There are more than 300 state boards and commissions in Nevada, civilian-composed bodies that either provide recommendations or oversee professional licensing requirements. It’s a number so high that the state’s Department of Business and Industry (B&I) has coined them a “de facto fourth branch of government, operating with minimal oversight.”

And an effort to streamline them is facing perhaps its most significant test to date.

SB78, a bill sponsored by B&I to consolidate many occupational licensing boards and increase oversight and transparency of the bodies, eked its way through the Legislature’s first committee passage deadline last week.

Members of the Senate Committee on Government Affairs on Friday did not vote on whether they supported the legislation — as is typically the case — but whether they wanted to approve the bill moving through the Legislature. Even so, only one Democrat on the committee — Sen. Edgar Flores (D-Las Vegas), the committee chair — voted in favor “in the interest of allowing for the conversation to continue to flow,” while still raising concerns. The remaining three Democrats on the committee voted against it.

“I’ve had so many emails, so many phone calls from so many different boards and members that I’m worried there’s unintended consequences with the bill as it’s currently written,” Sen. James Ohrenschall (D-Las Vegas) said before voting in opposition.

The opposition from Democrats — who hold significant majorities in the Legislature — indicates an uphill battle for a priority of Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, who said in his State of the State address this year that the system of boards and commissions should be “smart, lean and productive.”

The state’s boards and commissions occupy a unique space in the Nevada government. Occupational board members are appointed by the governor and oversee more than 260 professions covering about a quarter of the state’s workforce. Their budgets are fee-based and they are allowed to hire independent lobbyists.

Until 2023, when a bill created a new office within B&I to house the boards, state officials have said the boards operated with minimal accountability that has allowed malfeasance to occur.

In 2019, it was revealed the state’s pharmacy board failed to conduct background checks for a decade. The office has also singled out the Board of Homeopathic Medical Examiners over audits that revealed it accrued significant debt, spent significant revenue on travel expenses, and did not have written policies for decades.

Since 2013, the Legislature’s Sunset Subcommittee has been allowed to recommend the dissolution of boards, and the boards are required to report their financial information, but state officials have said these are insufficient in holding boards accountable.

Officials with B&I have argued that this year’s bill is a necessary way to increase accountability, ensure consistency across the boards and lower costs by reducing duplications that might exist across different boards. They have said that the proposal would bring in up to $15 million in annual savings.

“Anything that’s pertaining to the boards — it’s due for an overhaul,” B&I Director Kris Sanchez said in an interview with The Nevada Independent last week.

But during a nearly four-hour bill hearing last week, the bill received steep opposition from board leadership and their lobbyists.

While there was agreement that the system could be improved, opponents argued the changes would create more inefficiency and did not take into consideration the different regulations and codes of ethics in professions that would now be licensed under the same board.

“Professionals should not be asked to regulate areas in which they have no training or authority,” said Jennifer Letten, the president of the Nevada Board of Dispensing Opticians, which the bill proposes to merge with the State Board of Optometry. “There is no evidence of inefficiency or failure to justify this merger.”

If the bill fails, it would reflect the difficulty in passing substantive reforms to streamline Nevada’s governmental operations. It’s particularly top of mind in today’s political climate, given the massive effort led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut down on so-called government waste, fraud and abuse that has resulted in massive layoffs, grant cuts and program eliminations.

Earlier this year, Assembly Minority Leader Gregory Hafen (R-Pahrump) even likened the board consolidation bill to DOGE during a town hall.

But unlike the breakneck pace of DOGE, it’s evidently much slower (and much harder) to achieve similar changes through the legislative process.

“I knew that any change of this scope is going to be a challenge — and that’s just the nature of the world we’re in,” Sanchez told The Indy.

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“I think that regulation and oversight … can be done without merging these boards and watering down these professions.”

Jennifer Ross, president of the state’s board for marriage and family therapists and clinical professional counselors

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What the bill would do

In 2023, the Legislature passed a bill that created a new office within B&I to oversee boards and commissions, opening the door for future reforms.

SB78 goes further. It would allow B&I to periodically review each board and, if necessary, submit to the governor a request for termination or consolidation (which could only be achieved legislatively). It would also empower the department to approve any contacts that boards agree to, establish procedures to appoint members, inspect or subpoena any board records and require it to maintain a website for boards to post information, with the boards being prohibited from publishing information on their own sites. 

But the most controversial element of the legislation would be the consolidation of 20 existing boards into six new boards and an advisory committee.

To determine where to consolidate, state officials said they looked at factors such as the number of licensees, the board’s responsibilities, rule making, cases investigated, volume of complaints and other state board structures.

The bill would also restructure the composition of 10 existing licensing boards to mitigate so-called “dominance issues,” where the state feels there is an unequal distribution of industry representatives on a given board, positions that could instead be filled by experts or members of the general public.

Each board already has existing staff, and B&I has requested hiring 55 of those employees to staff the boards and commissions office. Additionally, it has requested 14 new staff members to fill administrative roles related to the bill that passed during the 2023 session.

Sanchez told legislators last week that B&I would work with the Department of Administration to find positions for board staff that would not be hired under the new structure.

“We’re not trying to put people out of work,” he said.

Something that’s not in the bill? Changes to the state’s advisory boards, which make up two-thirds of the more than 300 state boards and commissions.

Reforms to these boards, which provide recommendations and do not have any licensing authority, were included in the original version of the bill, but those were amended out. The plan, Sanchez said, is to revisit these proposals during the 2027 legislative session.

“It comes down to capacity,” Sanchez said in an interview. “Just looking at the capacity of limited staff ability to successfully get this carried out in a short amount of time.”

Strong opposition

While the proposal received support from groups such as the Vegas Chamber and the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, there was significant opposition to the bill — especially surrounding how the department determined which boards to consolidate.

Jennifer Ross, president of the state’s board for marriage and family therapists and clinical professional counselors, testified in opposition about the bill’s call to create a new board that would combine hers and ones that deal with licensing for social workers and psychological examiners, among others.

“We have over 10,000 licensees being proposed into this singular board, with a range of academic requirements. We’ve got four separate sets of regulations, six different codes of ethics,” Ross said. “I think that regulation and oversight … can be done without merging these boards and watering down these professions.”

Opponents also said there was not enough communication from the state, and that they were concerned about diluting a particular profession’s representation on a licensing board.

“The proposed consolidation would dilute specialized addiction and gambling treatment expertise to just two representatives on a massive board. This approach directly contradicts both community good and fiscal responsibility,” said Agata Gawronski, the executive director of the Nevada State Board of Examiners for Alcohol, Drug and Gambling Counselors, which the bill would merge with other mental health-adjacent bodies. 

In response to legislator questions about these concerns, Sanchez acknowledged that the devised system “is not perfect.” He added that B&I would be able to intervene in situations where there might be licensure disagreements.

There has also been concern about communication from B&I.

“Outside of a few larger group listening sessions … there was no individual outreach to our board,” Gawronski said.

Sanchez has said that they have sought to connect with every board, but he has criticized the dynamics where boards are represented by paid lobbyists, which he said has made it harder to communicate about the proposal.

“We went to the boards and we said … “I want to understand what it is you do and how you do what you do,” Sanchez said in an interview. “And the calls I got back were [mostly] from the lobbyists. So there was a barrier from the beginning.”