“I asked the Legislature not to get nervous when [Kris Sanchez, director of the Department of Business and Industry] plops that bill on the table. I saw it. It’s big. But we’ll get through it.”

— Gov. Joe Lombardo remarking on SB78 during his State of the State address.

Ninety-two pages and more than 39,000 words — “in skeleton form.”

SB78, which seeks to reorganize the state’s sprawling mass of boards, commissions and advisory bodies into a coherent and governable whole, is not what anyone would call “light reading.” The 97 sections of the bill propose a broad range of reforms to the hundreds of such bodies maintained by the state. As the text of the bill openly admits, how those reforms will be enacted — and on which boards — will require further filling in by the Legislature.

Frankly, many of the proposed reforms are long overdue.

Since the state first started licensing occupations in 1899, Nevada has added a growing list of occupational licensing boards, which currently issue 268 licenses to a quarter of the state’s workforce. These boards are statutorily granted the power to require various exams and fees from licensees, the power to require employers to only hire licensed professionals for certain professions, the power to discipline licensees and even the power to issue subpoenas.

They are, in short, granted the same powers to tax, spend, regulate and prosecute as any other executive agency — only, unlike other agencies in the executive branch, many occupational licensing boards function as if they’re exempt from measures that ensure transparency, oversight and accountability over the rest of the state government. Their budgets, which are funded from license fees, are not published in the state budget or the Nevada Open Finance Portal. Several occupational licensing boards also operate as if they’re exempt from the State Purchasing Act — only eight of the state’s licensing boards are listed under “Independent Boards and Commissions” on the state’s purchasing website. Some boards, such as the Board of Homeopathic Medical Examiners, don’t even have a functioning website.

For years, occupational licensing boards have  spent hundreds of thousands of dollars each year on lobbyists — a practice which is banned in several states since it fundamentally represents portions of the executive branch lobbying the legislative branch for their own interests independently from the rest of the executive branch. Given the lack of oversight applied to boards and commissions in Nevada, however, the practice of hiring lobbyists has sometimes been used to justify paying political insiders to do almost nothing — such as when the chairman of the Nevada Republican Party, Michael McDonald, was hired by the Nevada State Board of Dental Examiners as a lobbyist in 2019 and was paid tens of thousands of dollars to attend one board meeting in 16 months.

And that’s when Nevada’s occupational licensing boards aren’t just padding salaries for board members and their staff. An audit conducted by the Division of Internal Audits in 2018 found at least four boards were paying staff higher salaries than state workers were receiving at the time.

Worst of all, the state’s occupational licensing boards sometimes act as if they’re categorically exempt from all state law — including the laws and regulations applicable to their profession. The Nevada State Board of Pharmacy, for example, failed to conduct background checks on wholesale pharmacy companies for more than a decade.

Bringing Nevada’s occupational licensing boards to the same standards of transparency, oversight and accountability as the rest of the state government would be a meritorious bill on its own. Doing so would also follow up on North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners v. FTC, in which the Supreme Court ruled that state occupational licensing boards are only exempt from federal antitrust laws if such boards are subject to active supervision by the state — the key word being “active.” Occasional check-ins by the Legislature’s Sunset Subcommittee likely don’t qualify.

SB78, however, does not stop there.

According to a recent policy paper released by the Department of Business and Industry, Nevada now has more than 315 boards, commission and advisory councils. As previously discussed, many of these boards license and govern the occupations and professions worked by hundreds of thousands of Nevadans. Most of these bodies, however, provide context and advice for a broad array of governmental agencies across the state or serve as regulatory bodies for various industries. 

Like occupational licensing boards, many of these agencies also collect fees against their intended targets of regulation. The Rangeland Resources Commission, for example, collects fees from ranchers for each bovine or sheep permitted to graze on federal lands. Like occupational licensing boards, the operations and finances of Nevada’s regulatory boards are similarly opaque.

Each of Nevada’s 315 boards require several board members to be appointed to fill each of those bodies. According to the Department of Business and Industry, doing so requires more than 1,700 individuals to be appointed by the governor — an overwhelming responsibility that past and current governors have historically struggled with. As I write this, there are 170 vacancies currently listed on the governor’s website, including 6 of the 7 members of the Appeals Panel of Industrial Insurance, 9 of the up to 13 members of the Behavioral Health Planning and Advisory Council, and all six members of the Employee-Management Committee.

Given the above, it’s no surprise that many of Nevada’s boards — whether occupational, regulatory or advisory — struggle to keep enough members to hold meetings as often as they’re statutorily required to. Several Sunset Subcommittee reports are filled with lists of such bodies that haven’t successfully met in years.

In 2025, the Sunset Subcommittee recommended that several such entities be terminated, including the Technological Crime Advisory Board (which hasn’t met since 2020), a compensation review commission that hadn’t met since 1995, the Council to Establish Academic Standards for Public Schools (which hasn’t met since 2021 and whose role is already met by the Department of Education), and the Nevada High-Speed Rail Authority (which hasn’t met since 2017). 

The 2025 Sunset Subcommittee, however, only reviewed 15 of the state’s 315 boards. There are likely dozens more that can be safely excised from state law or whose roles can be combined into better functioning boards. SB78 proposes several such terminations and combinations. The Board of Homeopathic Medical Examiners, for example, which currently only has 48 licensees to sustain it and, again, isn’t even able to maintain a website, would be eliminated entirely. The Employee-Management Committee, along with the Human Resources Commission and the Committee on Catastrophic Leave (a suite of committees responsible for regulating various portions of the state human resources system) would be merged into a combined Committee on Human Resources.

The current draft of SB78 won’t be the final word on how to best organize, manage and administer the hundreds of occupational, regulatory and advisory boards that currently exist in this state. It is, however, a very solid first step toward defining the problem.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a recurring opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected].