a hearing recently and saw some fierce opposition from prosecutors, including Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson, and it's a bill that they've been pushing for, you know, multiple sessions in a row now but there seems to be some national momentum after Virginia recently, the governor of Virginia recently signed the bill abolishing the death penalty in that state.

So there's been some momentum nationally and the response that this could actually pick up some traction finally this year, and as of right now, as of filming this right now, they just scheduled a work session vote for tomorrow, so on Friday, to actually vote it out of committee which if I remember right, it never even got to that point in the 2019 session.

So this is a pretty major step for that piece of legislation.

So that's one, and that's a thing that progressives and criminal justice advocates, criminal-- that's a thing that criminal justice reform advocates have really been pushing for for years, so this is kind of a big step for them to get to that committee vote.

-And I know there's two separate bills here related to banning the death penalty.

There's an Assembly bill, and then there's a Senate bill.

What's the difference between the two, and which one is going to that work session you mentioned?

-Right.

So the difference between the two is the one in the Assembly, Assembly Bill 395, that one is both-- it would ban the death penalty going forward, but it would also be retroactive in converting anybody who's on death row, converting those sentences into life without parole.

Whereas the one on the Senate side has not-- it's just proactive looking forward.

The one getting that work session vote tomorrow at this point again is the Assembly version that is both proactive and retroactive.

-And there were a lot of criminal justice bills that were introduced early on in the session.

One I know that passed committee just recently too, barring law enforcement from detaining persons at the request of immigration authorities; no-knock warrants, the attorney general proposed that bill; decriminalizing traffic tickets, and as you mentioned, the death penalty bill.

Are there any other key ones in the criminal justice area that look like they're making it through or have made it through?

-I think one of the key ones for law enforcement in the state is Assembly Bill 58.

It's the a bill that would give the attorney general patterns in practice authority.

Effectively, it would allow them to review after a police shooting or after a police incident, they would have-- the attorney general's office would have the authority to review police standards and whether or not police practices were followed and whether or not those practices need to be reformed going forward.

It's something that was part of the bigger Black Lives Matter movement, kind of that push during the summer.

It was one of the key policy components that advocates were pushing for, and now it looks like that's actually going to be moving forward pretty quickly through this session.

-April, same thing.

Let's talk a little bit about education bills here, more narrow than the education funding bill that we've already talked about.

A slew of bills also that were introduced towards the beginning of the session.

Anything standing out to you that you think has any traction moving forward?

-You know, in terms of education bills, there's a lot of movement on charter school bills that sort of change the process, adjust the process slightly, changing-- there's a bill, AB109, that would amend the percentage of teachers that charter schools are allowed to hire that don't have a full teacher license.

There are changes for the process of approving it and how long charter schools can be approved for.

There's some sort of tweaking that's going on within the charter school world that have been interesting and are passing, but what's interesting there is that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of appetite for major curbing of the charter school industry here in Nevada.

Last session there was a bill introduced as a moratorium on the growth of charter schools, and it was sort of quickly amended into a much watered-down version that just required them to do more reporting on what it's like to open charter schools.

It doesn't seem to-- you know, that movement to sort of curb the growth of charter schools in Nevada hasn't seemed to get a new legislator that's picked it up and made that an issue.

So we're definitely watching that.

As we know, charter schools, you know, if they were a full school district, it would be the third largest.

They're sort of quickly gaining ground in Washoe County School District, and it's an area of the legislature that doesn't get a whole lot of coverage because CCSD and the big ones demand attention.

But it's definitely something to be watched for this session.

-And I want to bring a little bit of attention too to what seemed like potentially could have been a big bill.

Sales and gaming tax increases to fund education got the appropriate number of signatures for it to go to legislation.

It looks like, and you've reported, and Riley, you've reported as well, it doesn't look like that's going to become a bill which means that it will go to voters in our next election cycle.

But there has been some talk of potentially pulling that bill if there is something else that's brought forth in legislation related to education funding.

Do you see anything like that coming down before session ends?

-You know, the Clark County Education Association has been pretty clear from the beginning that they don't necessarily care how revenue is raised.

