What to expect from the Nevada Legislature's final week

LAS VEGAS — Lawmakers in the Nevada Legislature are staring down a busy final week of the 120-day session.

Friday was the last major deadline for the Silver State’s part-time legislature. But the work is far from over for hundreds of exempt bills, many of which have the biggest potential impacts on Nevadans — and looming uncertainty around cuts from the federal government could bring a special session later this year.

As the 83rd legislative session winds down and the pace picks up in the Nevada Legislative Building, here is what to know before the final gavel drops on June 2.

What to expect this week

Legislators will meet for marathon floor votes and last-minute hearings in the remaining days of the four-month session, suspending rules that govern the schedule of hearings and votes in favor of getting things done.

“The regular committee hearings schedule just sort of falls by the wayside,” said David Damore, executive director of the Lincy Institute, a public policy think tank at UNLV. “Depending on how far behind they are, they may have hearings up at midnight. It becomes whenever they get that critical mass of bills and committee members to meet.”

A Friday deadline required bills without exemptions to advance from the second house. What’s left for the remaining days of the session is to pass bills that were exempted from major deadlines. More than 400 bills were excused from the deadline days and instead have until sine die — a fancy, Latin way to say session adjournment — to be considered.

Fred Lokken, a political science professor at Truckee Meadows Community College, said the “sausage making” is in full swing as top Democrats in the Legislature meet with the executive branch to negotiate their priorities.

“Leadership carries the bucket,” Lokken said. “They have to keep track of all this. You’ve got conversations now going on far more intensely with the governor. You have attempts to have the first true bipartisan conversations. What bills can we get through? Because you want to move the agenda that you can move.”

Getting through all those bills is what makes for an eventful end of session, Damore said. The final hours can be hectic as the two houses take last-minute votes and resolve the differences between draft bills.

“It’s really in the last couple of hours, where they’re trying to iron out differences between an Assembly version or a Senate version that gets really crazy, hard to follow,” he said.

Not without politics

Carson City observers had a glimpse into the partisan tension between Democrats and Republicans in the Legislature in a Senate floor debate on Wednesday. Then, all eight Republicans voted against the education appropriations bill, saying they could not support the budget because it did not include allocations for charter school educators’ raises.

Both parties supported efforts this session to make $250 million in public school teacher pay raises permanent. But Gov. Joe Lombardo also appropriated $38 million for public charter school teachers’ raises, as well, and Democrats removed that appropriation from the Legislature’s version of the budget.

Instead, Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro and Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager, both Democrats from Las Vegas, moved public charter school teacher raises in separate education bills. Senate Bill 460 and Assembly Bill 398 had not had floor votes as of Friday afternoon.

Wednesday’s protest vote from Republican senators did not stop the bill from moving on. The only way that could happen is if all Assembly Republicans were to vote against the state’s capital improvement plan budget, which requires a two-thirds majority vote because it renews a property tax increase. In 2023, Senate Republicans voted against that budget with about half an hour left in the regular session, forcing Lombardo to call an hours-long special session the next day to fund critical state improvement projects without the charter teacher raises included.

(Only four Senate Republicans voted against the capital improvement budget on Wednesday.)

Other major policy proposals also could be the subject of political will. Exempted bills can be considered at any point in the session, and most major proposals have been given that special status. Those include Lombardo’s five policy bills, two versions of film tax credit program expansions and a bill setting online safety standards for children.

On the budgets

Budgeting and fiscal responsibility remain key themes as the session winds down. After the May 1 Economic Forum report projected the state would collect $191 million less for the general fund than initially projected, fiscal leaders largely focused on keeping the state’s operations and programming steady into the next two-year budget cycle.

The report, a state-mandated projection of revenues for the pending biennium that is used to set the budget, was not the only source of bad news. The state’s Education Stabilization Account, also revised its forecast for the forthcoming two years down by about $160 million. Lawmakers have tapped into the state’s rainy day funds to ease the blow.

Lokken said he thought less funding for new programs meant it was easier to come to a consensus.

“It really takes some of the pressure off, Lokken said. “Policy changes, that sort of thing, have probably moved to the front now to make sure they move on quickly.”

There is a widespread expectation that the governor might call a special session later this year, once the extent of federal budget cuts is established. President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” moving through the U.S. Congress is expected to reduce spending on Medicaid and food assistance programs. Those cuts and others could have an outsized impact in Nevada, where about 28 percent of the budget comes from federal sources, according to an April report from the Kenny Guinn Center for Policy Priorities.

Lokken said Nevada’s part-time legislature has historically been called into special sessions during economic downturns because revenues came in lower than expected, forcing the state to adjust. Critical fiscal and policy decisions made now could help or hurt down the line.

“It’s really hard if you start to commit the funds and then undo them,” he said. “It’s a better strategy if they come a little later because things didn’t work out as badly as we thought. It’s a very Nevada practice. It’s an important poker move, and we have a long history of hedging because we have one of the most unstable budgets of any of the states in the union.”