The Nevada Legislature has started its retro-19th Century, every-other-year scramble to adjourn with minimal damage to the body politick.
This year, the lineup is stocked with starry-eyed newbies proposing windmills of laws worthy of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. It’s all a hangover of President Ronald the Vague’s fabled and fatuous pronouncement that “government is the problem.”
Nevada Reaganauts pushed a lot of “reforms” to damage government as badly as possible. Even some otherwise intelligent Democrats voted to limit legislative sessions to four month sevey two years in addition to other strictures.
The Republican Party backed a constitutional amendment imposing political term limits. Critics noted that once experienced dinosaurs had been expunged, lobbyists would be more powerful than ever. They don’t suffer from term limits.
Most lobbyists serve a very valuable function. They are experts on their issues and provide important information to legislators and staffers in the shaping of the law. But term limits arguably tilt the playing field in favor of big money which can afford the staff, time and money to outgun unpaid private citizens.
Nevada voters cemented term limits into the state constitution in 1996.
The GOP’s real purpose, of course, lay in the usual: power.
Most of the time since WW2, Democrats have dominated the Nevada legislature largely due to the growth of Gomorrah South. The membership has always turned over every two years but some lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans, had careers that were decades-long. There is something to be said for the value of experience.
Conservative money interests funded the campaign to place term limits on the ballot. As usual, the issue first ended up in the Nevada Supreme Court which cut the baby in half. Instead of one term limit amendment, the blackrobes imposed two.
The first, which passed, established term limits for state and local legislative and executive offices. The second, created by the court, applied only to the judiciary. It failed and Nevada’s judges were permanently spared the embarrassment of forced retirement save at the polls, which rarely happens. Judicial races are usually very low profile and most incumbents run unopposed.
The independent judiciary independently thus awarded itself job security.
In Washoe County, term limits have recently resulted in lots of new faces on elective bodies. Same with the legislature.
CLINGING TO THE LEDGE. One Carson City freshmen (are we supposed to say freshpersons now?) wants a state lottery to fund mental health care, a laudable goal. Noting the success of the California state lottery which began in mid-1980s, the gambling-industrial complex got lotteries banned on this side of the state line.
As an alternative, the casino overlords established the Megabucks progressive slot machine program, whereby one-armed bandits statewide would be electronically linked to offer a very handsome payday for one lucky winner. It apparently failed. Witness the long lines of Nevadans traveling to play the national lottery in California.
California lottery proceeds were earmarked for education, an attempted remedy for the destruction wrought by Ronald Reagan’s two terms as governor followed in 1978 by the Proposition 13 permanent property tax cuts.
The California legislature indeed devoted all lottery proceeds to education. And shunted the same amount toward other budgets so the net effect for schools was zero. I guarantee gambling lobbyists will bring up that history if the newbie lottery bill even gets a hearing.
Nevada’s schools will remain underfunded because the gambling and mining industries want it that way. In 2016, Washoe County voters were presented a punitive and regressive sales tax increase versus nothing to build new schools and maintain old ones. Education “activists” thus carefully avoided pissing off the gamblers. It worked, so people like low-wage Sparks Nugget dishwashers or fixed-income seniors take the worst hit.
The gross gaming tax on the largest, most profitable casinos has not been raised since 2003 and even then, the hike was small. It remains just about the lowest in the world. The 1931 deal to legalize Silver State gambling was that casinos would fund government services. Not anymore. Sales taxes on dishwashers long ago became the principal source of funding for Nevada government services like parks, roads, schools and first responders.
Freshperson Gov. Giuseppe Lumbago has made a big deal of increasing per-pupil funding by about two grand annually. That won’t dig our schools out of the sub-basement.
He touted spending lots of money in many places, conveniently ignoring that much of it came from that despicable problem, the federal government. Speaking of sins of omission…
30 LASHES WITH A WET NOODLE DEPT. Reno Fire Chief Dave Cochran just got hit with a state ethics violation for appearing in a 2022 campaign ad for Democratic U.S. Sen Catherine Cortez-Masto. At the same time, Republican Gov. Lumbago wallpapered the state with ads showing him in full Las Vegas Sheriff drag and apparently nobody heard a discouraging word. Speaking of discouraging outfits…
KEOLIS-19 LOSES AGAIN. The contractor mismanaging the local mass transit system just got fired by the Gomorrah South Regional Transportation Commission. LV even went with the highest of three bidders.
Foreign-owned Keolis turned the Reno-Sparks-Washoe system into a COVID-19 superspreader and lost a hat trick of strikes to the Teamsters Union in 2021. RTCRide workers could again walk out anytime if strikers from Virginia come to town and establish picket lines.
Sparks Mayor Ed Lawson, current Washoe RTC chair, said the current system needs to be reinvented. Of course, money-wasting Keolis-19 is the place to start. So let’s get it on.
INVESTIGATIVE DEPORTING. The $2 billion libel case filed by Dominion Voting Systems against the Fox Fake News Machine could destroy the First Amendment. Rupert Murdoch’s outfit will appeal any loss and the moonhowler majority on the nation’s highest court, already under right-wing pressure to negate current standards, could use the Dominion action to place freedom of the press in a coffin.
GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE DEPT. Last Friday, conservative Republican NYTimes columnist David Brooks proposed radically changing local education by establishing “micro-schools” with smaller student bodies.
Hmmm…where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, here, a few weeks ago.
Stay safe, get vaxxed and pray for Ukraine and other currently war-torn lands, now up to 63.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Quarantino Barbano is a 54-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com/ Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us
Leave a Reply