We're talking to United States Senator Catherine Cortez Masto and Nevada State Senator Scott Hammond about the American Rescue Plan and related strategies for recovery.

That's this week on Nevada Week.

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(Kipp Ortenburger) Both the United States Senate and Nevada State Senate have played and continue to play a very important role in Nevada's COVID response, relief and recovery.

This is maybe no more evident than looking at their work on the recently passed $2 trillion American Rescue Plan.

Now, Senator Cortez Masto worked to pass the package with key provisions for state and municipal governments; in fact, $2.7 billion in American Rescue Plan funds will come to the state of Nevada directly.

Now, that means the role of allocating that money now falls on our state legislators.

While this relief is a welcome benefit to restore state budget cuts and support Nevadans hit hard by the pandemic, many state legislators stress the need for proper and strategic fiscal management of this relief.

Well, on this week's show, we'll get both federal and state senator perspectives on how this money can and will be best used to support Nevada's recovery efforts and potentially reimagine a new Nevada emerging from the shadows of the pandemic.

To start this conversation, please welcome United States Senator Catherine Cortez Masto.

Senator Cortez Masto, it's such a pleasure to have you on Nevada Week.

Thank you for breaking away from a very hectic schedule, I'm sure.

Great to have you on the show.

-Thank you.

Thanks for the invitation.

-I want to jump right into the American Rescue Plan: $2.7 billion coming to the state, roughly a billion dollars coming to our local municipalities, cities and our counties.

Since March you have done extensive research educating the Nevada public on the benefits of that plan and also how that bill will be spent.

Over the last two months, a lot of changes to our state.

Of course we've been going through a slow and progressive reopening.

Economically, we look like we're in a much better position from recent reports, a much better outlook for our state.

I want to talk specifically today though about what should Nevadans keep in mind related to this plan today?

(Catherine Cortez Masto) Sure.

Thank you.

First of all, let me just put that in perspective.

There's actually from the American Rescue Plan $11 billion coming directly just to Nevada, and that includes the 2.7 billion you talked about, there's about 3.1 billion that comes into our state and local governments, and then there's so much more.

It is important.

Why?

Because we know just during this pandemic when we were trying to stop the spread of it, we asked everybody to shelter in place.

Too many of our workers lost their jobs, out of work, businesses shuttered, so we had to make sure we kept everybody afloat.

In the meantime, the major revenue generator for our state is our tourism, hospitality, trade show, live event industry, right?

And that was just devastated by this pandemic.

We know that because we have seen during the pandemic the highest unemployment rates in the country were really coming out of Nevada and particularly Southern Nevada.

So it was important through the American Rescue Plan and all of the prior COVID relief packages for me is to get the money into the state to keep people afloat during this pandemic.

And while we continue to focus on the healthcare piece and get vaccines out there, which was crucial to opening our economy again, we had to keep people afloat.

We had to keep our businesses able to make sure they could come out of this pandemic and open their doors again, and our travel industry the same.

So that's why it was important to get the money, particularly the American Rescue Plan, which to me was just as crucial as the CARES Act that we had passed previously because of the nature of the impact to our tourism industry.

So it is very important and we've seen the benefits so far, and I'm happy to talk to you about that.

I've just recently been home in Las Vegas and Reno during the recess and saw-- and really have seen incredible things because of the relief money that is coming into our state.

-Well, let's talk about some of those things.

What particularly have you seen that is really a shift from maybe where we were let's say six months ago?

-Yes, there's a couple of things.

So one of the things that was important for me is during this pandemic, I'm concerned about stressors on families and mental health and mental well-being and, you know, this is an area for me that I know even prior to this pandemic, we didn't fund enough resources to address individuals' mental health needs in the state and really across the country.

So it was important during this pandemic to get money into our communities for mental health.

There's legislation I'm working on long term to address this, but during the pandemic because we were making these investments through the COVID relief packages, it was important to put mental health money in.

So just recently I was at my elementary school, Doris Hancock, which is still there, I went to the school to talk with a principal, our state superintendent of schools as well as Clark County superintendent to talk about the just over a billion dollars that's coming to our state for our schools from the American Rescue Plan.

My goal was to talk to them about one, how the money is going to be spent and to ensure some of that goes to mental health and that we are seeing the challenges of our students right now.

I don't have to tell you.

We've seen horrific suicide rates for some of our students and our kids, particularly in Southern Nevada.

And for me, I want to make sure that this money that I have fought for, some of that for our schools goes towards that mental health piece for our students.

And it was a great conversation that I had with the principal there, but also with our state superintendent who really is focused in this area as well.

So I feel really good and confident that they are also going to take some of this money and ensure that we get it to the mental health and needs of our children, particularly our students.

-Very, very important, Senator.

