Clark, Washoe and state charter school officials told lawmakers on Friday salary increase for staff was among their top priorities for the expected $2 billion increase into future budgets.

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.

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.

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.

Some of the higher-profile measures signed by Sisolak over the past two days include bills aimed at allowing collegiate athletes to receive compensation, lowering the penalties for minors caught in possession of alcohol or small amounts of marijuana, requiring teaching about minorities and historically underrepresented groups and raising the legal and age prerequisites for a person to become state attorney general.

Trade groups representing property owners came out in strong opposition against the measure. Their opposition was summed up by Southern Nevada property manager Molly Hamrick, who said the bill would only serve to “keep landlords from providing a product in the marketplace that tenants desperately need.”

Three Assembly members — Steve Yeager (D-Las Vegas), Sandra Jauregui (D-Las Vegas) and Tom Roberts (R-Las Vegas) — met as a somewhat rare election contest committee last week to hear and recommend dismissal of an official challenge by former Assembly Republican candidate Cherlyn Arrington, who lost her bid to Democrat Elaine Marzola by nearly 1,200 votes in the 2020 election.

No single cause of death is named on the legislative coroner's report, but interviews with involved parties suggest a combination of factors — ranging from personal belief, mixed gubernatorial signals, potential election-related considerations and the fact that the two senators responsible for hearing the bill work for the Clark County district attorney — helped kill the measure and keep Nevada as one of 24 states with the death penalty.

A major provision of the bill allows tenants to use a landlord’s refusal to accept rental assistance money as an affirmative defense in an eviction proceeding.

Friday at midnight marks the deadline for most bills and resolutions to pass out of their second committee, typically a major legislative culling with less than two weeks left before lawmakers must adjourn the state’s 120-day session.

Friday marks the deadline for bills to pass out of their second house committee, and many criminal justice reform advocates say they are concerned that the measure abolishing capital punishment, AB395, remains in limbo with no hearing scheduled in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Clearing up that interim work schedule — the last interim period saw 21 statutory committees, 7 study committees and 41 non-legislative committees — is the point of AB443, which was heard for the first time last week in the Assembly Committee on Legislative Operations and Elections (the measure was exempted from legislative deadlines).

“The lingering question about AB395 is whether the governor is going to be supportive, and so I know that he’s expressed publicly some concerns about it,” Scheible said in an interview on Wednesday. “If the sponsor can work with him to address those concerns and bring me an amendment, that would be an important step in the process, otherwise I’m still evaluating it.”

Amid continuing attempts by a Democratic-led Legislature to grapple with the effects of the energy industry on the climate, a handful of Nevada’s largest energy companies shelled out more than $401,000 to legislative campaigns through the 2020 cycle.

The bill faces a more uncertain climate in the Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro (D-Las Vegas), who is a prosecutor, would not commit on Tuesday to giving the bill a hearing.

With nearly a quarter of the Legislature holding legal day jobs or with a J.D. on their wall, it comes as little surprise that law firms, legal groups and lawyers contributed more than $607,000 to legislative campaigns last cycle.

She likened the summary eviction process to tenants having to sue for the right to defend themselves, and said by the best estimates of process servers, only 10 percent of tenants served such notices fight back.

“Many of those are interested in trying cannabis, but there's nowhere they can legally do so. They can't bring it into their hotel rooms. They can't consume outside. As a result, many of them end up breaking the law.”

Two major variables for the bill’s future are whether a death penalty ban can survive in the Senate, where two prosecutors hold key leadership positions at the head of the entire Senate and the Senate Judiciary Committee and have the power to kill the bill, and whether Gov. Steve Sisolak would sign such a bill if it makes it to his desk.

“These arbitrary limits were enacted at a time when Nevada imposed blanket prohibition on the possession and use of cannabis for any purpose. This is not the case any longer. Hasn't been for some time.”