Assemblywoman Michelee Cruz-Crawford

• Michelee (pronounced mih-shelly) Cruz-Crawford succeeds Democratic Sen. Pat Spearman, who retired after reaching her term limit.
• Represents the North Las Vegas-area District 1, which includes Aliante and Craig Ranch neighborhoods as well as Nellis Air Force Base. 
• The district leans Democratic, with 39 percent of voters registered as Democrats, 31 percent as nonpartisan and 22 percent as Republicans.
• In the primary election, Crawford defeated then-Assemblywoman Clara Thomas (53 percent to 46 percent) before going on to beat her Republican challenger, Patricia Brinkley, carrying 58.9 percent of the vote in the general election.
• Crawford will chair the committee on natural resources and sits on the education and revenue and economic development committees

Profile

Michelee "Shelly" Cruz-Crawford proudly boasts a tattoo of Nevada on her arm.

Crawford, who moved from Tucson to Las Vegas when she was 6, considers herself to be a Nevada native. She remembers spending long nights as a child at the Riviera Hotel, a now defunct Strip casino, watching shows with her mom, a wigs and costume designer, and her stepdad, a sound engineer. 

“I thought that was normal,” said Cruz-Crawford, 41. 

Now, after years of working in education, the newly elected Democratic senator for District 1 said she was inspired to run to address challenges she regularly saw pop up while working as a principal at C.C. Ronnow Elementary School in Las Vegas and serving as Nevada’s first Latino regent (she’s 100 percent Mexican). She’s intimately acquainted with the city’s educational landscape, having gone through the Clark County School District, UNLV and the College of Southern Nevada. 

“I knew that I had a unique understanding of some of the issues that we have as a state,” Cruz-Crawford said. “When a family is in crisis, like when a kid has a mental health issue, or a parent is deported, or they can't pay their power bill, they actually come to us and say, ‘Hey, Dr.  Crawford, can you help with this?’” 

Cruz-Crawford is a member of the Nevada National Guard, where she serves as an equal opportunity officer. She said that has been a bit tricky, considering that many of her loved ones are in the process of becoming documented and Gov. Joe Lombardo has said he’d be willing to deploy the guard to support deportation efforts.

She has been married to her husband, Michael, who is a fifth generation ironworker for more than 22 years. They have two children: Lola, who is following her mother’s path and studying at UNR to be a teacher, and Gustavo, a senior in high school. 

Even though she is a freshman, Cruz-Crawford already has written multiple bills, including 2021’s SB352, which aimed to eliminate barriers that prevent paraprofessionals from becoming licensed educators, and she co-presented 2023’s SB428 for teacher pathway programs last legislative session. It was this prior experience that contributed to her being approached by the Senate Democrats who asked to run for the seat because term limits prevented Sen. Pat Spearman from seeking it again. 

This year, education and energy are among Cruz-Crawford’s top legislative priorities. Although District 1, which cuts across North Las Vegas, includes urban and rural areas, Cruz-Crawford contends that they “both deal with a lot of the same stuff,” including food deserts, housing and infrastructure issues, all of which she plans to highlight as a legislator. 

ON THE ISSUES

Education 

Working in education for more than 20 years, Cruz-Crawford is naturally full of opinions on the state’s educational landscape. 

Cruz-Crawford is a decisive “no” on Opportunity Scholarships, the contentious program that offers needs-based scholarships to private schools for students who live in households with annual incomes at or less than 300 percent of the federal poverty line. She worries that redirecting public funds to private schools will ultimately hurt the neediest students who rely on schools not just for education, but for food and care. 

“I think it completely works against the reason why public education exists, which is to level the playing field,” she said.  

In a similar vein, Cruz-Crawford disagrees that providing free school lunches to students regardless of household income causes waste (an argument made by Gov. Joe Lombardo when he vetoed legislation that would have allocated millions toward free school meals) and feels that those who supported getting rid of the program should “come to the schools” before making a decision on the issue. 

Health care

Crawford says that schools are the first line of “defense” in Nevada’s health care system. She contends that there are not ample educational or professional opportunities for health care providers in Nevada and that shortage in turn drives up health care costs. In particular, Cruz-Crawford would like to see more measures to increase preventative health care and the nursing workforce. 

Housing

Cruz-Crawford says that she is still forming her opinion on the state’s summary eviction process, which allows landlords to evict a tenant who receives a seven-day eviction notice and fails to file an affidavit within that time frame. 

But having witnessed students deal with the fallout from eviction, she says that issue is particularly hard hitting and she has communicated with the Housing Justice Alliance to learn more. 

“I can't really speak on it now. I've heard it's a terrible process because it's a way to fast track eviction, but I've also heard from landlords that ‘it's what we need,’” Cruz-Crawford said. 

Cruz-Crawford said that she plans to continue to work on Nevada’s housing crisis through an idea pushed by her predecessor through SB426 in 2023. The bill, which did not become law, proposed capping rent increases to 5 percent after the first year and prohibiting landlords from increasing rent during the first year of tenancy.

Energy

The bulk of Cruz-Crawford’s ideas on energy have to do with making green energy more accessible to low-income families. 

As chair of the committee of natural resources, Cruz-Crawford said she believes that it's important to keep up with the “ever-changing evolution of what is green” but also to ensure not to “leave behind people and communities.”  

Recently, Cruz-Crawford said that she has had conversations with people in Nevada’s solar industry on how to subsidize and provide solar energy to families. She also wants to support initiatives for lithium mines in Nevada in hopes that they help create more green energy needed to reach the state’s goal of near-zero emissions by 2050. 

Elections

Like many of Nevada’s top officials, Cruz-Crawford agrees that Nevada lags behind other states in counting election results. Although she said that she mostly trusts Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar to handle the issue, she believes more poll workers and counters can be hired in the future to help speed things up.