Near midnight on June 2, the Legislature’s halls sounded much like the final minutes of a close football game as criminal justice reform advocates inside the lobbyist room loudly cheered an unexpected champion: Sen. Ira Hansen (R-Sparks).

As the session drew to a close, the Republican brought work in the chamber to a halt with a series of parliamentary procedures protesting last-minute introductions of resolutions altering the balance of power on the state’s Legislative Commission, which reviews and approves state agency regulations. 

The whoops of joy weren’t directed at the resolutions, but rather at the fact that Hansen appeared to be stopping progress on Gov. Joe Lombardo’s signature criminal justice legislation: SB457. 

After multiple amendments, numerous late-night hearings and a madcap dash to the finish line, the bill had passed out of the Assembly about a half hour before Hansen began speaking — only needing a small procedural Senate vote to reach the governor’s desk.

But when the Senate was forced to adjourn at midnight, the constitutionally mandated end of the 120-day session, the crime bill had not reached that step. No further action could be taken on the bill.

In the whodunit of Lombardo’s marquee crime bill’s demise, lawmakers, legislative observers and longtime lobbyists told The Nevada Independent that blaming the legislative session’s chaotic final hours is part of the answer. However, it isn’t the full explanation for why the governor’s priority bill, which 56 of 63 lawmakers voted for, failed to pass. 

Tackling crime has long been a major priority for Lombardo, the former sheriff of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department who is gearing up for his 2026 re-election campaign. 

During his State of the State address in January, Lombardo vowed to restore a sense of “law and order,” criticizing a slew of policies the Democrat-controlled Legislature passed in 2019 that softened penalties for retail theft and fentanyl trafficking, which his bill sought to reverse. 

“It's evident that more work remains in our fight to secure our communities,” Lombardo said at an April press conference, flanked by district attorneys and other law enforcement officials. “This legislation was drafted to put teeth back into Nevada’s penal code, hold criminals accountable, empower judges and prosecutors and support victims of crime.”

Problems began days and even weeks beforehand, said those interviewed by The Nevada Independent, citing a lack of timely bill hearings and amendments, siloed discussions during drafting that excluded certain parties and last-minute changes that made the bill procedurally challenging to get over the hump.

“The Assembly did everything in its power to get SB457 processed and back to the Senate on sine die, but there was not enough time to do so given how late the Assembly received the bill,” Speaker Steve Yeager (D-Las Vegas) told The Nevada Independent.

The bill’s clock simply ran out. Though the bill’s untimely end was initially attributed to Hansen’s last-minute protest (Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro (D-Las Vegas) told reporters after midnight on June 2 that “Taking a lot of time to do antics on the floor makes it tough to get business done.”), a closer examination of legislative records reveals that the bill never actually reached the Senate for a concurring vote. 

Instead, it quietly died in the state printer’s office, where legislative staff ran out of time to physically print copies of the amended bill.

Plus, there were several nights leading up to sine die when the Assembly adjourned earlier than expected because there were no bills for them to act on, according to a longtime lobbyist who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share information freely, adding that having an earlier and better-coordinated plan among top lawmakers would have helped it survive. 

Spokespeople for the Senate Democratic Caucus said the legislation died because it was never transmitted back to the Senate from the Assembly, even though staff were ready for it and there was enough time left to make it over. One spokesperson added that Senate leadership offered on multiple occasions to call a special session immediately after midnight to take care of the issue — but Lombardo rejected the offer.

“So far no further conversation has taken place,” a spokesperson said. “If the governor’s office considered this legislation a top priority, they could have taken us up on the offer to immediately pass it.”

Lombardo spokeswoman Elizabeth Ray said that the bill’s death came as a surprise because the governor had assurances from legislative leadership that the Senate would concur on the bill.

She reiterated that the bill died because of a “lack of time management in weeks leading up to the end of the session and on sine die.” 

Some legislative sources say they expect the crime bill to reemerge if lawmakers are called into a special session to deal with federal budget cuts. 

As for what Lombardo's team says?

“The office of the governor is thoughtfully reviewing what happened with budgetary and policy bills before making any decisions,” Ray said.

Last-minute amendments

At the bill’s introduction in April, Lombardo said that he anticipated major changes would need to be made to his proposal for it to successfully pass — especially given its sizable price tag.

But no additional changes were made until it came up for its first hearing almost two months later in late May, with ostensibly little done to address the bill’s estimated cost of more than $42 million. 

Between then and the end of the session, lawmakers, criminal justice reform advocates and other power players proposed at least five amendments to the bill, prompting back-and-forth discussions during a process that many complained largely took place behind the scenes and without the input of all relevant parties. 

