Nevada’s felony theft threshold will not be lowered under Gov. Joe Lombardo’s crime bill, SB457 after the Senate Committee on Judiciary passed a significantly amended version of the bill on Sunday evening.

It marks a significant setback for the former sheriff, who had called in his State of the State address for the threshold change as a way to restore a sense of law and order that he said eroded after lawmakers reduced some penalties in 2019 to curb prison population growth. Lombardo had marveled in the January speech that “California is tougher on criminals than Nevada.”

Lombardo’s office declined to comment. 

His effort to have felony theft charges kick in when items valued at $750 or more are stolen — down from $1,200 — came after California voters last year reduced their state’s threshold. But it could have been costly — Clark County estimated that the provision would have created more than 2,000 felony cases annually, costing the county more than $4 million per two-year budget cycle.

After axing the section that would have made it easier for a theft to trigger a felony charge, Democrats added provisions cracking down on smash-and-grab burglaries. The other most significant change would see increased penalties for people who commit multiple crimes on the Strip — which proponents say would boost safety for workers in the area, but is likely to anger criminal justice advocates.

The changes, which also include the removal of provisions that would have more harshly punished fentanyl possession, reflect the difficulty that Lombardo faced in passing an ambitious “tough on crime” measure in a Democrat-controlled Legislature. Senate Judiciary Chair Melanie Scheible (D-Las Vegas) said in an interview Sunday that more than 50 hours of work were put in behind the scenes to craft a bill that would be palatable to all parties.

That work also included meetings with groups and organizations that Scheible said were not initially involved. 

“When I met with the governor's office, I knew the areas where we could find compromise with the public defenders, with the ACLU,” Scheible said. “I was able to bring some of that to the table. And in the last couple of weeks, I think we've had better communication.”

Scheible said she does not expect further changes to the bill. 

Sunday’s committee passage of the bill comes with just more than one day left in the legislative session, and marks the third of Lombardo’s five priority bills to make it to an entire chamber. An earlier version of the 84-page bill received a more than six-hour hearing last week, where legislators and criminal justice groups panned it as costly and overly strict despite Lombardo’s attempts to soften it.

Though Scheible and proponents touted changes to the Strip regulations as a safety measure, criminal justice reform advocates raised concerns about the new policy. They also said they were frustrated that the late-coming changes to the weighty measure were presented in a two-page summary “conceptual amendment” format, as opposed to in final legal language.

“The new amendment includes new provisions that have never been discussed and were never heard in committee,” said Nick Shepack, the Nevada state director at the Fines and Fees Justice Center. “We are working as fast as we can to digest the new amendment but we are extremely frustrated and this amendment fails to address many of our concerns.” 

Scheible said the new Strip regulations are similar to what happens when people are prevented from returning to crime scenes or being in the presence of someone they have continually harassed or threatened.

The newly amended version of the bill would also establish an alternate transitional custody program for nonviolent offenders who are eligible for parole and who have served at least half of their sentence. Lawmakers raised concerns during the bill’s Wednesday hearing about how that program would be funded — especially as the Nevada Department of Corrections (NDOC) faces a $53 million budget deficit. The latest iteration of the bill, however, would appropriate $4 million to the NDOC and an additional $1.8 million for courts.

Scheible said the money would be placed in a contingency account overseen by the Interim Finance Committee, only released upon a request from NDOC and approval from lawmakers. 

“Hopefully, it will accomplish the goals that we have,” Scheible said. “[That] it will reduce the prison populations and it will provide a pathway that's not exactly available now to people to make that transition from incarcerated to community supervision to parole to ultimately being completely reintegrated into the community.”

The conceptual amendment brought Sunday also took out a Lombardo-backed provision that would have banned diversion courts — which allow individuals to pursue treatment programs instead of jail time — for individuals who committed crimes against children or the elderly. In its place, the new bill prohibits their records from being automatically sealed.

The amended version would also slash a provision that would have expanded the use of hearsay at preliminary hearings related to domestic violence or sexual offenses against children. It would still allow, however, allow law enforcement officers to intercept conversations for the purpose of investigating a sexual offense. 

Other changes to the bill — some of which had already been proposed in amendments proffered a few days earlier — include: 

• Slashing sections that would have lowered the quantity of fentanyl that triggers a trafficking charge.
• Requiring a mental health evaluation of a child who has committed two or more attacks on a school employee or employee of a child welfare agency.
• Removing a section that would have cracked down on repeat offenders, including lengthening the sentence of someone who committed additional crimes while out on bail or parole. 
• Axing a section that would have allowed courts to have a pretrial release hearing 72 hours after a person is taken into custody, instead of 48 hours. The timeline may be extended if it falls on a legal holiday. 
• Removing a section that would have assigned a category B felony to people who commit a DUI while undergoing an alcohol or drug treatment program for having committed three DUIs in seven years.