Sunday, June 2, 2019 | 2:44 p.m.
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CARSON CITY — With hours left in the Nevada Legislative session, lawmakers are working on a handful budgetary bills to fund the state government for the next biennium.
The bills would fund employee pay, appropriations, capital improvement, K-12 education and more, and must be passed before the Legislature concludes Monday in order to keep state services funded.
Arguably the most significant bill — the K-12 education funding allocation — was passed Sunday by the Senate.
Lawmakers have around $8.8 billion to use from the state’s general fund, based on projections from the Economic Forum, a body that sets the projections to build the budget. That body’s projection last session sat at around $7.9 billion.
Education bill — Senate Bill 555 sets education funding for the next biennium, including per-pupil funding.
The bill sets the average total per-pupil funding at $10,227 per pupil for Fiscal Year 2019-2020 and at $10,319 per pupil for Fiscal Year 2020-2021.
The money being moved to the Distributive School Account from the general fund is around $1.17 billion for Fiscal Year 2019-2020, and around $1.16 billion for Fiscal Year 2020-2021. Those numbers are slightly lower than the general fund allocations last sessions, which came out to $1.19 and $1.18 billion for Fiscal Years 2017-2018 and 2018-2019, respectively.
The bill also allocates funds toward Victory and Zoom Schools, who have enhanced programs to serve low-income and English-language learner populations.
Education funding has been a contentious issue this session, with lawmakers attempting to overhaul the state’s aging funding formula, the Nevada Plan, with the Pupil-Centered Funding Plan. The proposal would see per-pupil funding for students with further needs — such as English language learning or low income — follow the student if they were to switch schools.
A statement from Lola Brooks, trustee president of the Clark County School District, and Jesus Jara, the CCSD superintendent, supported the bill, while calling for passage of the education funding formula.
“We want to thank Governor Sisolak, Speaker Frierson, Majority Leader Cannizzaro and other legislative leaders for the additional funding put into K-12 public education with Senate Bill 555,” the statement read. “We look forward to continuing to work with legislative leaders on education priorities in the final days of the session. The per-pupil numbers demonstrate the inequities in how we fund public education. That’s why it’s critical that legislators support SB 543 and modernize our funding formula.”
State employee pay bill — Assembly Bill 542 authorizes a pay raise of 3% all state employees, a goal of Gov. Steve Sisolak.
These raises would be implemented by July 1 of this year and be funded by transfers of $13.5 million from the highway fund, and $62.9 million from the state general fund over the next biennium.
The bill has passed through the Assembly unanimously.
Appropriations bill — Assembly Bill 543 sets the amount of money state agencies will get from the state’s general fund over the next biennium. It differs from an authorization bill in that it provides the funding for the authorized spending.
The authorization bill says what an agency can spend on certain programs, and an appropriations bill gives the agencies the money.
This bill hits essentially every agency in the state, from the governor’s office to universities.
Under this bill, UNR will receive almost $235.2 million split over the fiscal years of the next biennia, and UNLV will receive around $326.3 million. This is strictly money appropriated to the university as a whole — for example, the UNLV School of Medicine would receive almost $77 million split over the biennia and the UNR School of Medicine will receive around $75.2 in the same period.
Allocations can shift, as, for example, the attorney general’s administration fund will receive around $325,500 less throughout the next two fiscal years than it did in the last two. The allocation drops around $1.6 million between Fiscal Year 2019-2020 and Fiscal Year 2020-2021.
However, these allocations are not the only resources that departments have access to. For example, the attorney general’s office will receive, in some cases, almost twice as much in receipts from the Attorney General Cost Allocation Plan over the next two years as compared to the last two. The allocation plan is explained by the governor’s finance office as the “recovery of costs for legal and investigative services provided by the Office of the Attorney General to state agencies as well as administrative expenses of the office.”
The Secretary of State’s office would also receive around $1.7 million more over the next biennium to assist in ongoing efforts to implement the automatic voter registration measure passed in November 2018.
Capital improvement bill — Assembly Bill 541 authorizes funding for capital improvement projects around the state. The projects this bill covers can range from the large to the mundane, from constructing buildings to replacing refrigerators.
The bill allocates quite a bit of money toward higher education renovations, including over $11.5 million for “deferred maintenance” at the Nevada System of Higher Education, over $55.8 million to construct an education academic building at Nevada State College and over $70.7 million to construct a health and sciences building at the College of Southern Nevada, the most expensive single project.
The Henderson City Council voted in March to pledge $500,000 to the building. CSN staff supported the measure at a March 5 meeting of the council, with Peter Lanagan, the interim Dean of Science and Math, stating the building would allow for additional health science courses and CSN president Federico Zaragoza stating the building would allow the college to accept more nursing students.
The bill would also, among other allocations, send almost $1.4 million to the Valley of Fire State Park for renovations and replacement of “comfort stations” in the park, fund renovation and installation projects at correction centers around the state such as an $3.8 million cooling tower replacement project at the Southern Desert Correctional Center and allocate over $8 million for advance planning of renovations at the Grant Sawyer Office Building in Las Vegas.
The bill has passed through the Assembly unanimously.
Authorization bill — Senate Bill 553 sets the amount of money that state agencies can spend throughout the next biennia.
The authorization process is specific, with the bill authorizing expenditures in each agency based on the projects they will fund.
For example, the attorney general’s office has been allowed over $3.5 million in the next fiscal year to go toward the Medicare Fraud Control Unit, over $4.7 million to go toward the Bureau of Consumer Protection and a little over $390,000 for victims of domestic violence.
The state’s universities also got their approved expenditure numbers under this bill. With both allocations and tuition and fees UNR can spend around $230 million in the next fiscal year, while UNLV can spend around $269.5 million in the same period.