Ray pushed back, saying that the governor’s office “engaged with a diverse range of public safety stakeholders, including victim’s advocates, law enforcement and a diverse array of attorneys.”

“After the bill was introduced, the Office of the Governor engaged with any and all stakeholders who reached out with concerns,” she said. “Furthermore, the Office of the Governor does not set the legislative agenda. The Senate Judiciary Chair sets the agenda, deciding if or when bills get hearings and work sessions.”

Still, many entities involved in the criminal justice system said in committee hearings and conversations with The Nevada Independent that they were left out of the development process.

Amendments from Democratic lawmakers sought to scale back key parts of the initial bill, including proposals to crackdown on fentanyl trafficking and retail theft, which lawmakers called far too punitive and said had little basis in reality with property crime and violent crime rates going down. 

But as the legislative clock began to tick to midnight, there was little time left for both sides to adopt some of those sweeping changes.

Another longtime lobbyist, speaking on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the situation, said that it’s logistically challenging for legislative staff to quickly churn out amendments to large bills, and that holding a first hearing on the bill (introduced in April) just five days before the end of the session was a mismanagement of time.

If hearings had happened earlier, groups left out of the initial drafting would have had a chance to weigh in, the lobbyist said.

Ray told The Nevada Independent that despite promises from Senate Judiciary Chair Melanie Scheible (D-Las Vegas) that the bill would be heard four to five weeks before the end of the session, it didn’t receive a hearing until May 28.

Senate aides, however, disputed this, saying no such promise was made. And Ray didn't offer proof, saying the promise was made verbally. 

Scheible said in an earlier interview that more than 50 hours of work were put in behind the scenes to craft the amended bill to make it palatable to all parties.

“We didn't know any of this until we met for the first time … to try to work out and negotiate and actually deal with the issues that were mentioned,” Athar Haseebullah, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, testified during a May hearing about the last-minute amendments.

A longtime lobbyist noted that the second house, in this case the Assembly, usually also wants to make changes to the legislation and needs time to do so — time it didn’t have after the Senate passed the bill after 2 p.m. on the Legislature’s final day. 

Yeager, an attorney who worked on a landmark 2019 criminal justice package, said he told the governor and Senate that he would not be forced into a "take it or leave it position" and would amend the bill. He said he had expressed to Scheible and Lombardo early on the need for the Assembly to receive the bill by Friday, May 30, or at the latest, Saturday, May 31, so that it could go through the normal three-day legislative process. 

“That did not happen, as we did not receive the bill until the evening of sine die,” he said.

His own amendment to the bill, adopted with less than an hour left in session, took out a provision that would have authorized law enforcement to intercept communication for the purposes of investigating child sexual abuse.

Spokespeople for the Senate Democratic Caucus, however, said that they didn’t anticipate Yeager’s amendment and had “every indication” that the language was “acceptable to all parties” — a point Scheible made as well on the last day of the session during an Assembly hearing.

“The discussions on this bill were carried out over several weeks and at multiple points, updates were given to Assembly leadership on the status of negotiations,” the spokespeople told The Nevada Independent. “We can’t speak to why there were other substantive changes being made to the bill once it left the Senate.”

‘More time to digest’

Perhaps one of the most surprising and politically significant amendments was a joint effort from the Nevada Resort Association and Culinary Workers Union Local 226 to ban people convicted of misdemeanor crimes from designated tourism corridors for as long as a year.  

The pair — at odds on other major policy questions — said additional safeguards were needed to keep employees and guests safe from harm, and urged lawmakers to reestablish a corridor court authorized to ban people from the Strip after a similar program ceased operating last year. 

“We welcome 40 million people a year. The resort industry remits 30 percent of the state's general fund. We personally employ 45,000 hard-working men and women who are your constituents,” said MGM lobbyist Jason Gray during public comment in the final hearing on the last day of the session, noting that the casino saw no reason for the court to have been disbanded. “I’d be happy to meet with any of you to talk in greater detail about our company's perspectives on what has and has not been done.”

But again, lawmakers and progressive advocates raised concerns about the timing of the amendment, as the proposal was publicly introduced on the last day of session. They said the policies needed more work, input and lacked clear evidence-based solutions. Some said that the late amendment was an effort to steamroll advocates.

During the informational hearing in the Assembly, the Resort Association also noted there was a misprint on the amendment that would need to be fixed.

“I do wish I had more time to digest this,” Assm. Erica Roth (D-Reno) said during the hearing. 

