Too limiting: Why Nevada needs legislative sessions every year

Monday, May 16, 2016 | 2 a.m.

A recent gathering of politicians, businesspeople and other civic leaders at UNLV offered an insightful peek behind the curtain to see how sausage is made in the Nevada Legislature.

The view was both uplifting and discouraging.

On the one hand, it was instructive to see how issues for the 2017 Legislature are identified. The city of Las Vegas and the Las Vegas Metro Chamber of Commerce hosted a series of meetings, open to the public and known as the Southern Nevada Forum, for interested residents to ruminate on the main issues that dominate political decision-making in Carson City: K-12 education, higher education, transportation infrastructure, economic development, health care and good governance, which goes to the heart of this editorial.

State senators and Assembly members from both parties — but hopefully with their biases being pro-Southern Nevada versus their party affiliation — chaired these meetings, and many good ideas for legislative bills were proposed with great justification. Some projects cost a lot of money, others not so much. This process reflected healthy, grass-roots brainstorming. The goal is to assist our part-time, citizen legislators in setting priorities to improve the quality of life for Nevadans and the future of our state.

The discouraging part of the exercise that played out at UNLV on May 5 was having to decide which of these ideas should be forwarded to Carson City for legislative consideration, and which should be left for some future biennial Legislature. In each general topic, only three good ideas were to be forwarded to lawmakers for consideration. Why the limit? Because ours is a part-time Legislature that meets every other year, and like a freeway on-ramp that is metered to control the amount of traffic entering the vehicular fray, our part-time legislators, meeting for just 120 days, can introduce, study, debate and vote on only so many bills before the session ends.

As a result, a limited number of bill draft requests, called BDRs, can be made for each session; politicians with the most power get the lion’s share. For instance, the speaker of the Assembly and the Senate majority leader can request 20 bill drafts, while a newly elected member of the Assembly gets six. The attorney general can request 20 bills, the lieutenant governor just three. The Clark County Commission can ask for four bills, and Carson City, our state capital, is allowed just one bill request. In both cases, those requests have to be filed five months ahead of the session.

Granted, the cynics among us, and famously Mark Twain, would think our elected representatives already are making too many laws. But the fact is, lawmakers should not be restricted in the number of bills they are allowed to consider because it artificially limits the number of serious issues that need to be addressed. That limit is a function of how much the Legislature thinks it can accomplish in four months every two years. It’s a madcap rush, sometimes with a last wave of bills being heard as the final day’s clock approaches midnight and laws are passed with typos and confused intentions.

We need to slow down. Ours is one of only four legislatures — the others being Montana's, North Dakota's and Texas's — that meet every two years. It is naïve to think our elected state representatives can smartly govern the state and lead us into a new Nevada if they meet just four months out of 24. Lawmakers have no real chance to reform our budgeting process, reorganize our mental health system or even just to appropriate money to update our aging electronic voting machines. Granted, certain legislative committees can meet between sessions, but that only serves to concentrate power into the hands of a relative few.

As a state, Nevada has got a lot on its plate that needs careful consideration and action. We shouldn’t brag about our part-time, biennial Legislature. It’s time to grow up.