Behind the Bar: The push for a smaller Board of Regents
Behind the Bar is The Nevada Independent’s newsletter devoted to comprehensive and accessible coverage of the 2023 Legislature.
In today’s edition: A look at the latest push to reshape the board in charge of higher education, vis-a-vis how many people get to be on the board. Plus, a new poll finds a supermajority of respondents don’t know about the public option, grad students are ready for higher stipends, and the return of the vaunted LIGHTNING ROUND.
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Days until:
- Last day for bill introductions: 24
- First house passage deadline: 53
- Sine die: 94
How many regents is too many regents?
The legal underpinnings of the Board of Regents, which governs the Nevada System of Higher Education, are back on the menu this session with AB118.
The bill would knock down the number of regents from 13 to nine, and reduce the length of their terms from six years to four. Sponsor Assemblyman Howard Watts (D-Las Vegas) couched the bill as an accountability measure — allowing regents to face re-election twice, rather than once, during statutory 12-year term limits — and argued that the board is significantly larger than other equivalent education boards, or even county commissions.
But the bill also comes as an echo of past attempts to retool how the regents function in the wake of controversy, personnel disputes and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent in big-money contract buyouts and severance.
Presenting the bill Thursday, Watts told the Assembly Education Committee that the frustration from years of regents-related controversy and tension with legislators “has resulted in a level of distrust from the Legislature” that led to funding cuts and projects going unapproved.
“And at the end of the day, I think all of us recognize that's punishing students,” Watts said. “It's punishing the wonderful educational mission that the system has for the sins or the oversights of the board members.”
A similar measure failed to gain traction in 2019, passing through the Assembly but stalling in the Senate. Part of the hangup over the 2019 bill came in a provision that would have created a split board of elected and appointed regents, in addition reducing the number of regents.
The size of the Board of Regents has generally increased over the last several decades, jumping from 9 to 11 in 1991, then again from 11 to 13 in 2001 — both after redistricting cycles.
AB118 is designed not to affect any regent sitting on the board, and Watts told the committee that the redistricting process necessitated by AB118 could take up to two additional legislative sessions (2025 and 2027, if we’re going by regular session math) to sort out.
That timeline was constructed in large part, Watts said, to avoid booting regents from the board while serving their original term, and would allow a greater runway to inform new regents of the new term structures ahead of future elections.
Still, the bill stopped short of creating requirements for elected regents or creating a position for a student regent — in part because of what Watts described as “constitutional limitations that need to be sorted out.”
Those constitutional limitations could be undone as soon as next year, should legislators pass SJR7, a revival of a constitutional amendment that would remove the Board of Regents from the Nevada Constitution, and if voters approve it next November. (A similar measure, Ballot Question 1, was narrowly rejected by voters in 2020).
Backers of the bill — namely the Vegas Chamber, the Nevada Health and Bioscience Corp (a private company in charge of constructing the UNLV medical school building over the last several years) and the Council for a Better Nevada, a philanthropic advocacy group long critical of the regents — lauded AB118 as “a start” toward putting more control over higher education back in lawmakers’ hands after repeated controversies.
But opponents of the bill, especially Regents Chair Byron Brooks and Vice Chair Joe Arrascada, argued that the current board had moved beyond the controversies of its past, and that the bill’s language threatened to shift too much representative power to Clark County.
“The bill sponsor mentioned numerous unsubstantiated accusations of the past,” Arrascada said, referencing in part the outside investigation of a hostile work environment complaint from the former chancellor, who later left the system with a $600,000 severance. “Yes, the past.”
— Jacob Solis
Poll: Voters unfamiliar with public option, but oppose repeal sought by Lombardo
New polling on Nevada’s politically tinged public health care option law indicates 70 percent of voters are unfamiliar with the law establishing a state-managed public health insurance option in Nevada but a majority want the policy preserved when given a description of it.
The poll was conducted by Global Strategy Group in partnership with New Day Nevada, a well-funded political action committee that supports Nevada Democrats. It comes in the wake of opposition to the law by Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican who called the 2021 public option law “bullshit” on the campaign trail and said it should be “substantially revised, or better yet repealed” in his January State of the State address.
Nevada’s public health insurance option aims to leverage the state’s purchasing power with Medicaid managed care organizations — private insurance companies that contract with the state to provide coverage to the state’s low-income population — to get insurers to also offer public option plans. The plans will resemble existing qualified health plans on the state’s health insurance exchange, though they will be required to be offered at a 5 percent markdown with the goal of reducing the plans’ premium costs by 15 percent over four years.
The plans won’t be offered for sale on the exchange until 2026. Nevada became the second state to adopt a form of a public health insurance option in 2021, when Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak signed SB420 into law after it passed on party-line votes out of the 2021 Legislature.
The poll surveyed 1,000 Nevada voters likely to participate in the 2024 general election via phone, text and an online panel over an eight-day period beginning Feb. 2. The survey had a 3.1 percent margin of error.
Despite political wrangling over the public option, results from the poll indicate fewer than a third of respondents said they were familiar with the law.
Pollsters then gave voters the following description of the public option:
“The public health insurance option is a health insurance plan that Nevadans will be able to purchase starting in 2026 which will be designed by the state, required to provide more affordable quality coverage, and will compete with traditional insurance plans.”
Following the description, about 56 percent of voters said they want the policy preserved, roughly 41 percent said they would support a repeal and around 3 percent they did not know or refused to answer.
