Assemblyman Philip “P.K.” O’Neill (R-Carson City) has been in service-oriented jobs — from mortuary assistant to police officer — throughout his 72 years of life. 

That’s one of the reasons he cited — along with the influence of his father, his private Jesuit education and his admiration for former President Ronald Reagan — for getting back into the legislative arena after losing a contentious 2016 GOP primary that followed his 2015 vote in favor of a major tax package. 

“Maybe it's hereditary, DNA, or it's how we were raised, but I've always been told you have an obligation to your community that you live in,” O’Neill said. “That's why I went back in.”

After serving in the 2015 and 2021 sessions, O'Neill is spending the 2023 session navigating a challenging landscape as leader of the Assembly Republican Caucus — a group with a wide range of ideologies that is in the super minority, holding less than one-third of the votes in the lower house and unable to block tax increases, which require two-thirds support to pass.

With little voting power, Republican success could mean simply playing defense against select Democrat-backed policies and leveraging personal relationships to win over support on the other side of the aisle for certain bills.

O’Neill counts at least one friend in a high place — Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager (D-Las Vegas), who has walked with O’Neill in the Nevada Day parade and plans to go to Ireland with him this summer for a conference. Yeager said he gives O’Neill credit for coming back after two sessions off. 

“Don't get me wrong, it's an honor to be a legislator. But this is a crazy 120 days, right? It's stressful. You don't get a lot of sleep. It's a lot of work. No matter what you do, you get criticized. And then you've got the whole campaign. So a lot of times if people lose, they don't run again,” Yeager said. “He voluntarily came back to this building, knowing what he was signing up for. And I think he will probably tell you is, he just really, really values the public service part of it.”

O’Neill is the go-to person for legislators — some hundreds of miles away from home — when they need help navigating Carson City, helping them get haircuts, rides and emergency services if necessary, Yeager said. 

“One thing I want to say [about] P.K., he literally would give you the shirt off his back,” Yeager said.

From mortuary assistant to assemblyman

O’Neill was born in 1951 in Washington, D.C. His grandfather was a native of Ireland, and his father — a first-generation U.S. citizen — worked in independent contracting and public health at the Capitol. 

His family moved frequently because of his father’s work, but O’Neill eventually attended Georgetown Preparatory School — the oldest Catholic boarding school in the U.S. and the only Jesuit boarding school in the country, located in the suburbs of D.C. —  from the seventh grade until he graduated high school. 

He said his father’s dedication to his work, as well as his time at Georgetown and his faith, influenced his passion for service. 

“Living six years under the Jesuits, you learn service. It is part of religion. I mean, we should be out there helping people,” O’Neill said. “Whatever the religion is.”

After graduating from Georgetown, O’Neill went on to attend Loyola University in New Orleans. O’Neill said he went into college thinking he “knew more than everybody else did at the time, and like so many of us, dropped out.”

“Uncle Sam looked at me for a minute when we were in Vietnam,” O’Neill said. 

However, O’Neill ended up not serving in Vietnam, as the war was drawing to a close and his draft number was high when he left school.

Instead O'Neill moved to Florida, enrolling at Miami-Dade Community College and working at a business that was both a funeral home and an ambulance service to make ends meet. O’Neill said it was the hardest job he has ever had, and he quit despite the owners encouraging him to get his mortuary license and stay with the business.

“It was just one of those things that I just couldn't constantly do,” he said. “It was very difficult for me dealing with families in that situation over and over.”

But the mortuary job did open the door for O’Neill to get his paramedic license, a career he considered pursuing until an opportunity presented itself to join the Miami Police Department in November 1972. 

In March 1980, O’Neill decided to move west to join the Nevada Division of Investigation of Narcotics — spending three years in Washoe Valley and the remaining 40 (and counting) in Carson City — eventually being promoted to form a new division called Records and Technology.

In the early 90s, O’Neill became a single parent while working on call 24/7.

“Very often I’d kiss the kids, put them in bed, get called out and have to transfer them back over to their mother if she was available,” O’Neill said. “Or close, close friends that would come over and take care of them for me while I was out.”

O’Neill said that having to work while being a single parent deprived his kids of certain things. However, his wife Nancy — who began dating O’Neill in the late 1990s and married him in 1997 — said what drew her to him was his relationship with his four children: Laura, Philip, Nick and Andy.

“I was kind of attracted to the way he talked about his children and the way he treated his children,” Nancy said. “Like they were the most important thing in his life.”