You know, they proposed raising the sales tax and raising the gaming tax, and those are currently scheduled to be on the ballot next year in the general election but, you know, John Velardita, the head of CCEA, has been very clear that if the legislature makes significant progress in raising revenue for education that he will pull those bills or those ballot initiatives and that he doesn't want them to go on there.

So right now he's using it as leverage, and really that's been their standpoint from the very beginning, and he's been very clear about not mentioning any other bills.

So there are several revenue, you know, proposals that are already out there.

There's some property tax ones; that's a common way to fund education.

There's a digital sales, digital products tax that's basically a sales tax on ebooks and movies that you download and streaming services also.

There's-- I'm sure I'm going to miss some.

But there's a removal and an exemption for LET tax for sporting.

There's the mining tax amendments that have been proposed that haven't been heard yet.

So there are many steps that can be taken to fund education, and CCEA and other education advocates are watching all of those very closely.

-Gotcha.

Riley, please.

-Yes.

I wanted to build on what April said, and I think there's an interesting legal discussion slash debate slash preview of a potential lawsuit as to whether or not CCEA can withdraw these two initiative petitions.

Again, they got the signatures, I think they had over 200,000 signatures each, so it cleared the amount they needed to qualify.

It went to the legislature, they took no action within 40 days.

There was some theater on the last day about withdrawing them or whatever, but there was no real appetite to take those on.

But there's an open question of when can these be withdrawn?

Does CCEA have the ability right up until ballots are printed to withdraw these?

When are these out of the hands of the teachers' union, and when do they have to go to the ballot?

It's my understanding that most people involved believe that they can be withdrawn because I'm sure CCEA doesn't want to put these on the ballot if they don't have to, if they do get their funding solution, but I think we might see litigation after session.

If there is a challenge, if someone signed these signatures and would like to see the gaming tax ballot measure on the ballot that they signed and now it's being withdrawn, I think that could also be a potentially huge issue.

And April did a great job on the digital sales tax bill which is great, because I didn't really understand that issue so I'm grateful that she wrote about that.

But I think the revenue conversation, right, the joke that always goes around in Nevada political circles is if you want to raise taxes, elect a Republican governor, based on what Kenny Guinn did in 2003 and based on what Brian Sandoval did in 2015.

We haven't seen that like coordinated hard press for a tax increase this session from the governor's office.

So we're getting these little smatterings of tax policy bills sort of coming up right before the deadline, but there hasn't been that like large scale buy-in to get some kind of large revenue increase to the level that CCEA and John Velardita would probably be happy with.

We'll see what happens with a mining tax.

Again, lawmakers in the 2020 special session approved those three potential mining tax amendments.

I don't think we're going to see really any action on those until probably the final month of the session, just based on past experience and kind of how these big, difficult decisions go.

But if it is a ballot question for 2022, that's not dollars in the state coffers immediately.

That's dollars in the state coffers after 2022, so I'm not sure that's going to be enough for the union because they want to see more dollars heading towards education here and now not in the future.

-Multiple great points you're making there, Riley.

I want to go to Colton and something you said, particularly government leadership in something like this and bringing up potentially a large funding bill, any type of tax-based bill forward.

Colton, just more broadly, actually, let's talk about the governor's role here.

From the outside looking in, it looks like the governor is not maybe as engaged as previous governors have been in the process of using that bully pulpit.

What's your take on that?

Are we seeing a much larger role from the governor just behind the scenes?

-It's definitely a little bit interesting.

It's a little interesting to see the lack of outward push from the governor's office on a lot of these key issues.

I think back to the 2020 special sessions where they were talking about tax revenue and these mining taxes that Riley mentioned, these mining initiatives, where when asked about mining proposals, new revenue sources, Governor Sisolak, if I remember right, said basically well, it's up to the legislature to make that decision, basically taking a backseat, not really taking any kind of an initiative to push for things, unlike what we saw with Brian Sandoval in 2015 where he was really pushing that new tax initiative he used to fund his education initiatives.

And then this session, we're really not seeing that.

It seems to be more of the governor's-- that's kind of his MO.

He doesn't really take a front seat in driving any of these initiatives in terms of the funding initiatives.

