Nevada’s public records law has a big bark, but little bite. It’s time to change that.
That’s strong rhetoric, and rightly so. Government officials work for the public. That makes members of the public the boss. One of your rights as a supervisor is to know what your employees are doing.
Imagine if your employer came to your office to find out what you’re working on, and you told him it was none of his business. Think you’d have a job for very long? Yet that’s what government employees often do.
Right now, numerous Review-Journal reporters are working on stories that involve government misconduct or mismanagement of government funds. These are stories you’ll want to read, but the reporters are waiting — sometimes for months at a time — for public agenices to produce documents.
If an agency refuses a request, you have to sue. Just last week a District Court ruled that the Clark County coroner improperly withheld records requested by the Review-Journal. The RJ sued last July, and the judge ordered the agency to produce the records and pay the RJ’s $32,000 in legal bills.
Getting attorney fees back is good, but it’s not enough. As Nevada’s pre-eminent news source, the RJ has the resources to sue when government officials disobey the law. Most requesters don’t.
Clark County’s 8.25 percent sales tax is relatively high compared to other jurisdictions across the country. But state Sen. Tick Segerblom, a Democrat, yearns to make it an even greater burden for county residents.
One gubernatorial candidate released internal polling, while another snagged a key endorsement from the teacher’s union last week in Nevada politics.
Who cares if we’re 10 months away from the general election? It’s never too early for political polls.
An internal poll from Republican Adam Laxalt’s gubernatorial campaign shows him well in front of primary opponent Treasurer Dan Schwartz, by a margin of 66 percent to 7 percent.
The poll showed Laxalt ahead but in a tighter race for the general election against both major Democratic candidates. It had Laxalt up six points on Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak, by a percent margin of 44-38, and ahead of Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani by a percent margin of 45-34.
Laxalt, Nevada’s attorney general, has been endorsed by Vice President Mike Pence and a slew of Republican governors including Arizona’s Doug Ducey and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker. Nevada GOP Gov. Brian Sandoval has not endorsed anyone in the race.
But a competitive primary between Sisolak and Giunchigliani could hurt the eventual Democratic nominee in the general election, the article said.
“We expect another Toss-up open-seat race in a Toss-up state,” the author wrote.
Nevada Republicans need to take a page out of Donald Trump’s playbook and propose a big, beautiful tax cut right here in Nevada.
Nevada has the reputation of a low-tax state, but you wouldn’t know it from all the tax increases Clark County residents have endured over the past 10 years.
Donald Trump’s decision to shutter a contentious voter fraud panel has turned into campaign fodder for the Democratic lawmaker hoping to replace Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske.
Democratic Assemblyman Nelson Araujo, running to take on Cegavske in the 2018 election, aimed a broadside at the Republican earlier this week after President Donald Trump announced he would dissolve the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity formed earlier in 2017.
“Even the Republican secretary of state of Mississippi opposed this obvious attempt at voter disenfranchisement and told the Trump administration to ‘go jump in the Gulf,’ yet Secretary Cegavske willingly agreed to give away voters’ private, personal data for the sake of partisan political gain,” he said in the statement.
Trump announced that he would dissolve the commission on Wednesday, saying that despite “substantial evidence” of voter fraud, many states had refused to provide the requested voter information.
If you thought the Clark County School District’s budget problems were over, think again. An unelected, unaccountable, out-of-state arbitrator could leave the district without enough money to pay its bills.
t’s time to put my credibility as a pundit on the line and offer eight political predictions for 2018.
1. Recalls go forward. Democrats have offered plenty of bluster to the media about invalid signatures on the recall petitions, but the numbers don’t back it up. Consider the recall of state Sen. Nicole Cannizzaro. Recall supporters turned in 16,875 signatures. Election officials said 89 percent were valid. Recall opponents turned in 1,273 removal requests. Election officials found just 36 percent were valid.
That leaves recall opponents relying on constitutionally dubious post-submission withdrawals. While it’s always dangerous to assume the state Supreme Court will follow the constitution, I think the justices get this one right and give voters the final word.
2. Preventing sanctuary state initiative qualifies, wins. Six years ago, the immigration debate in Nevada centered around blanket amnesty. Now, it’s about whether illegal aliens who commit additional crimes should be deported or released.
While then-candidate Donald Trump pioneered that incredible act of political jujitsu , state Senate Minority Leader Michael Roberson has brought it to Nevada. He’s sponsoring a constitutional amendment to prevent sanctuary jurisdictions in Nevada. Qualifying initiatives is all about raising money, a talent at which Roberson excels. If the initiative makes the ballot, it’ll win and boost Republican candidates.
The tax reform bill recently passed by Congress is expected to boost middle-income Nevadans’ wages by an average $610 next year.
So why do so many seem to think this coming tax cut is somehow actually a tax increase?
More than a month after supporters of an effort to recall Democratic state Sen. Nicole Cannizzaro turned in the recall petition, Nevada election officials have narrowly ruled that it has enough signatures to trigger a special election.
By a slim margin of 43 signatures, election officials with the Nevada Secretary of State’s office said Tuesday that the petition to recall Cannizzaro had reached the required threshold to trigger a special election — though Democrats, as they did in another recall effort, are likely to immediately challenge the signature total in court, which would block an election from immediately going forward.
The effort needed 14,975 valid signatures, and garnered 15,018 after officials removed signatures from people who had asked them to be stricken after the fact. Recall backers turned in 16,875 signatures to recall Cannizzaro, a freshman state senator first elected in November 2016.
The petition comes after attorneys for Cannizzaro cried foul over Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske’s outlined process for reviewing signatures and removal requests submitted as part of the recall petition. Though Cegavske’s office defended their process of determining valid signature removal requests, attorneys for the group fighting the recalls said in a letter earlier this week they had found several “apparent discrepancies” in the published number of signature removal requests.