Legislative laptop savings seen

Wednesday, June 10, 1998 | 11:16 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- Ron Nichols, who is resigning as head of the Nevada Legislature's computer system, is giving taxpayers a $300,000 going away present.

Nichols said Tuesday he wants to return to private industry after almost two years in his position.

Sen. Bill O'Donnell, R-Las Vegas, said Nichols stepped into a "pit of problems" when he took over the job in September 1996. At the time the lawmakers were getting individual laptops and there were other computer projects in the works, many of which were stalled.

"You inherited a real donnybrook," O'Donnell told Nichols at a meeting of the Legislative Subcommittee on Computer Application to the Legislative Process. He added that Nichols "used bailing wire and gum" to get the lawmakers through the session.

Nichols told the subcommittee the Legislature could save $300,000 by purchasing computers for less than $1,000 each that would be adequate for the 1999 and 2001 legislative sessions.

In the past, the Legislature bought new computers each session for its estimated 150 part-time employees and then sold them to state agencies for about half the cost.

In another cost cutting measure, lawmakers decided previously to go ahead with Nichols' plan to trade in their $6,000 laptop computers for lighter, faster and more sophisticated computers that would be leased.

Assembly Jack Close, R-Las Vegas, who headed the committee, said the new computers would cost about $40 a month to lease -- a big savings in the long run.

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