CARSON CITY – For people who’ve followed the misfortune of Nevada state government, Tuesday in snowy Carson City was nothing new. There was testimony about budget cuts proposed by Gov. Jim Gibbons. There were lamentations from unions, students, education officials and others about budget cuts. And a consensus began to emerge, at least on some issues, toward what might be the final solution to the Legislature’s solution to the budget mess.
Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley set the tone early in the day, with brief remarks after calling her chamber to order. “What I think is paramount to this body is to avoid the cuts to education,” she said. “Our kids will never recover … you can’t get back a fourth grade.”
She added: “I think that, working together, we can do better than the proposed cuts to education.”
And it was Buckley who pressed state Budget Director Andrew Clinger on the real size of the state cut to K-12 education, which had been variously reported at 10 percent (the Legislature) or 2.4 percent (Gibbons’s administration). Without adding in federal and other funds that go to schools, the state’s portion of the cut is, in fact, 10 percent, or $130 million.
In the Senate, Majority Leader Steven Horsford agreed, and said cuts to health and human services should also be reduced beyond the governor’s recommendations. “We must protect education and other vital services,” Horsford said after a long day of hearings. “We believe those cuts are too much.”
Consensus was also emerging on other fronts. Horsford and Buckley (among other lawmakers) said a proposal to allow a private company — InsureNet — to set up cameras on Nevada roadways to scan license plates and issue citations to drivers without registration or insurance was dead. In addition, they (and Assembly Minority Leader Heidi Gansert, a Republican) said a plan to reduce the mining industry’s tax deductions was also dead, the victim of constitutional concerns. (Any change in deductions could and likely would be challenged in court.)
However, Buckley and Horsford said they were negotiating with the mining industry for additional fees that would help defray the budget shortfall, yet be agreed to by the industry, a key issue. Gibbons and his administration have said that the governor will only approve fees on industries that agree to the levies. But Horsford said the fee option would likely generate more than the $50 million expected from the mining tax reduction plan.
As this is written, leaders were headed into a “core group” meeting, in which lawmakers were expected to see if a consensus had emerged on other cuts or fee increases. Much like the 2009 session, it appears the negotiations were primarily between Assembly and Senate, Republicans and Democrats, not Gibbons or his administration. “We’re hopeful that the governor will sign on,” Buckley said cagily when asked if he was participating in talks.
(The governor was distracted for part of the day Tuesday because of fallout from a television interview in which he obviously lied about traveling with Kathy Karrasch, a woman to whom he’s been romantically linked in the past. He apologized for telling KLAS Channel 8 I-Team reporter Jonathan Humbert that he wasn’t traveling with Karrasch, who was seen on tape at Reno-Tahoe International Airport trying to dodge Channel 8 cameras and later getting into the governor’s state-owned SUV.)
For his part, Horsford said this: “We’re going to work together as a Legislature in a bipartisan way, as we did in 2009.” Gibbons was notoriously absent from the 2009 session, vetoing a record number of bills and suffering a record number of veto overrides.
Tags: Barbara Buckley, Jim Gibbons, Nevada Legislature, Steven Horsford
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