Just as our national organizations of AAUP and AFT advocate on behalf of all faculty on legislation, initiate lawsuits, and support faculty at member institutions, your membership in the Nevada Faculty Alliance also comes with advocacy for faculty at our Nevada State Legislature. Yes, NFA, you have lobbyists in Carson City!  

This year we were working with an expanded team with Kent Ervin leading as our Legislative Director, Amy Pason as the chair of the state Government Relations Committee, and Doug Unger and Ian M. Hartshorn as co-Vice Chairs of the state NFA Government Relations Committee. With the addition of Amy and Ian this session, we are building capacity to be able to lobby for sessions to come.

Over the past 120 day session, we:

• Testified at 80+ bill and budget hearings.

• Met individually with legislators over 95 times.

• Collaborated with other public employee and labor groups on legislation.

• Coordinated with NSHE and institution lobbyists on shared priorities.

• Handed out numerous one-pagers of legislative priorities, end-of-session priorities, and information specific to AB 191 and AB 188. 

• Sent weekly email updates to members signed up for legislative updates.

• Sent action alerts related to bill hearings and Board of Regents meetings.

• Wrote op-eds (This is Reno; and one forthcoming in the Nevada Independent) and press releases related to collective bargaining.

• Analyzed data and created charts related to budget and benefits (you can review on NFA Headlines).

• Enjoyed solidarity and strategizing at AFL-CIO sponsored events.

To sum up the 83rd Session, we offer:

• The Good: Passage of mandatory Regent training, and one-shot money appropriations for our main priorities of campus safety and to backfill budget deficits from last session’s historic cost of living increases.

• The Bad: Collective bargaining for NSHE professionals (faculty and graduate assistants) died in committee; bill to restore retiree health benefits for state public employees was gutted, passed both houses, but then vetoed.

• The Ugly: Governor Lombardo breaks his own veto record, much of it targeted at pro-worker and pro-education legislation.

Our Legislative Wins:

• SB 322 Regent Training was signed by the Governor on May 31, after unanimous support in both houses. Working with bill sponsor Senator Angie Taylor, we modeled this legislation after similar legislation for K-12 Boards of Trustees, and even helped facilitate adding bipartisan sponsorship with the addition of Assemblymember Alexis Hansen. Although the required training is minimal (open meeting law and anti-discrimination every other year), the bill also includes a list of other necessary topics and a reporting requirement to hold Regents accountable to this training.

• AB567: $11M towards campus security funding. Following the events at UNLV, ensuring that all our institutions are safe for faculty, staff, and students has been a priority of our advocacy. This funding was part of the Governor’s recommended budget, and although not the full $38M requested by NSHE to meet safety needs, NFA advocated for this as our top one-shot funding priority.

• AB568: NFA’s advocacy for the Regents to approve the historic 12% and 11% COLA raises last session meant that NSHE did have funding gaps to cover (as the legislature only funded around 60% of the total cost of those COLAs). Although we would have preferred the legislature to increase the NSHE base budget to make us whole from this increase, we advocated for the Governor’s recommended one-shot to help cover this continued budget gap in this biennium. We are grateful that the legislature provided this bridge funding and explicitly said it was for instruction and personnel costs.

Our Legislative Partial Win:

• SB 494: Nevada Health Authority. One of the Governor’s priorities was to reorganize state health agencies to create the Nevada Health Authority that would oversee the Public Employees’ Benefits Program (PEBP), the Silver State Health Exchange, and Medicaid. As this reorganization impacted PEBP (and had provisions in the initial draft related to the composition and function of the PEBP Board), NFA worked with other PEBP stakeholder groups and the Nevada Health Authority to amend the bill to clarify the independence of the PEBP Board under this new structure.  We also worked to include provisions related to customer satisfaction surveys and data collection to better understand retiree benefits and costs. The study components were also part of AB 188, so including them in SB 494 saved that part of the bill from the Governor’s veto pen.

The Work Yet to Do:

• AB 191: After a successful hearing in the Assembly Government Affairs committee, our collective bargaining bill died waiting for a hearing in the Assembly Ways committee due to the inflated fiscal note submitted by NSHE. We heard that the Governor would have likely vetoed our bill (again) and is principally opposed to collective bargaining by graduate student workers. As noted below, the Governor used many of his vetoes on collective bargaining or worker benefit bills. If nothing else, we have now four sessions of practice with running this collective bargaining bill, and we’ll be ready to bring this bill back for the 84th session.

• AB 188:  After a lot of amending to take out the meat of the bill (that all state public employee retirees should have state subsidized health insurance as all pre-2011 hires have), the Governor vetoed the amended bill that merely helped current retirees by raising the cap on their HRA and giving a $1 raise to the state contribution to the HRA for these retirees. PEBP claimed they would need to raise their reserves related to allowing retirees to save more in their own HRAs–and apparently the Governor believed PEBP’s fiscal concerns over those of our retirees. AB188 was one of many last minute veto dumps, so this bill gets automatically reintroduced next session.