Legislature might get messy near the end

Sunday, May 19, 2013 | 2 a.m.

The Nevada Legislature has reached the point in every session when lawmakers, lobbyists and reporters ask: Is it going to end on time?

This year, an ugly combination of factors is working against lawmakers as they struggle to close a $6.6 billion budget and move scores of major bills: a cadre of first-time leaders in both houses, a legislative staff sapped by turnover, partisan deadlock over taxes and a bevy of personality conflicts within each party.

So far, after 104 days of legislating, just 12 bills have made it to Gov. Brian Sandoval’s desk. Hundreds remain trapped in legislative committees. And the biggest budgets are still up in the air.

Now, with just two weeks until the Legislature adjourns, the pressure to bring the session to a close is intensifying.

Lawmakers from both parties are working late into the night to reach agreement on legislation. Weekends are no longer free. Money committees are madly working through Sandoval’s proposed budget, saving the big accounts such as education for last.

Amid all the work, however, is a pressing tension, not just among lawmakers of opposing parties but within each party, as well — most notably among the Democratic majorities in both houses.

To some extent, Democrats in the Assembly and in the Senate have been working in their own silos, crafting their own priority legislation and even their own tax policy without a great deal of collaboration between the two houses.

Two years ago, when the majority party decided to release its tax proposal, Democrats called a giant press conference, where Assembly and Senate leaders argued the case for a billion-dollar tax increase.

This year, no grand tax plan has been presented, but two much smaller ones have been floated separately by Democrats — one from Assembly Speaker Marilyn Kirkpatrick and one from the Senate Democratic caucus.

It was clear from the rollout of the two proposals that while Democrats in both houses knew what the other side was working on, they didn't work together on a shared plan.

Indeed, Kirkpatrick’s proposal to levy an 8 percent tax on entertainment admission tickets did not draw resounding support from her counterparts in the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Mo Denis, D-Las Vegas, praised her attempt to craft a broad-based tax with few exemptions but then questioned whether it is politically feasible to tax every activity she wants to tax.

Sen. Kelvin Atkinson, D-North Las Vegas, was even more blunt in his criticism.

“I think it’s going to be difficult for her,” he said. “It’s a tax on pretty much anything. It has the ability to affect the families in my district big-time.”

Besides, Atkinson added, “We’re working on our own thing.”

That “thing” is a proposed increase in the payroll tax paid by businesses with payrolls larger than $250,000 a year. A larger payroll tax hike would be assessed on mining.

Senate Democrats, as a group, also are working on a “long-term solution” for stabilizing the state’s tax structure, but the details haven’t been released yet.

Kirkpatrick was complimentary of the Senate Democrats’ proposal.

“What else is there?” she asked. “We have to do something.”

Denis denied that work is being done without communication between the two houses. He said the tax proposal presented by Kirkpatrick is exactly what his caucus was expecting.

But while senators were kept in the loop on the bill, they weren’t exactly part of crafting it, nor were they successfully rallied for their support on the measure.

Perhaps more troubling than lack of cohesion on a tax plan — after all, lawmakers can simply pass Sandoval’s proposed budget if they can’t agree on an alternative, as unpalatable as that may be to some — Democrats also have scores of major policy bills that have yet to be heard in the opposite house.

Technically, all policy bills should have been passed out of the house of origin by April 23.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, lawmakers took many of the most important bills — and those they worried might find hostile territory in the opposite house — and stuck them in their own money committees for safekeeping.

The move essentially keeps a bill alive in a kind of purgatory between the Senate and Assembly, protecting it from the opposite house until the last possible moment.

As of last week, the Senate Finance committee was holding on to 99 policy bills, including a bill to create a dispensary system for medical marijuana, a voter identification bill, a measure that would provide state oversight of water rate increases and a fuel tax bill.

The Assembly Ways and Means committee also is holding on to 99 policy bills, including legislation on construction defects litigation, energy tax credit bills and one to create a special tax district for UNLV to build a new stadium.

The centerpiece energy bill — a measure that would require NV Energy to divest from coal and launch a massive construction program to build new natural gas and renewable energy power plants — has yet to see the light of day in the Assembly, with just 15 days to go.

“Those are the bills I’m most worried about,” Atkinson said of the policy bills still stuck in their house of origin. “It’s a misperception that all Democrats have the same goals. We have different constituencies that demand different things from us."

To protect those varied interests, lawmakers routinely hold hostage bills important to their adversaries as an insurance policy for seeing their own measures passed out of the opposite house.

Assembly Majority Leader William Horne, D-Las Vegas, said lawmakers aren’t holding hostages this session.

“Those aren’t the conversations we’re having,” he said.

Lawmakers are constitutionally required to bring the session to a close within 120 days — that clock runs out June 3.

If lawmakers fail to finish on time, the governor can call them back to a special session. And, for the first time ever, lawmakers can call themselves back to a special session — but not without a two-thirds vote.

That potential is unlikely, unless they fail to finish the budget.

Sen. Debbie Smith, D-Sparks, who is chairwoman of the Senate Finance Committee, said lawmakers are working furiously to ensure that doesn’t happen.

But if they want to pass anything significantly different than what Sandoval has proposed, they will have to figure out a way to pay for it.

On that point, no consensus is in sight.

Still, Smith is optimistic the session will come to a close — even if it happens over bitter disputes that remain unresolved.

“It’s never very clean,” Smith said of bringing a legislative session to a close. “In fact, it can be a bit messy. But we will get it done and done on time.”