Tom R. Smedes / AP
Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, right, speaks before signing an election worker protection bill into law as Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar looks on at the old Assembly Chambers in Carson City, Nev., Tuesday, May 30, 2023.
Published Tuesday, June 6, 2023 | 7:23 p.m.
Updated Wednesday, June 7, 2023 | 10:19 p.m.
CARSON CITY — The Oakland Athletics’ search for a new home drew Nevada lawmakers into a special legislative session Wednesday to weigh whether the state should cover $380 million of the $1.5 billion stadium planned for the Las Vegas Strip.
The governor's proclamation comes on the heels of a special session that ended late Tuesday in which both houses of the Legislature approved a $1.2 billion proposal for capital improvements, which had faltered in Nevada Senate when a vote didn’t occur before the constitutionally required end of the regular session.
The capital improvements program, Assembly Bill 1 of the special session, which was identical to Assembly Bill 521 of the regular session, needed a two-thirds supermajority vote to pass because it renews a property tax increase. In Tuesday's special session, four Republican lawmakers — three in the House and a pivotal one in the Senate — broke ranks from their caucuses to send the bill to Lombardo, whose office declined to comment on whether the governor would sign it.
But shortly before midnight, the governor turned his attention to the deal he helped broker with representatives of the Oakland A's in which Nevada taxpayers would provide up to $380 million in public assistance, partly through $180 million in transferable tax credits and $120 million in county bonds, which are taxpayer-backed loans, to help finance projects and a special tax district around a new 30,000-seat stadium with a retractable roof at the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue. Backers have pledged the district would generate enough money to pay off those bonds and interest.
The A's would not owe property taxes for the publicly owned stadium and Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, also would contribute $25 million in credit toward infrastructure costs.
The stadium has the backing of the the powerful Nevada tourism industry, including the Culinary Union, a 60,000-member group of workers on the Las Vegas Strip, which won a promise that stadium employees would be able to unionize.
The capital improvements program was one of five major budget bills lawmakers considered during the 120-day, biennial regular session of the Legislature
Republican State Sen. Scott Hammond, R-Las Vegas, voted with all 13 Democratic senators to provide the two-thirds margin in the Senate. The Assembly vote was 30-11 with Republicans P.K. O'Neill of Carson City, the minority leader, Danielle Gallant of Las Vegas and Rich DeLong of Reno joining 27 Assembly Democrats to pass the measure. Assemblywoman Sarah Peters, D-Reno, was listed as excused and did not vote.
The capital improvement program includes nearly $214 million to replace the Grant Sawyer State Office Building near downtown Las Vegas, $106 million for a new Department of Motor Vehicles office, and allocations for other projects ranging from expanded fire safety programs to a new wastewater system for the Department of Corrections.
“Tonight, one of our Republican colleagues finally came to their senses and agreed to pass our remaining budget bill after Republicans threw us into an unnecessary and wasteful special legislative session,” Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro said in a statement. “This bill should have been passed last night before our regular session adjourned, and Republicans’ refusal to do so was pointless, irresponsible, and a violation of our agreement with Governor Lombardo.
However, now that the bill is passed, the state can finally move forward with major investments in facilities for veterans, youth, people seeking mental health treatment, public safety, and everyday government services.”
Republican lawmakers had objected that charter schools had been excluded from most of the major education bills passed this session. They were seeking raises for charter school teachers, as well as increased capital improvement allocations for charter schools.
Governor vetoes aid-in-dying bill
Lombardo became the first governor nationally to veto a bill that would have allowed terminally ill adults the option to end their life with medication prescribed by a doctor.
“End of life decisions are never easy,” Lombardo wrote in his veto message about Senate Bill 239, the so-called End of Life Options Act. “Individuals and family members must often come together to face many challenges — including deciding what is the best course of medical treatment for a loved one. Fortunately, expansions in palliative care services and continued improvements in advanced pain management make the end-of-life provisions in SB 239 unnecessary.
“Given recent progress in science and medicine and the fact only a small number of states and jurisdictions allow for similar end-of-life protocols, I am not comfortable supporting this bill.”
Ten states allow medical aid-in-dying, including California, Hawaii, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Montana.
Opponents of the bill warned the statute could have been used to harm mentally indigent, disabled and otherwise marginalized people who might be coerced into ending their life. But supporters, including terminally sick patients, maintain more than 82% of Nevadans support the practice that allows an ending to “unbearable suffering.”
“Governor Lombardo has failed to provide relief for dying Nevadans like me who wanted all the medical options this bill provided,” Lynda Brooks-Bracey, a 57-year-old Las Vegas mother of four dying of metastatic pancreatic cancer and advocate for the policy, said in a statement. “It’s sad to me and my family that our governor did not allow his terminally ill constituents to be heard.”
Veto on prescription drug cost cap
Lombardo also vetoed Assembly Bill 250, a Democrat-backed bill that made it to his desk along partisan lines that aimed to cap prescription drug prices at a rate negotiated by Medicare as prescribed by the Inflation Reduction Act passed last year by Congress.
In his veto message, Lombardo said Medicare’s “Maximum Fair Price” ceiling does “not reference prices or objective external benchmarks rather, they are prices that manufacturers are compelled to make available with respect to Medicare beneficiaries because failure to do so will result in an excise tax, of an amount up to 1900% of daily sales and, potentially, an exclusion from doing business with Medicare and Medicaid in the future.”
The governor added that reliance on the ceiling would undermine Congress.
“Critically, AB 250 would set arbitrary price caps in Nevada based on federal decisions with no review or consideration from state stakeholders,” Lombardo wrote. ”These caps could restrict patients’ access to medicines and result in less innovative treatments for patients.
“Though price-setting policies are often aimed at the admirable goal of increasing access to care, the unintended consequences of many, if not most, related pricing regulations have been a decrease in innovation as bureaucratic entities tend to focus their investments on the policies or diseases they determine to be most worthy of support — not on patient-outcomes.”
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