Ray said the governor’s office became aware of the amendment from the Nevada Resort Association in early May, and the office was supportive of the effort, though their team was not involved in the details of it. She said language for the amendment “continued to evolve up until the final bill hearing.”

Senate Democratic Caucus sources said there were alternative vehicles for the Nevada Resort Association language, but the governor requested that it be included in his crime bill, which contributed to the bill’s delay and last-minute amendment.

They said the amendment had to wait to move until all the other pieces of the bill were finalized, and though there were some “technical drafting changes needed to that language, … conceptually everyone was on the same page.”

Legislative sources also indicated they expect to see a return of the effort to reestablish a court that could ban people from the Strip. The effort is a top priority for the Nevada Resort Association and the Culinary Union.

Virginia Valentine, president and CEO of the Nevada Resort Association, told The Nevada Independent that the association was “disappointed” by the death of the crime bill. 

Valentine said the industry has been working with law enforcement, the district attorney’s office, public defenders, gaming enforcement and Clark County for more than a decade on addressing crime in the tourism corridor. 

“There is no higher priority for our industry,” Valentine said, adding that hundreds of hours of work informed the amendment to the crime bill.

Valentine pointed to a recent shooting on the Strip that killed two people as a tragic loss of life that affected Las Vegas’ reputation. People don’t want to travel to unsafe places, she said, adding that employees shouldn’t have to worry about personal safety while they’re on the clock.

The crime bill “was good public policy, and it should have passed,” she said.

The Culinary Union did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

A procedural death loomed

Though more and more legislative processes are moving online, the backbone of any legislative action relies on the creation of hundreds of physical artifacts, including the physical copy of a bill, which is backed by a jacket stamped with the actions taken by each chamber.

The process can be time-consuming, and in the instance of Lombardo’s crime bill, legislation can be killed by the printer rather than a vote.

Take the initial development of a bill. 

Turning concepts into workable legal bills doesn’t happen overnight. Legislative Counsel Bureau legal staff need to write up a lawmaker’s idea into constitutionally acceptable language, which can take time, and then it needs to be physically printed. If a bill is amended, it must be reprinted with the language changes incorporated, which can also add time to the process.

The state printer typically has a minimum 24-hour turnaround time for bill printing, but can take as long as 48 hours. That time can be sped up, with the legal division printing and backing individual copies of bills as necessary to enable the houses to transmit bills more quickly. Still, no single bill is being processed in a vacuum — especially in the fast-moving final hours of the session. 

Steps involving the physical printing of the bill and timestamping that copy ensure there is a legal record of the exact language that the Legislature acted upon. 

In the final days of the session, dozens of bills are being processed simultaneously, often with significant changes.

One of the longtime legislative lobbyists noted that there were other bills with voluminous amendments being processed in the final hours of the session, which gummed up the process and hindered staff’s capacity to meet printing deadlines.

One example of the length of time it can take is Cannizzaro’s education bill, SB460, the measure was amended to incorporate aspects of Lombardo’s major education bill.

When the Assembly amended and voted the now 204-page SB460 out at 10:19 p.m. on sine die, the message that the Senate had received the physical version was read at 11:39 p.m., roughly 80 minutes later. The Senate concurred with the amendment 4 minutes later — taking about 84 minutes for the bill to be fully approved by both houses.

Reprinting and turning the governor’s crime bill back to the Senate in about 30 minutes would be difficult for legislative staff, though not impossible.

Looking ahead

Sources close to the Senate Democratic Caucus, granted anonymity to speak freely, said last week that because the crime bill was never transmitted back to the Senate, caucus leaders offered to hold a quick special session to pass the bill, but the governor declined.

Asked about the offer and refusal, Ray said last week “many bills were killed because of legislative leadership’s lack of time management.”

“Legislative leadership squandered valuable time, and they are well aware of their mismanagement and the issues it caused,” she wrote.

In follow-up remarks, Ray said, “the delays land squarely on legislators.”

Ray's comments could foreshadow potential attacks in legislators' future campaigns, such as for for Cannizzaro, who is widely considered a potential contender for the 2026 attorney general race.

Spokespeople for the Senate Democratic Caucus responded by saying that the governor’s office struggled to close down negotiations on many of their priority bills, including the crime one.

“If the governor’s office was worried about squandering valuable time, a bill of this magnitude would have been introduced well before the halfway point of session and negotiations would have been completed sooner,” they said.

This story was updated Sunday, 6/15/2025 at 11:45 a.m. to include a response from Senate Democratic aides and context on future campaigns.