Nevada lawmakers had hoped to come up with a permanent funding source this session to build wildlife bypasses — structures that help animals safely cross busy highways and cut down on the estimated 5,000 animal-vehicle collisions that happen in the state each year. 

But the effort suffered a major setback after AB486, a bill looking to double the existing $1 fee the state charges on new tires and send the funding toward the projects, was gutted. It faced opposition from the trucking industry — a heavy consumer of tires — and political challenges because it would require a two-thirds majority approval to increase a tax.

“So many of our bills become a marathon. It [requires] more than one session to get things through,” said Assm. Natha Anderson (D-Reno), who championed the bill on behalf of the Assembly Committee on Natural Resources, which she chairs. “We’ve got to see this as one attempt at the marathon run.”

Wildlife crossings, particularly when constructed in seasonal migration corridors, significantly reduce animal fatalities and save millions of dollars by reducing the number of animal-vehicle collisions. 

The proposed tax would have brought in $2 million to $3 million each year for the state wildlife crossing account established in 2023 through AB112, which awarded the account a one-time $5 million appropriation but no permanent funding mechanism.

This session, lawmakers are considering AB87, which would provide another one-time allocation of $5 million to the account. But the lack of a regular funding source concerns advocates.

“Our wildlife, including mule deer, elk and antelope and other species that travel across highways, cannot depend on the fluctuation of funding every other year that our state has to fund projects like this,” Russell Kuhlman, executive director of the Nevada Wildlife Federation, said while testifying in favor of AB486.

AB486 passed out of the Assembly and is now before the Senate, but not before a series of amendments shifted the bill’s focus from wildlife to transportation — a process one lawmaker described as a “gut and replace.” 

The Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) recently compiled an inventory of high-collision areas in partnership with the Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW). The amended version of the bill requires that when NDOT reports on highway projects, it includes the progress of any projects identified in that inventory. 

The bill also increases the cost of a project that requires the department to prepare a written analysis of the costs and benefits from $25 million to $50 million, while additionally requiring the department to include a discussion of the value of wildlife crossings for that project. 

The language adding the tire tax and redirecting funding for wildlife crossings has been removed.

“The hope is in two years to bring something back,” Anderson said.

‘Highways are known to create barriers’

Of the thousands of vehicle-wildlife accidents in the state each year, more than half involve large wildlife such as mule deer, elk, bighorn sheep and black bears.

Added up, those accidents become costly. Infrastructure damage, injuries, emergency response, traffic control and other costs come out to about $12.9 million per year — a sum of more than $155 million in the years studied, according to NDOT.

Since 2010, NDOT has spent more than $43 million on projects to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions. 

That includes wildlife crossings, which can include everything from overpasses spanning Interstate 80 for big game mammals to cross, to small tunnels similar to stormwater drains for tortoises to travel beneath highways. Fencing along the highways directs wildlife toward the crossings.

As of summer 2024, the department has installed 24 large animal over and underpasses, modified more than a dozen other structures to improve large animal movement and installed 42 tortoise crossings. It also put up more than 500 miles of wildlife fencing.

“Highways are known to create barriers,” Cody Schroeder, wildlife staff specialist for NDOW’s big game division, told The Nevada Independent. “When you put these crossings in, it can open up habitat on each side of the road that might not have been accessible before or were [too] risky to access before.”

In January, NDOT was notified it would be awarded $16.8 million in federal funding to protect one of the state’s smaller (and slower) species.

The funding would pay for NDOT to construct 61 tortoise under-crossings and install 68 miles of fencing (34 miles on each side) to protect tortoises along U.S. 93 in Clark and Lincoln counties, near Coyote Springs — an area considered essential for tortoise populations. Found only in the desert Southwest, the Mojave desert tortoise was listed as a threatened species in 1990 under the Endangered Species Act and remains on the list decades later.

The state was only able to leverage the federal funding for this long-standing department goal thanks to the Legislature’s 2023 appropriation to the wildlife crossing account.

“Our state investment is bringing in $16.8 million,” Nova Simpson, wildlife crossing program manager for NDOT, told lawmakers in April. “We hope to see that within the next year.”

A ‘win-win’ for saving wildlife and human lives

In the recently released inventory of high-priority crossing areas, 30 spots across the state were outlined as likely to benefit from wildlife crossings — roughly half of those are on U.S. 93 or Interstate 80. 

In a 2023 interview with The Nevada Independent, Simpson said that construction of wildlife corridors can cost anywhere from $2 million to $20 million per project; when speaking with lawmakers this session, Simpson said that it would cost about $1 billion for NDOT to complete all 30 projects.

But she said, “we don’t have dedicated funding, and as you're all aware, funding for the state is tight.”

After wildlife crossings were installed on U.S. 93 north of Wells, research from UNR showed that more than 35,000 mule deer used them during seasonal migrations. Prior to construction of the wildlife crossings, data collected by NDOT and NDOW showed an estimated 300 deer killed per year in vehicle collisions along a roughly 20-mile stretch of U.S. 93 between Wells and the unincorporated community of Contact. Collisions were highest during seasonal migrations.

The state’s current mule deer population is estimated at around 72,000 — up from 68,000 last year, the smallest deer population in nearly five decades. But numbers are still far below the 200,000 or so deer estimated to roam the state in the late 1980s.

The crossings on Interstate 80 and Highway 93 have helped reduce the number of ungulate deaths being recorded in that area, Schroeder said. 

“Those were some of our higher collision areas,” he told The Nevada Independent. “Those have since been largely mitigated by some of the crossings we built out there.

“It’s a win-win when you can minimize wildlife collisions and you're saving human lives.” 

‘There’s political realities in this building’

Passage of AB486 in its original form would have made Nevada one of the first states to establish a dedicated funding mechanism for wildlife crossings, Nic Callero, senior officer at Pew Charitable Trusts, told lawmakers.

But nationwide momentum for wildlife crossings is growing: From 2019 to 2024, 66 habitat connectivity bills were passed nationwide, and this year, 20 states have introduced bills related to wildlife corridors and crossings.

Utah recently appropriated $20 million to address wildlife-vehicle collisions, Callero told lawmakers at an April 28 Assembly Growth and Infrastructure Committee hearing, and in New Mexico, a $50 million bill to fund new wildlife crossing infrastructure was just signed. Montana just created a wildlife crossing account and is on the cusp of creating the nation’s first dedicated funding mechanism for such accounts.

Nevada’s previous wildlife crossing bills, in combination with passage of AB486, “would help solidify this momentum and codify the implementation of wildlife crossings as an agency priority,” Callero said. 

But using the tire tax to fund the account would have an outsized effect on the state’s trucking industry, argued Nevada Trucking Association CEO Paul Enos. In an interview after the bill’s hearing in April, Enos told The Nevada Independent that one of his association members purchased more than 4,900 tires last year. 

He added, “We do believe this bill has a noble purpose in terms of preventing these wildlife vehicular collisions.”

In addition to initial opposition from the state trucking association (which flipped to support after it was amended), Enos said there were concerns in the Legislature over the tax component of the bill. Any bill that adds taxes, fees or other assessments requires a two-thirds vote by both the Senate and the Assembly, and those bills usually face tough odds — especially with Gov. Joe Lombardo pledging not to raise taxes. 

The amendment, he said, focuses on what can be done to move the ball forward for wildlife crossings short of a tax. 

“There’s political realities in this building with two-thirds votes,” Enos told The Nevada Independent.