The races include a Culinary-backed food server, Reno woman in the energy industry and chiropractor facing establishment-backed candidates.

“I knew people were suffering and we were trying everything we could do to help them as quickly as we can and we felt like we're fighting … a civil war at the same time,” Gaa said.

to más álgido de la crisis de desempleo de la pandemia, el gobierno federal apresuró la ayuda a los departamentos de desempleo agobiados. Pero gran parte de eso se detuvo en los últimos meses.

Officials say the unemployment claims backlog is now as bad as at points earlier in the pandemic, as the state grapples with a drastically reduced unemployment workforce amid a dry-up of federal funding. 

Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) Director Elisa Cafferata said that while the Department of Labor has authorized states to use American Rescue Plan funds to continue benefits past Saturday’s deadline, her agency had no plans to do so.

The program ticks on in states with high unemployment, and off when states achieve a three-month average rate below 8 percent.

“Unemployment is not something that you just want to sit on and be content with, because it's not an amount that you can be content with. You're constantly stressed, you're constantly worried because there's not enough money.”

“It's very concerning to me that we still have a lot of folks who are continuing to get benefits and can't find employment,” DETR Director Elisa Cafferata said in an interview this week.

Lawmakers learned more details about a plan from the Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) to modernize the state’s outdated unemployment insurance system during a hearing on Monday, but some legislators were left with questions about how long the project will take and what effect it will have on Nevadans.

It’s another bump along the way for businesses during the pandemic, which brought layoffs, closures, capacity-restricted reopenings, reimagined operating models and, lately, pent-up customer demand as COVID-19 vaccines multiply and people clamor for a return to some semblance of normal.

“There's a $40 million price tag associated with that bill they introduced,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chris Brooks (D-Las Vegas) said in an interview on Friday. “They don't have any $40 million ideas for revenue.”

“Just to be very clear, this is a requirement that people engage in work search activities. It's not that they have to take the first job that comes along,” Cafferata said.

The agency, which has never had more than 300 cases in a year, expects it might have 10,000 such petitions stemming from denied Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) claimants alone. Right now, the agency has one senior attorney and two contracted attorneys working on the petitions.

As Nevada struggles to shake the economic side effects of being overly dependent on tourism and hospitality, there’s an increasing focus on how to help the more than 1 in 5 Nevada workers who are still claiming unemployment benefits each week transition back into the workforce before many of the programs supporting them are expected to go away in September.

Bank of America froze more than 25,000 Nevada unemployment insurance debit cards from July through February while the state fielded an onslaught of unemployment claims — a move that officials say prevented payouts on fraudulent claims but also frustrated many legitimate claimants who were cut off from crucial payments for months at a time.

Because there is an expectation that they will have a job waiting for them each fall after summer break, they are not typically eligible for benefits, but many have struggled to find summer jobs that normally help them make ends meet.

The agency also discussed challenges in implementing the benefit extensions coming through the latest round of federal COVID relief.

Nevada is, once again, healing, just as it did after the tourism industry was rocked by 9/11, the Great Recession and 1 October. That healing, though, has only ever been surface deep. The question now is whether history will repeat itself.

Officials from the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) warn that there could still be more of the payment delays like those that have plagued the implementation of the late 2020 stimulus bill and left many Nevadans without weekly payments since December.

The state has received nearly 1.1 million PUA claims through last week, and several hundred thousand have been denied. But advocates for the unemployed say the slowness of appeals for those who believe they were wrongly rejected is among their top concerns within DETR right now.