His daughter Laura said O’Neill was always there for her, from soccer practice to when she decided to get her motorcycle license.

“I remember being super nervous about it, and telling him like, ‘Don't you dare show up!’ Because he knew all the people. He's super involved in motorcycles,” Laura said. “On my test day, I remember being out in the parking lot behind the DMV … And I look up and sure enough, he’s parked in his truck in the Lowe's parking lot, over-watching the test scene.”

Now, being a single parent herself, Laura said she has a new appreciation for her father.

“I guess you don't realize the sacrifice your parents make,” Laura said. “He never showed any kind of stress or demands or anything like that. He was always super involved.”

O’Neill retired from the Nevada Division of Investigation in 2009, but quickly went on to work on projects with the FBI and the International Association of Chiefs of Police as a consultant working on technology and data sharing. O’Neill’s long career with the state familiarized him with the Legislature, but it was the late former Assemblyman Pete Livermore (R-Carson City) who paved the way for O’Neill to become the city’s next representative in 2015.

It was the only session in at least the prior three decades with a Republican governor and Republican control of both houses of the Legislature. 

“Livermore, may his soul rest in peace, said ‘P.K., come, I'll endorse you and work with you.’ And so I got elected in ‘15 when [Republicans] were in the majority, which was extremely interesting,” O’Neill said. “Ran again for re-election [in 2016] and lost. Went back to my family life and enjoying my motorcycle, my wife and my growing number of grandchildren.”

Time in Legislature

In 2015, O’Neill was one of a dozen Assembly Republicans who joined Democrats to support then-Gov. Brian Sandoval’s $1.1 billion tax package, which included the creation of Nevada’s Commerce Tax, a levy imposed on businesses with more than $4 million in annual gross revenue. The tax package was meant to boost K-12 education funding. 

“Governor Sandoval … had some good plans at the time for the money to go to education in a very specific way. Unfortunately in ‘19, the money was taken out of that, and I'm really sorry that that happened because I think it hurt education,” O’Neill said. “In some ways, it didn't help because the Democrats were all in power all the way up and down the line. And I thought they were rolling and taking money out of it. And I regret that we gave them an opportunity to do that.”

When the Commerce Tax was adopted, new education funding was distributed through "categorical" funds earmarked for specific programs, such as added support for English learners and early literacy initiatives. But in 2019, lawmakers dissolved these silos and redistributed the money through a new formula named the Pupil-Centered Funding Plan, with a base level of per-pupil funding and additional "weights" for students with particular needs.

Sen. Heidi Seevers Gansert (R-Reno) expressed similar concerns, opposing the funding transfer during the 2021 session because she said the original system's separate categories made  progress easier to track. 

“We don't have that many students. And I think that funding is critically important,” said Seevers Gansert.

O’Neill’s vote in favor of the Commerce Tax cost him his re-election in 2016. Though other Republicans, such as Sen. Scott Hammond (R-Las Vegas) also voted for the tax plan, running in red Carson City rather than a more purple area such as the one Hammond represents (including suburban areas in the northwestern Las Vegas Valley) did not favor O'Neill.

As the 2016 primary approached, the Carson City Republican Central Committee (CCRP) tried to remove O’Neill from the organization over his, saying it sullied the group’s reputation. Still, O’Neill defended his vote, saying he would not apologize for his support of Sandoval, a fellow Republican, because it helped improve services to veterans and public education.

However, O'Neill was not intimidated by the CCRP's excommunication and refused to “follow blindly” and that the CCRP could “merely [remove him] from the good ol’ boys network” but did not prevent him from running again in 2016.

Al Kramer, who signed a pledge not to increase taxes and supported repealing the Commerce Tax, ended up defeating O’Neill in the primary and winning the Assembly District 40 seat, which he held for two sessions.

However, on the last day of candidate filing in 2020, Kramer withdrew from running for re-election (citing a need to take care of his elderly mother-in-law in Ohio), and O’Neill filed to run in the district again. He defeated attorney Day Williams in the GOP primary and easily won in the general election.

O’Neill returned to the Legislature in 2021, a session altered by the COVID-19 pandemic, including mask requirements and limits on public access to the building. 

“Working under COVID, we weren't able to build relationships,” O’Neill said. “One of the legislators that I like to say I'm good friends with, I didn’t recognize him the first time I saw him without a mask on until I heard [his] voice.”