We've covered that topic actually on a recent show, and the thing to remember here is that anxiety levels, you know, the stress levels go up as schools reopen of course in addition to what we saw with our distance education.

Very important part of that.

I want to bring attention too to a population that has been hit very hard during the pandemic: Women, particularly women of color.

In general we've seen the wage gap increase; four times as many women lost their jobs as men, and that's not just because of layoffs.

That is because of critical services like childcare that were reduced during the pandemic.

Let's talk specifically about the American Rescue Plan.

What specifically can that plan do to close some of these gaps?

-Absolutely.

This is a great question because this has been one of my concerns really, you know, even before the pandemic.

Women really had a lot of gains that they still needed to make with equal pay and opportunities in the workforce, so what I saw during this pandemic is we were actually losing women to the workforce because they had to make the decision to stay home because their child now is maybe doing schooling from home or there was no childcare facility for their children.

I mean, there were so many issues, so my concern has been that we're going to lose those gains, the small gains that we made as women in the workforce and particularly for women of color.

So in the American Rescue Plan, it was important that we put funding in there to support our families and our single parents or families, particularly women, who are having to make these decisions.

So we have in there funding for childcare to help some of our shuttered businesses get back to opening again as we tackle the pandemic, get more vaccines out there.

We have invested in the child tax credit, which was key for our families.

The child tax credit lifts so many children out of poverty.

It actually cuts the poverty rate for children in half, and that is more money for our families and their children long term.

Now, granted that's for the length of the American Rescue Plan, which is short term, but the goal for me and I think many of my colleagues is to make that permanent because if we can tackle and make sure we provide the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit for our families, our working families, it lifts many of them out of poverty and it helps our children long term.

This will help those mothers as well who want to be in the workforce but also make sure that their children are taken care of.

So that was part of the American Rescue Plan which, to me, was really an essential resource and tool for working families and particularly mothers.

-I want to turn the conversation to the Republican perspective here.

Not one Republican vote in support of the plan.

A Morning Consult political poll recently reported that 86% of Democrats support the American Rescue Plan, only 25% of Republicans.

I want to ask you, in your outreach you've been doing in the state, what are you emphasizing particularly to that conservative side of our state population?

-Well, let me just put this out here, because this was fascinating to me.

Even before the American Rescue Plan, I was hearing from constituents in our state, both Democrats and Republicans.

I was hearing from, you know, all of our counties, every single one of our counties and the leaders there, that they needed help and they needed this support, and quite honestly, some of our counties in our rural communities couldn't understand why the Republicans did not want to support funding to state and local governments.

You know, I work with not only the local leaders but the associations for Nevada, NACO, our counties, and our Nevada League of Cities, and they also supported the COVID relief packages including what's in the American Rescue Plan because it is bringing relief and support to our communities that have been so hard hit by this pandemic.

So I tell people really there is bipartisan support for the American Rescue Plan.

It's in my state, and it's in many states, because this pandemic really didn't choose whether you're a Democrat or Republican, right?

COVID-19 is not choosing what party you're from whether you're going to be infected or not.

This is about how we lift everybody up, how we support everyone who is struggling because of this pandemic, and that's why these relief packages were so important.

And for me, hearing from constituents in my state, all over the state, there was support for the American Rescue Plan.

Let me give you an example.

The first package, when I was just in Nevada, the cities of Sparks, Reno and Washoe County, the leaders there both Democrats and Republicans, put together a regional homelessness shelter, regionally, to address what they are seeing as an increase in homelessness because of this pandemic.

They funded it through the CARES Act funding.

It's the CARES Campus now, and I was so pleased to see the money that I voted for and fought for going into our community, the communities coming together regionally to support the needs of their constituents, and that's what this is about at the end of the day.

-Senator, we're pretty much out of time.

I just had one extra question for you, if I could really quick.

Responsibility now falls on our state legislature to allocate that $2.7 billion you mentioned from the American Rescue Plan.

I wanted to know, what is the Senate's role, your particular role, in that process now that it is at our state legislature?

-The combination of couple of things here.

Now that we have fought for this money, and it's more than that that's coming into the state.

Let me just say this: I fought for our tourism in this state, and I fought to get a set aside of $750 million to go to economic development agencies to be distributed in grant funding into our state for those communities that are so hard hit because the tourism or travel was so hard hit.

So my goal now is to make sure people are aware of the funding that's available and that we provide at the federal level the technical assistance on how to get access to those funds or to access those grants or to make communities aware of what's available to them.

So that's what my office is doing now.

I think that's a crucial part here: It's one thing to vote for the funding, it's another thing to make sure that people in my community in the state, all over the state, know that there's funding available for them and how to access it.

-Senator, thank you so much for your time.

We appreciate it.

-Thank you.