Voters belonging to swing groups broadly indicated they want to maintain the law after hearing the description given by pollsters. Those include nonpartisans (57 percent opposed to repeal to 39 percent in support), suburban voters (56 percent to 39 percent) and Hispanic voters (56 percent to 39 percent).
You can find the crosstabs for the poll here, and the memo here.
— Tabitha Mueller
Grad students laud proposed stipend increase, but push for more
After more than a year of lobbying both on campus and in Carson City, graduate students at UNR and UNLV are on track to receive a $20 million boost in assistantship stipends under Gov. Joe Lombardo’s proposed budget.
Nicole Thomas, president of UNLV’s Graduate and Professional Student Association (GPSA), said that officials on every level — from institutional leadership to the Nevada System of Higher Education to Lombardo’s office — “supported basically everything that [graduate students] have asked for.”
But she said the increases still fall short of meeting the increased burden of high costs of living.
“We're walking, like, a very fine line right now where it's fantastic and wonderful that this was included, but at the end of the day, I think we've been so chronically underfunded, that we still need more,” Thomas said. “And I don't want to be someone that's greedy, but at the end of the day, I think our students — we need to eat.”
Those stipends are paid out to graduate students who work part-time as teaching or research assistants, a small subset of the overall population of the more than 8,000 graduate and professional students statewide.
However, because they are unable to work other jobs outside of their graduate programs — especially if they are international students, who legally cannot work outside assistantships because of visa restrictions — those students have argued current rates are well below a cost of living that skyrocketed through the pandemic in both Las Vegas and Reno.
Graduate students from UNR had planned to hit the Legislature on Monday to lobby lawmakers before blizzard conditions shut Northern Nevada down. But Thomas said several dozen UNLV graduate students will descend on the capital Friday to make their push for more stipend dollars.
But after an extended lobbying campaign, Thomas said her degree of optimism was “much higher” than this time last year.
“Everyone's on the same page about getting graduate students more money, and I think they're finally feeling the urgency that we've been pushing,” she said.
— Jacob Solis
What we’re reading and writing
Tesla gets $330 million in tax breaks, pledges to address infrastructure strain, by Sean Golonka
$3.6 billion in planned Tesla spending nets $330 million in abatements.
What Tesla’s multibillion-dollar Gigafactory expansion means for Nevada, by Sean Golonka
What’s in a Gigafactory, anyway?
Vegas council approves cannabis consumption lounge ordinance, keeps distance requirements, by Naoka Foreman
The consumption lounges cometh.
THE LIGHTNING ROUND
The Return of the ESA — Sen. Scott Hammond (R-Las Vegas) sponsored SB200, a bill introduced in the Senate on Thursday that would revive and allocate $58.3 million toward Education Savings Accounts, a politically divisive program that would allow parents to use state money to pay for private school tuition or other qualifying expenses.
Dickman COVID vaccine bill — AB240, introduced in the Assembly on Thursday and sponsored by Assemblywoman Jill Dickman (R-Sparks), would prohibit medical facilities from blocking visits or overnight stays for those without a COVID-19 vaccine. It also contains a provision banning medical providers from being punished for off-label medical use.
No gifts from pharma to doctors — SB203, sponsored by Sen. Fabian Doñate (D-Las Vegas), would prohibit certain gifts by a manufacturer or wholesaler of drugs or medical devices to a medical practitioner.
College fee waivers for tribal students could get tweaks — AB150, a bill that would expand access to the state’s college and university fee waiver for Native American students, could be funded to the tune of $450,000. Per a proposed conceptual amendment from bill sponsor Assemblywoman Natha Anderson (D-Sparks), the money would address a long-running complaint from NSHE that such fee waivers, while broadly positive as a means to increase access to higher education, were also unfunded legislative mandates.
A report on the fee waiver published by the system found it cost more than $457,000 in the 2021-2022 academic year, with nearly three-quarters ($330,000) absorbed by UNR alone.
Trio of election bills — Three election bills brought forward by the secretary of state’s office and heard Thursday in the Senate Legislative Operations and Elections Committee drew extended public comment from supporters and opponents alike. Among other things, the bills propose moving the filing period for non-judicial candidates earlier in the cycle and creating an election procedure manual that would serve as a guide for election workers amid massive turnover.
While county elections officials praised the bills for streamlining and clarifying election processes in Nevada, the public comment period saw attacks on Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar’s character, unfounded complaints about Dominion Voting Machines and cries for more transparency that deviated from the bills themselves.
Sen. Nicole Cannizzaro (D-Las Vegas) responded to the outcry by saying that while she appreciates public dialogue, disparaging remarks or comments about hacking voting machines that have been repeatedly proven false have no place in the halls of the Legislature.
“Those sorts of ad hominem attacks are not appropriate,” Cannizzaro said. “I would ask that moving forward public comment be restrained to the bill itself, not to personal attacks on individuals who are appearing before this committee or any individual for that matter.”
And to get you into the weekend, a few tweets that caught our eye:
- I for one welcome our new deer overlords
- The Big Hot Dog lobby arrives
- That’s no moon!
- And one more Star Wars reference for the road.
We’ll see you on Tuesday.
Editor’s Note: This story appears in Behind the Bar, The Nevada Independent’s newsletter dedicated to comprehensive coverage of the 2023 legislative session. Sign up for the newsletter here.