During his last campaign, O’Neill took a stronger position against taxes, telling Carson Now, “We need better solutions rather than increased taxation. What is needed is to take a deeper look into spending. I’m dedicated to voting against any tax increases until we learn how to efficiently use the money we already have.”

Now, O’Neill is serving his third term as an assemblyman, a job he describes as humbling. He referenced a bill that came to the floor to adjust a law that was 100 years old.

“You sit there, you go, ‘you know, if I [vote on] that, maybe another 100 years before this bill gets adjusted again,’” he said. “And if that does not put you in perspective of what you're doing here, you should not be here because you should not be here for yourself … remember that you're here to represent the good of this state, the good of the people of this state.”

O’Neill said he still believes in policy over personality and that if a Democratic lawmaker brings a good bill to the table, he will vote for it.

“If it's good for Nevada, we should be in support of it,” he said. “There are several Democrat bills I will disagree with, but I stay friends with the individual. I guess the Nevada Day bill is a good example. We joke about it but there's some more serious bills to that on principle.”

O’Neill was referring to a bill that Yeager brought to the Legislature in 2021, asking for Nevada Day — which is observed on the last Friday of October despite the actual anniversary of statehood being the final day of the month — to be observed on the 31st every year. However, Proponents of having the last Friday of October as a holiday say it allows Carson City to prepare for the annual Nevada Day Parade that happens the following day.

O’Neill told Yeager if he dropped the bill, O’Neill would have Yeager walk with him in the Nevada Day Parade.

“I bagged on him something fierce, and I said you got to come up and walk with me in Nevada Day,” he said, and eventually persuaded Yeager to drop the bill. Yeager did walk with O’Neill in the 2021 Nevada Day Parade and returned in 2022 as a spectator.

O’Neill was elected as the leader of the Republican caucus ahead of this session, an unexpected outcome after Assemblywoman Heidi Kasama (R-Las Vegas) topped the fundraising chart of all the Assembly Republican candidates and was widely considered the next leader of the caucus. 

Sources with knowledge of the situation said Assemblywoman Danielle Gallant (R-Las Vegas) orchestrated a contingent of caucus members to elect O'Neill instead of Kasama. Gallant said she was unavailable for an interview for this story. 

O’Neill said in an interview with The Nevada Independent before the 2023 session began that the Freedom Caucus he helped co-found within the Assembly Republican Caucus had gone on hiatus because of his and Assemblywoman Jill Dickman’s (R-Sparks) leadership positions in the Legislature.

“We can represent a very conservative position. So there's really no need for it,” O’Neill said.

Though O’Neill is a Republican, his wife, Nancy — a Democrat — describes her husband as a moderate who will not sway on certain issues. Former Assemblyman Jim Wheeler (R-Minden) — who represented an Assembly district adjacent to O’Neill’s and served with him for two sessions — remains friends with O'Neill and agreed with this assessment. 

"Law enforcement, the Constitution and conservative values," Wheeler named as O'Neill's non-negotiables. 

Sen. Pete Goicoechea (R- Eureka) said though he doesn’t see O’Neill often because Goicoechea is in the Senate and O’Neill is in the Assembly, he thought O’Neill’s style of leadership likely helped the Republican Party this session. 

In previous sessions, Goicoechea said, Republicans were often split on issues, but things seem to be running smoother this session. 

“[O’Neill] is not going to impose his leadership will. He’ll help you, ‘What do you want to do? And how do you want to do it?’” Goicoechea said. “So I think, you know, I gotta tip my hat to him. The caucus works better that way.”

Republicans being in the super minority helps with cooperation too, Goicoechea said.

“When you only got 14 votes, you better play together, because you're irrelevant enough as it is,” Goicoechea said. 

Preparing for sine die

With less than a month left in the session and a disproportionate number of dead bills being Republican-sponsored, how the last days will go for Republicans depends on who you ask. 

Wheeler said O'Neill may fare better than he did as the minority floor leader in 2019, referencing O'Neill and Yeager's willingness to cooperate and O'Neill's common law enforcement background with Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo as possible advantages to getting bills passed. 

O’Neill says now is the time for the caucus to stand up against bills they believe are not good for the state and support Lombardo’s plans to diversify the economy, move education forward and ensure public safety. 

“It'll finish off like everything else, sine die will come in no matter what,” O’Neill said. “We will look at it and support the governor to be successful because his success is our success. And to me [it’s] the state's success because they elected him.”

Reporter Tabitha Mueller contributed to this story.