-As already discussed, the U.S. Treasury Department's release this week of American Rescue Plan spending guidelines comes with only weeks left for Nevada's legislators to make related budget decisions.

To discuss this process, please welcome Senator Scott Hammond.

Senator Hammond, we appreciate having you so much on Nevada Week, especially in a very busy week in legislation right now.

Thank you so much for joining us.

-It's a pleasure to be here, and I look forward to the conversation.

-Well, let's get right into it.

It has been a couple of very busy weeks for legislators in general.

First off, economic forum, very good report two weeks ago: $900 million above previous projections for state revenue.

And then this week, the Treasury Department issues the guidelines on spending for the $2.7 billion in state American Rescue Plan relief.

That's a great thing for our state, but with respect to balancing a budget responsibly, some people might say more money, more problems, particularly with just a couple of weeks left in the session.

What's your take?

(Scott Hammond) Actually, I kind of agree with that statement.

Sometimes when you get a lot of money, you have a lot of people who have either pet projects or have a desire to start putting money into areas that maybe we don't agree with, so you do have a lot more work ahead of you because you have to start talking and agreeing with people on where that money needs to go.

And from my perspective, you have to do that quickly because it's not that hard-- if you think about $2.7 billion, I have a hard time thinking about that.

In my own home budget, I could never imagine that, right?

But it doesn't take long to spend the money for the state because there are a lot of needs, a lot of critical needs, a lot of services that you would like to make sure continue to move forward.

So because it wouldn't take that much time to spend the money, you want to circle up really quickly and figure out what are the most important needs.

So yes, more money, sometimes more problems or in this case, just more work to get to quickly.

-More work to get to quickly.

Let's talk about those more direct pieces of this that need to be filled from the previous summer legislative session and what some of those cuts were, and of course we had $500 million in cuts.

Let's not forget that our unemployment trust fund prior to the pandemic was almost $2 billion, and of course a lot of that was depleted in itself.

And then 300 vacant state employee positions too that need to be refilled.

Like you said, you add those together, and the money can go really quickly.

Do you have any idea of just where you're at in decision-making now and how much of that money, so to speak, is already spent?

-Well, first of all, I have to say this.

I'm really happy with the direction we're going.

When we received the CARES Act money, a lot of that decision-making was put in the hands of the governor, and a lot of times we were just brought in and sort of rubber stamping some of the decisions he was making in very critical times.

We were mitigating the effects of the coronavirus on the population in the state of Nevada.

But this time what we've done is we're putting this money into an executive budget account, and typically what that means for folks that are listening in is the normal process that we would undergo where you have input from the legislature, not just the governor's office but the legislature, is going to be part of that process.

My hope is that we create something that we'll work on with the governor's office and talking about where these needs are and then when we come back and do maybe a special session in the fall most likely, we'll be able to allocate those monies to those specific areas.

One of the first ones that, you know, one of the first areas that I would like to work on and think needs money is what you just mentioned, that trust fund.

Unemployment insurance, I think it was actually about $2.1 billion was what we had in there right before the pandemic hit, and in about five months, we spent that to mitigate-- to pay people off to mitigate the effects, the ill effects of the coronavirus, and then we borrow on top of that about $350 million.

I don't know if we'll be able to put all that money back in right away, and I believe that we should be putting about a billion dollars into that.

And I believe we should be doing that for two reasons, at least, that I can think of.

One, it will help businesses, especially the small businesses that were hit.

It'll help them from having to pay that higher rate in order to pay back the money to the federal government.

That would help small businesses, and it actually helps out the workers because now those businesses can continue to hire folks, pay the salaries and get them working again.

So that's really an important part of that.

And then secondly, we need to start looking at where we can spend the money, and I think every agency-- I'm telling you right now, every agency is trying to figure out where we can spend this money because we've got the guidelines, but it's another thing to go through that 150-page document and make sure that you're going to be spending it.

Before you put that application in, the governor's office is going to put the application together, they're going to have to figure out what is allowable, what's not.

You don't want to put an application together, send it off and have it rejected.

So some of that money could be spent in workforce development both for folks who are seeking employment as adults and probably even money that we could put into career and technical education programs at the high school level to get folks ready because one of the things that we have noticed, at the very height of the pandemic, we had about 8 million job loss in the United States; of that 8 million, you're probably going to see about 3 million just not come back.

There's just some industries, some businesses that are folded up or changed dramatically.

For instance, I don't think a lot of us are ever going to look at the airline industry the same way in terms of business travel.

A lot of people figured out I can do business, you know, online, Zoom.

Zoom became a common word every day.

So there are going to be people who need to be retrained, looking for different employment.

So those dollars could be put there as well, and I think that's an important part.

-It is, Senator, and it's interesting.

