Saturday, March 15, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
The measure, expected Monday in the Assembly as the Legislature starts its ninth week, would raise sales taxes in southern Nevada by a quarter-cent to help finish a second water supply pipe from Lake Mead to Las Vegas.
Anticipating the bill's introduction, the Assembly Infrastructure Committee has scheduled a hearing on the sales tax plan for Wednesday.
Nevada's gambling industry also has proposed a 1 percent room tax hike in Las Vegas to help pay for the city's huge infrastructure needs.
There's also talk of a business tax hike and other revenue-generating proposals - but the industry isn't suggesting what some critics say is long overdue: an increase in its main 6.25 percent "net proceeds" levy.
Other action Monday will include a Senate Judiciary work session on bills dealing with sex offenders and domestic violence victims. They include one allowing for chemical castration of repeat offenders, and another providing for involuntary lockups of sexually violent predators.
Also Monday, Assembly Ways and Means will review spending plans of the state Economic Development Commission and Tourism Commission. The budgets for the panels include a request for a sizeable increase in grants for events like cowboy poetry gathering in Elko and Shakespeare at Lake Tahoe.
Ways and Means also will review a bill to help cover the nearly $4 million cost of sending up to 300 Nevada convicts to prisons elsewhere in the country - using the services of a "bed broker" company based in Oklahoma.
On Tuesday, Senate-Assembly budget subcommittees will review various state welfare programs, parole and probation programs and the state Department of Prisons.
The prison budget review will include discussion of various prison construction and expansion projects in the works in efforts to keep up with an increasing convict population.
Also Tuesday, Senate Commerce and Labor will hold a work session on bills aimed at stopping deceptive trade practices. The panel also plans to discuss an age discrimination measure.
And Assembly Education plans a hearing Tuesday on a bill making kindergarten attendance mandatory in Nevada.
In addition to the Assembly Infrastructure hearing Wednesday on the sales tax plan, Assembly Judiciary plans a midweek hearing on a bill to raise the excise tax on liquor to generate more money for treatment of alcohol- and drug-abusers.
Judiciary Chairman Bernie Anderson, D-Sparks, pushed similar legislation in the 1995 session but it was shelved after running into opposition from the liquor and casino industries. And Gov. Bob Miller has taken a strong no-new-taxes stance this session.
A related rehabilitation measure to be discussed by the panel would establish a drug and alcohol treatment coordinator within the Department of Prisons.
On Thursday, Assembly Ways and Means will review the State Industrial Insurance System, which after extensive budget belt-tightening has managed to reduce its unfunded liability to just under $1 billion - down from $2.2 billion a few years ago.
And on Friday, a joint Assembly-Senate budget subcommittee will go over proposed state funding for Nevada's public schools. Efforts to expand class-size reduction in the schools - a project pushed for years by Gov. Miller - also will be discussed.
archive
