76th Legislative Session

Prior to the beginning of the 76th Nevada Legislature, Assembly Democrats proposed legislation to get Nevadans back to work, improve our public schools, and to make government more accountable, transparent and efficient.

The 120-day state legislative session, which concluded on time in early June, was a difficult one. Our state was facing the worst budget shortfall in the nation, at 54%, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.  Legislators from both parties and from all regions of the state were able to come together to pass a balanced state budget that provided substantially more funding for education and other critical services than originally proposed.  While painful cuts were necessary given the severity of our budget shortfall,  we held firm to the belief that education is key not only to our children’s future success in life, but to our economic recovery and reshaping our economy for the future.

Below are just a few of the bills championed by Assembly Democrats on job growth, education and government accountability.  Details on more bills passed to rebuild our economy, improve education, reform state government, reduce foreclosures and improve health care can be found in our press release section.

Jobs, Economic Development, and Security

Legislation was passed to establish a bidder’s preference for companies that hire Nevada workers and purchase materials locally to keep jobs funded with taxpayer dollars in our state (AB 144). We totally reorganized our economic development efforts to bring together existing businesses, state and local government and higher education to attract new high-tech industries to our state (AB 449).

Education

After months of meetings with teachers, school administrators, parents, education policy experts, students and the public, Assembly Democrats introduced a number of bills to reform our schools—improving the process for evaluating, rewarding and dismissing educators (AB 222, AB 225, and AB 229), improving efforts to engage parents in their children’s education (AB 224), preserving  class size reduction and full-day kindergarten in many schools, and providing schools and teachers new tools to help struggling students and improve graduation rates.

Also critical was our fight to protect funding for our public schools, community colleges and universities.   We passed a balanced budget that funds our education system at more than $600 million over the amount originally proposed.

Government Efficiency, Transparency and Accountability

We passed major reform that institutes performance-based budgeting in our state, requiring long-term planning by state agencies and enabling us to determine which programs are not producing results and should be eliminated (AB 248). Working with our Republican colleagues in both houses, we passed legislation (SB 251) that pulled the best ideas together for reviewing all boards and commissions, again so we can get rid of “dead wood” in state government.

More Information

For more information, contact your assemblyman or assemblywoman.  If you are not sure who represents you, you can look up your district here.  All of the contact information for Assembly Democrats can be found here.

Visit the Nevada legislative website at www.leg.state.nv.us.
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