With state Sen. Joe Hardy (R-Boulder City) termed out, two Republican Assembly members are eyeing his seat, with one of them already openly campaigning.

Nevada will become one of the first states in the nation to allow pharmacists to prescribe human immunodeficiency virus prevention drugs to patients who are at risk of contracting the virus.

Lawmakers took a major step this session to expand and diversify the industry’s disproportionately white and male ownership and also provide tourists with a place to legally consume marijuana by creating a new license type for cannabis consumption lounges.

Administrators, officials and lobbyists in the orbit of Nevada’s higher education system shared a common refrain coming out of this year’s legislative session: It could have been worse.

More than 200 of the more than 550 bills passed by the Legislature take effect either in full or in part on Thursday, from a high-profile new policy giving laid-off casino workers priority in rehiring to a new law decriminalizing jaywalking.

Frustration over an ineffective ban on short-term rental properties in unincorporated Clark County and a patchwork of rules across municipalities prompted state lawmakers this spring to pass a bill aimed at standardizing rules and holding hosting platforms such as Airbnb or Vrbo liable for noncompliance with local regulations.

Refunds of the technology fee — which has been in place since 2015 and was designed to fund a long-awaited but scandal-stricken DMV system modernization upgrade — didn’t exactly come as a surprise. The fee and an extension of the state payroll tax were challenged by state Senate Republicans in a 2019 lawsuit, and the state Supreme Court ruled in their favor in May 2021, requiring that the state pay back the unconstitutionally extended taxes collected over the past year.

When lawmakers kicked off their 120-day legislative session in February, the state was still recovering from a brutal winter surge of COVID-19, which saw a thousand new cases of the virus reported across the state each day.

Members of the Interim Finance Committee met Tuesday to authorize the governor’s office to accept the full ARP allotment and designate allocations of more than $76 million in federal aid programs, including $39.5 million in rental assistance, $12.1 million in homeowner assistance and $13.9 million for the Department of Education to ensure federal relief funds are properly administered.

Democrats controlled both houses of the Legislature during the 2021 session, and hundreds of high-profile Democratic measures sailed through the Assembly and Senate while a vast majority of Republican-backed measures failed to make much headway in the legislative process.