"Legislative Commission rejects common sense regulations, creating a new roadblock to bringing accountability to Nevada's occupational licensing boards"

You'd be forgiven for assuming the above headline was written by a wonky opinion columnist for an award-winning nonprofit newsroom. Instead, it's the start of a surprisingly forceful — or astonishingly defensive — press release issued Sept. 24 by the Office of Nevada Boards, Commissions and Councils Standards within the Department of Business and Industry. It was published hours after the Legislative Commission refused to approve the office's proposed regulations for occupational licensing boards.

Administrative rulemaking is rarely the sort of work that drives state agencies to use phrases such as "strongly disagrees," "undermines" or "Nevada must answer" in official public-facing communications (especially when the name of the agency writing the press release includes nine nouns, two prepositions, a repeated conjunction and a definite article). This holds doubly true when addressing state lawmakers who not only must explicitly approve regulations prior to their enactment but who also control an agency's budget and statutory authority.

Even so, this is not the first time Department of Business and Industry Director Kristopher Sanchez has publicly vented his frustration, nor will it likely be the last.

Three years ago, the Legislature created an office within his department that placed all professional and occupational licensing boards under his department's purview. Within that purview were several responsibilities, such as establishing centralized administration between the dozens of boards, as well as establishing a uniform set of standards for legal representation, internal controls, investigations, licensing and discipline between them.

How many staff and how much budget did the Legislature assign to that office? One and none, respectively.

One person could never successfully discharge one of the responsibilities assigned to the office, much less all of them. To explain the size and scope of the problem, Sanchez's department prepared a 74-page report detailing the history of the state's boards — not just the 37 professional and occupational licensing boards the department is already struggling to maintain any sort of purview over but also the hundreds of advisory and regulatory boards that pepper the state government. In the report, it was noted that Democratic Gov. Mike O'Callaghan wanted to rein in the number of boards and centralize common administrative functions between them in 1976 but was ultimately unsuccessful.

Alongside that report came a bill, SB78, which sought to implement various recommendations included in the report. 

To help sell the public on the bill, Sanchez wrote an op-ed for the Reno Gazette-Journal encouraging its passage. Unfortunately, the Legislature was less thrilled with the bill than either he or I was, in no small part because much of the bill's language was still "in skeleton form" — as one observer put it, the bill "died on its own weight." It certainly didn't help that several occupational licensing boards also lobbied aggressively to stop the bill. Adding insult to injury, a compromise bill that sought to provide the department some additional staff and allow it to provide services to the boards in exchange for administrative fees never made it out of the Assembly.

The Legislature did grant the department sufficient budget to hire an additional staff member to oversee the boards, though. So there's that.

Given the fate of his signature bill, Sanchez was understandably quite visibly upset. He asserted that the boards under his purview are "a fourth rail of Nevada government that [have] been unaccountable to anybody" and that "they know and they want to cling and hang on to as much power as they possibly can." He claimed that three of them were insolvent, then later added that "there's an impending train wreck, but [he doesn't] have the authorities necessary to just go in and solve the problem."

Unfortunately, it's sometimes easier to be right than it is to win.

Even so, neither he nor his office gave up. It doggedly prepared a comparatively svelte 14-page regulation that sought to define how two people in his department would ultimately centralize administration and establish a uniform set of standards for the state's boards. Many of the requirements proposed in the regulation were straightforward at first blush, such as a requirement for board members to attend and participate in board meetings. If the regulation was approved, the office could submit a recommendation to the governor for removal of a board member who failed to attend three or more consecutive board meetings or who failed to attend more than half of the meetings of the board.

Each simple requirement, however, proved more legally complex than it first appeared.

For example, the statute establishing the State Board of Architecture, Interior Design and Residential Design permits the governor to remove board members after 10 days' notice. The statute establishing the Nevada State Board of Accountancy, meanwhile, requires a hearing prior to the removal of a board member but does not establish any notification requirements. The malfeasance statute referenced in the regulation, meanwhile, requires 45 days notice but no hearing prior to removal. 

If the governor attempts to follow the office's recommendation to remove a board member, is the board member protected under the board's statutes, the malfeasance statute, or some combination of the two? Which hearing and notice requirements take precedence?

This doesn't even touch on how often each board is supposed to meet in the first place. For example, the Board of Applied Behavioral Analysis is statutorily required to meet at least once per year, while the State Barbers' Health and Sanitation Board is required to meet every three months — no more and no less. Some boards aren't statutorily required to hold meetings at all, including the State Board of Architecture, Interior Design and Residential Design, the Board of Examiners for Alcohol, Drug and Gambling Counselors and the State Board of Accountancy. 

If a board isn't even statutorily required to hold meetings, can a regulation — which, according to the Administrative Procedures Act, has the force of law — establish a requirement for board members to attend them?

Other requirements established in the regulation, such as the one to maintain a website that's accessible to people with disabilities, are actually established through federal law and regulations. According to the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, all state and local governments, regardless of size, are required to ensure that web content provided by each government agency is accessible to people with disabilities by April 26, 2028. 

By attempting to place the requirement in regulation, however, the department took the blame for delivering the bad news to boards that sometimes struggle to maintain a website at all.

Then there are other requirements established under statute that aren't covered under the proposed regulation. For example, each board is statutorily required to provide the state controller the name, address and Social Security number of every licensee. To do so, every board is required to store personal information, as defined under NRS 603A.040 — which means every board is statutorily required to comply with extensive security and privacy controls. Requesting Social Security numbers in the first place, meanwhile, imposes federal notice requirements that occupational licensing boards must follow under the Privacy Act of 1974.

These are significant challenges for full-time information technology and legal professionals to navigate. Several boards, however, don't have a single full-time employee of any sort.

For decades, Nevada's occupational licensing boards have struggled to meet basic fiscal arithmetic, never mind the transparency and oversight requirements applied to all levels of state government. According to a January 2026 audit report submitted by the Legislative Counsel Bureau, five boards failed to raise $100,000 in licensing fees and 14 boards spent more than they collected last year. 

Unsurprisingly, then, the Department of Business and Industry's willingness to place some of those requirements into the same regulation, along with its desire to potentially hold board members accountable if they failed to meet them, was not well received. Some boards objected to the regulation outright, while others requested various changes. Equally unsurprisingly, given Sanchez's dismissive view of the boards he's been tasked with regulating, the department faithfully recorded that opposition and informed the Legislative Commission that it would "not accept" much of the feedback provided by the boards — though, in fairness, the department did accept other suggestions raised in the past year's workshops.

With the benefit of hindsight, the Legislative Commission's unanimous refusal to approve the regulation was predictable. 

On one side of the issue were dozens of boards, as well as their lobbyists, each ensuring Republicans and Democrats alike had plenty to object to, such as the department's unwillingness to directly consider the impact of the regulation on small businesses.

On the other side of the issue is a director who spent much of last year chewing out the Legislature for not giving him what he wanted and who's now apparently comfortable calling the commission chair out by name using state letterhead.

Frustratingly, both sides are right. Ever since the Office of Nevada Boards, Commissions and Councils Standards was established, the Department of Business and Industry — with some gubernatorial encouragement — has been openly adversarial toward the boards it's been tasked with administering. 

On the other hand, the Legislature's lackadaisical treatment of occupational licensing boards during the past 50 years has led to serious issues that require immediate attention.

Unfortunately, only one side is winning.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager and an award-winning 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]. You can also message him on Signal at dcolborne.64.