We are starting to see him take a little bit more of an initiative or a front seat in driving some legislation, specifically the Innovation Zones, blockchains.

We did see him hold a brief roundtable discussion with his Governor's Office of Economic Development and Jeremy Aguero from Applied Analysis kind of discussing and kind of playing up the Innovation Zones idea, although since then he and his office have been relatively quiet on that issue as well.

-Yes, let's talk more about that.

Again, we're at about that halfway point.

As Riley mentioned, bills can be proposed really until the 25th hour.

Do we still anticipate that we're going to see that bill, or what's your perspective, Colton?

-Yes.

The assumption for most people that are involved in the discussions is that the bill is still going to be coming probably within the next few weeks, probably will have some sort of an exemption of some sort.

A lot of times the governor's late BDRs come in, you know, in late April, early May type range so they don't have to follow the same necessarily deadlines.

And in this case, they're still working on a lot of things.

I know that there's been-- I know that blockchains, Innovation Zones-- blockchains lobbyists have been really lobbying advocacy groups, environmental groups, and in recent weeks has tried to really try to drum up some support for the idea, although it does seem to be facing quite a bit of opposition from all sides at this point.

But I think the assumption is there will be a bill.

It would be really strange, I think, to see the governor just completely walk away from an idea that was a key component of his State of the State address, that he's pitched as a key way of diversifying the economy, so I think there will be something.

It's just whether it will be exactly what we saw with the original bill draft back in February.

That's one thing that's still unclear.

-And Riley, I know you've covered the Innovation Zone bill as well.

I'll have you comment on that.

But more in addition to that, I should say, any other-- as we kind of look over the next month of our session, any other bills you were tracking that haven't been introduced or anything that has not been introduced that you think will be in the next month or so?

-Yes, I'll focus on Innovation Zones because I think that is an interesting one.

I mean, this is like one of the most coordinated public pushes for this, right?

Like the people behind Innovation Zones have purchased ad time, they're running ads on TV and websites and digital ads, so it's a real hard push.

But I think, as Colton mentioned, there is a lot of skepticism around this story.

The county passed a resolution saying we don't want this, so there's a little bit of like rural hesitation towards this.

Rurals don't even like Sisolak to begin with, so it's kind of a hard sell to begin with.

And then the Reno Gazette Journal's James Dehaven did a story earlier this week, and there's a lot of progressive Democrats who don't like this idea too.

Maggie Carlton, who's the head of the budget committee in the Assembly said I don't really understand this.

I don't like it.

I'm not voting for this.

Senator Dina Neal in the Senate, who's also behind a lot of different tax policy changes, said I really don't like where this is going.

And the thing to remember with Innovation Zones, the bill draft that was put out in February, it's a two-thirds bill.

It's a tax increase.

Part of the idea behind an Innovation Zone is that they're going to levy a tax on some new technological product.

So I don't really think they could probably get to two-thirds right now, as Colton sort of hinted at.

They can change that.

They can take that part out, that's totally fine, and make it a majority vote, but I think there's still a lot of lobbying work to be done on that.

But they've hired some of the best lobbyists in the state to work on this, so there's no lack of money or resources going into trying to pass this.

In terms of other measures to watch for that might be introduced later in the session, not specifically a bill but I think the discussion about what happens with the federal stimulus money from the American Rescue Act, the $1.9 trillion that just passed Congress.

There's a lot of discussion on how that process is going to work.

We did an interview, a Q&A with former governor and UNR president Brian Sandoval, who sort of spilled the beans and said it might be a special session where they adopt this.

This is because we're already in the budget closing period, so we're starting to do the initial work on the budget.

If the state gets guidance-- because it doesn't have guidance right now from the federal government how those dollars can be spent-- if that happens in mid May, there's not a lot the legislature can do because they have two weeks till the end of session.

So the idea is the legislature is going to go ahead and approve the budget and then come back in in a special session, open everything up and then figure out how to spend those dollars, which is substantial.

I think it's like $2.9 billion, somewhere in that range.

But that's one of the bigger budget-focused discussions is can we do that in the course of a normal session, or will that have to be a special session decision?

-Well, 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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