In today’s edition: 

• Gaming has a leg up on Culinary
• The Indy’s bill graveyard 
• Boards, commissions bill ekes through

From the Capital Bureau Chief:

Welcome to a special edition of Behind the Bar, where our sleep-deprived reporters bring you a roundup of some interesting nuggets that caught our eye during the bill cullings on Friday's deadline.

For a full recap, please visit our live blog with updates from the committee hearings. You can also view the status of all legislative measures on The Nevada Independent’s complimentary bill tracker (sorry that it doesn’t come with breakfast).

As always, please send us your questions, thoughts and suggestions. You can reach me at [email protected]. 

Our deadline day takeaways

Out of more than 1,000 measures that were introduced, about 300 met their demise on the first major deadline of the 120-day session. 

There’s more reporting to be done on what lived, what died and telling those stories, but we wanted to highlight a few aspects of Friday’s deadline day outcomes that caught our attention. 

• Gaming 2, Culinary 0 — Lottery, room cleaning die
  • The Culinary Union is zero for two on priority legislation with the union-backed lottery measure, AJR5, and room cleaning legislation, SB360, failing to move forward after receiving heavy pushback from the gaming industry.
    • AJR5 sought to remove a 159-year-old constitutional prohibition on Nevada operating a lottery.
      • Context: Nevada is one of five states without a lottery.
      • The measure easily passed in both legislative chambers in 2023, but it required a second approval before it could be sent to Nevada voters in 2026. The bill was backed by Culinary Workers Union Local 226 but opposed by the Nevada Resort Association.
      • “With so much economic uncertainty and shocking federal funding cuts, this measure will not move forward,” Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager (D-Las Vegas) said in a statement about the bill's untimely death.
    • SB360 would have mandated daily room cleaning in hotels and casinos with the goal of addressing the illicit cannabis market. Proposed by Sen. Lori Rogich (R-Las Vegas), the bill did not receive a hearing in time to pass out of committee.
      • Gov. Joe Lombardo had signaled he would veto the bill in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter.
      • He wrote the proposal was “no different than the law that was repealed in the last session on a bipartisan basis.”

• Boards and commissions reform ekes through
  • SB78, the bill brought by the Department of Business and Industry to significantly reform the state’s boards and commissions, advanced through the Senate Committee on Government Affairs — barely.
  • The committee decided to vote on advancing the bill, but not advocating for its passage or release.
    • The measure received support from only one Democrat on the committee — Chair Sen. Edgar Flores (D-Las Vegas) — while the remaining three Democrats opposed, citing significant concerns they heard from constituents.
      • That could spell trouble for the bill — at least its current iteration — given that Democrats controlled the Legislature.

• Paid family leave expansion passes
  • Despite Republicans opposing AB388, paid family leave passed out of the Assembly Committee on Commerce and Labor. This bill would mandate almost all public and private sector employers to give their employees 12 weeks of paid family leave.
    • The business industry opposes the bill, claiming the payouts would be a heavy financial lift. However, if passed, this would be significant progress for Nevada’s paid family leave policies.

Other bills that met their demise

• For the fifth straight session, an effort to investigate government waste, fraud and abuse has failed.
  • AB33 would have created the Office of Inspector General in the State Controller’s Office that could audit any entity receiving governmental funding.
• Hmm …
  • An interesting bipartisan bill from Assms. Elaine Marzola (D-Las Vegas) and Toby Yurek (R-Henderson) would have required age verification before accessing pornography websites. It never received a hearing.
• Another nurse licensure compact bites the dust 
  • Another effort to join an agreement allowing a nurse to hold a license recognized by any of the 43 states that are part of the Nurse Licensure Compact has fallen by the wayside.
    • SB34, which would have Nevada join the compact along with a host of other interstate compact agreements, was not scheduled for a hearing as of Friday and does not have an exemption.
    • Industry experts have said the bill would address a critical shortage of professional health care workers, while labor unions have cited fears about the compact benefiting hospitals over workers and undermining collective bargaining power.
• Bill expanding reproductive rights falls through the cracks
  • After SB139 died, Nevada continues to be the only state to criminalize self-managed abortions — the act of ending a pregnancy outside of a formal medical setting.
• Legislature not a fan of transparency on itself?
  • Two constitutional amendments proposed by Assm. Heidi Kasama (R-Las Vegas) — AJR2 and AJR3 — to increase legislative transparency never received a hearing. They would have subjected the Legislature to public records requests and the Open Meeting Law, as well as required bill texts to be available to the public 72 hours before final passage.

— Eric Neugeboren, Tabitha Mueller, Isabella Aldrete

Days until: 

• First house passage deadline: 11
• Second committee passage deadline: 35
• Sine die: 52

And to get you through the weekend, a few social media posts that caught our eye: 

• X: Bark.
• X: The legislators keep getting younger
• Instagram: A victory lap and a funeral

We’ll see you next week.