You mentioned the restrictions in that 150-page document.

Let's just give kind of an overarching statement from the Treasury Department.

They use the words "broad flexibility" in some of those restrictions, but let's not forget there are specific restrictions.

One of those is not being able to re-input into the rainy day fund as one of those pieces, which is interesting, an interesting part of this conversation because then we have this interplay between this other $900 billion that's coming in that might be able to fill that and then be able to use some of the Rescue Plan money for other things, as you just mentioned.

I wanted to bring up-- you mentioned workforce development, and you mentioned virtual means as well.

There is some language in there that seems to be allowable for things like you just mentioned where, you know, upgrading certain systems, being able to have more virtual means in government agencies could be allowed.

Are those things being examined, particularly for something as you mentioned, workforce development?

-Absolutely, and I think you see that.

The other day the governor was actually in the legislative building.

He was promoting one of his bills, I believe it was SB-- oh, you're going to get me here-- 430?

Yes, I was going to say that, 430.

And SB 430 basically is putting money into the infrastructure bank, a system we put together.

We passed this bill in 2017, and perhaps-- I mean, in looking at it, there's a lot of different things you can do with the infrastructure bank, but he has honed in on one of them, and that is you can take some of this money, this ARP money as we understand it, and put it into infrastructure for high speed, basically trying to get your technology up to speed so folks have access to the internet and have access to these things that are really life-saving in their homes.

So I think you're going to see infrastructure needs there, and I think they'll put money there, broadband is going to expand, but I think they're going to use that infrastructure bank in order to accomplish that goal.

The one thing that we learned in those guidelines is it is very broad, and they mentioned several times it's very broad guidelines, but very specific in what you cannot do.

If you were to ask me four weeks ago, you know, what is one need that we have, I would have said that we need to take a very large chunk of that money and put it into our rainy day fund because we depleted that in the very early stages of the pandemic as well.

But it's very specific in the guidelines you're not allowed to do that.

So we're going to have to figure out a way to put money back in there but it's not going to be with those kind of funds right there.

But instead we are going to see, I think, having a high concentration of infrastructure that will help us in the future, and of course that also includes looking at the unemployment insurance, DETR, the Department of Education, Training and Rehabilitation.

There's going to be some infrastructure needs there as well, upgrades in their technology that will allow them to, you know, navigate between unemployment insurance, and then of course the pandemic unemployment insurance-- pandemic unemployment assistance that came up, PUA, and we have another system called DUA.

Anyway, we need to figure out how to do that so it talks a little bit better with each other and helps people out a lot faster.

We need money in there, and I believe we can use money from the ARP money to do that.

-Let's talk about some of the more landmark bills that we've had in our last couple legislative sessions.

Education funding formula is one of those.

We move to a people-centered formula that was approved in the last legislative session in 2019, and now we have SB 439 being reviewed right now of how then to distribute funds for that people-centered model.

Educate Nevada Now has said and recommended potentially the use of ARP money to kind of get and jumpstart this formula and the system.

Is that an acceptable form of use of this money?

-Again, they have teams of people looking at the guidelines.

Every agency has got different people, and I'll give you an example.

I looked at it.

There's a funding formula for, you know, they're looking at-- what was it-- how the pandemic has impacted your economy, and they're looking at that 4.1% over the last three years.

You know, trying to look back over the previous years before the pandemic hit to see how negatively the pandemic impacted your particular state.

I asked the question what's the formula, and our fiscal team, they have a team of people looking at it, you know, because I was thinking I'll dive into it and try and figure it out.

You got to understand, that was not my major in college so it was a huge undertaking and, you know, they looked at me and said we have teams of people.

So to your point, there's teams of people who are looking at what you can and cannot do.

They're broad, right, the guidelines are broad, but is it allowable or not?

I think it is allowable, the way I look at it.

I think you're going to see that, which would be great, because one of the things about the funding formula and what we've done with it is if we just took a look at the pie as it exists and then redistributed, we cut the pie up a little bit but we didn't add any money.

There's no new revenue to it, so some of these counties, some school districts, they may be negatively impacted by the implementation of the new funding formula.

So if there is any way that we can mitigate that with the use of the funds coming from the federal government, that would be great as we look forward.

But my biggest concern though is when you start putting money towards something like that, you're actually looking at how do you continue that going forward?

How do you sustain that, and that's my biggest worry.

I think that's going to be sort of the give and take between different sides.

I mean, I think you have to look at infrastructure and look at one-shot deals.

I'm really cautious about putting money into anything that would expand government or require upkeep, maintenance on any kind of new program because then now you're talking about new revenue that we don't have in the state and we can't generate unless we increase taxes somewhere.

-Senator Hammond, we appreciate your time so much.

Thank you.

-Thank you for having me.

-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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