A day after Gov. Joe Lombardo dropped a sweeping criminal justice proposal that tackles everything from domestic violence to fentanyl trafficking, the Republican governor said he doesn’t think the state can afford the measure in its current form.

“Not as it stands, but that's why we go to budget meetings,” Lombardo said at a Tuesday press conference in Carson City to promote the bill.  

The bill could eventually cost the state an additional $42 million per budget cycle, according to a fiscal note from the Nevada Department of Corrections (NDOC), and lead to an eventual increase in about 630 incarcerated offenders.

Over the next two years, the NDOC fiscal note projects that the bill would cost upward of $10 million dollars and lead to the incarceration of an additional 300 or so individuals. 

NDOC is already facing immense staffing shortages and a $53 million budget shortfall. 

The projected increase in the prison population would likely come from harsher sentences for repeat offenders, lowering the level of theft a person must commit to trigger a felony charge, and imposing trafficking charges for smaller quantities of fentanyl.

Lombardo, alongside several state law enforcement officers, championed the bill during the press conference as “commonsense criminal justice reforms” that will improve community safety. Although state data indicates that property crime and violent crime have ticked down over the past two years, the speakers maintained that lowering the felony theft threshold and cracking down on repeat offenders are crucial.

“This bill is a positive step forward addressing the safety concerns faced by Nevadans,” Washoe County District Attorney Christopher Hicks said Tuesday.

But Nevada’s incarceration rate has worried state legislators in recent sessions. In 2019, it was predicted that Nevada’s ballooning prison population — especially the growth of incarcerated nonviolent offenders — could have cost the state upward of $770 million over the next decade, mostly by paying for a new correctional facility.

Lombardo’s bill in its current iteration would reverse many of the provisions made in 2019 to curb prison population growth. A bill that year raised the threshold considered a felony from $650 in goods stolen to $1,200 and raised the amount of fentanyl needed to trigger a felony charge.  

Although the fiscal note predicts that the number of incarcerated individuals will grow under the current structure of the bill, Lombardo said “we are evaluating time served for nonviolent offenses” to balance the department’s budget. 

“We'll make an adjustment in the budget numbers that go into the future sentencing and removal of individuals from the incarceration environment,” Lombardo said. 

Although the bill has not yet been scheduled for a hearing, a source close to the Senate Democratic Caucus said there is an “appetite for discussion” and anticipates that the bill will get a hearing, despite budget concerns. 

Federal budget uncertainty, meanwhile, could further call into question the bill’s proposal to expand several opioid use disorder programs and increase collaboration with Nevada’s Department of Health and Human Services on substance abuse treatment programs for inmates.

More than half of the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services’ budget is made up of federal funds, including $16.4 million for opioid response measures and $18.4 million toward substance abuse prevention and treatment programs. Late last month, the Trump administration revoked $11.4 billion nationwide in COVID-era funding toward addiction and mental health programming.

“It would be a detriment if we were to lose availability to those programs,” Lombardo said on Tuesday. 

An attached fiscal note from Nevada’s Department of Health and Human Services, however, says that the bill “will not have a fiscal impact.”

Proponents and opponents of the bill alike have called into question the financial feasibility of the bill given the prison budget shortfall.

“It could hurt the state budget as far as state corrections go, but we wouldn't know that for a while,” said John Abel, the government affairs director for the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, which still strongly supports the measure.