When a lawsuit was filed seeking to block state funding for a glitzy new baseball stadium on the Las Vegas Strip for the relocating Oakland Athletics, the court wasn’t in Las Vegas or Clark County.

Instead, that lawsuit and others challenging state laws or related to elections tend to be filed in the First Judicial District Court, located in Carson City and serving Nevada’s seat of government. 

Unlike Clark County, whose district court consists of 58 judges, the First Judicial District Court has only two judges and no public access to online court documents or hearings. That means members of the public must attend hearings in person rather than watch a livestream, call or email the clerk to learn about when hearings are scheduled rather than search that on their own, and request the clerk find and send documents to them instead of serving themselves — a process that can take days.

Frustration over the lack of transparency on some of the state’s most important cases led Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager (D-Las Vegas) to sponsor AB490, a bill in the 2025 legislative session that would have moved initiative petition disputes out of the First Judicial District Court and to other courts that have electronic access to documents and hearings.

“It's really frustrating to not be able to access, particularly the oral arguments and the documents online,” Yeager said in an interview, saying it wasn’t practical to expect the majority of Nevadans who live outside of Carson City to physically request or see court documents. 

The bill faced no opposition during hearings in both the Senate and Assembly. Though the bill — which passed mostly on party lines with Republicans opposed and was vetoed by Gov. Joe Lombardo — failed, the Carson City court system is on track to launch an online case management system, funded with money secured by the Administrative Office of the Courts, by next year that will allow members of the public to view court calendars, search cases and view court filings for free.

“The goal is to have greater access to court records for the public, and also balance the need for documents that are confidential,” Carson City Courts Administrator Max Cortes said in an interview.

Alexander Falconi, CEO and founder of Our Nevada Judges, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit aimed at educating the public on court operations, judges and judicial elections, called Lombardo’s veto “disappointing,” and said not having access to online court documents shrouded important political disputes in secrecy and hindered timely and accurate reporting. He cited a 2024 study from the Nevada Open Government Coalition that found 15 of 17 counties in the state did not have online portals through which the public can search cases.

Falconi described working with the First Judicial District Court as "frustrating," because the court has no online docketing or filing system, and staff were sometimes unresponsive to media inquiries.

“There's this notion that if the press can't get access to the court, they’re just going to go away. What can and does happen, however, is that a story is published with less accuracy than it could have had,” Falconi said.

What the bill did and why it was vetoed

The bill originally sought to move cases where the First Judicial District Court had exclusive jurisdiction (such as lawsuits to remove ineligible voters) to courts with at least three judges and electronic access to court documents. Through subsequent amendments, the bill would only affect lawsuits involving initiative petitions — proposed ballot measures that in the most recent cycle, dealt with topics from a voter ID requirement to abortion rights and stopping public financing of the A’s stadium.

Yeager said proposed initiative petitions are almost always challenged in court, and he found it difficult to follow news on those kinds of court cases because of the lack of publicly available detail — which could affect his job as a state lawmaker, as certain kinds of initiatives can end up before the Legislature for approval.

Yeager said another issue is that the First Judicial District Court only has two judges, and if there was a situation in which both judges recused themselves, a non-elected senior judge, who is unaccountable to the public, would preside over an important case — such as in 2022 when the state’s new political maps were challenged after redistricting or in a 2024 lawsuit challenging initiative petitions for an independent redistricting commission.

Additionally, Yeager noted the judges who preside over the most consequential cases for the entire state are elected by a smaller population of Carson City that is less representative of Nevada’s whole population.

Though Yeager narrowed the scope of the bill, it was still vetoed by Lombardo, who wrote in his June 2 veto message that the bill “diminishes the value of learned expertise” that Carson City judges attain with experience working on initiative petition cases. 

Lombardo also raised separation of powers concerns in his veto message, questioning why the Legislature should make conditions on where a case can be heard. He also said the court’s ability to review cases should not be based on its ability to implement an electronic filing and storage system.

The governor’s office never expressed any of those concerns during the legislative session, Yeager said. 

A spokesperson for the governor’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“I was pretty surprised when it got vetoed, and my expectation would have been that there would have been some communication from the governor or his legislative team,” he said. 

Lombardo, who was the Clark County sheriff before becoming governor, appointed the two current justices in January 2024 and October 2024.

What’s next

Notwithstanding the bill and veto, the Carson City courts are moving forward with a new case management system aiming to launch next year.

Part of the difficulty in adopting online access in Carson City is that the three courts — district, justice and municipal — are consolidated under a single administration, meaning the three courts share technologies, courtrooms, administrative staff and judges. 

Over the past year, Cortes said staff has been preparing for the new e-filing system by sorting through which documents are confidential and which aren’t. Cortes added that documents deemed not confidential will be able to be viewed by the public in the new system.

The technological advances were a change that was needed for a long time, Cortes said.

“The goal would be to have cases with those documents to be viewable, to be searched, to be copied, so that we can have more access to those files,” Cortes said.