Shortened session at midway point

Wednesday, March 31, 1999 | 10:31 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- Come Thursday, lawmakers can kiss their $130-a-day pay goodbye as they reach the halfway point of the first session of the Nevada Legislature limited to 120 days.

Although Thursday is the final day of pay for lawmakers, the $80-a-day expense account continues the rest of the session.

On one thing everybody agrees: Legislators are working longer hours and at a faster pace to meet a string of deadlines. But there's still disagreement over whether this session will produce better laws than in the past.

More bills have been introduced in the first 60 days than in the full 167-day session in 1997. Of the 1,225 bills, only 30 have been passed and signed by Gov. Kenny Guinn.

And a typical legislative day for many starts at 7 a.m. and ends at 8 p.m.

More lawmakers have been felled by illness than in any session in recent times. Assemblymen Bob Price, D-North Las Vegas, and John Marvel, R-Battle Mountain, both spent two stints in the hospital.

Assemblyman Tom Collins, D-North Las Vegas, entered the Carson-Tahoe Hospital for a weekend of tests. Assemblywoman Sharron Angle, R-Reno, collapsed and was absent for a few days while she recovered.

"We're working harder, but that's OK," says Assembly Minority Leader Lynn Hettrick. "We've learned a lot. I hope it proves we can cut back on the number of bills."

Hettrick, R-Gardnerville, predicts that 25-35 percent of the bills will not be passed out of the house of origin by the April 19 deadline.

Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, takes the opposite view.

"The public voted for this (the 120-day limit) because they thought if we were here a less amount of time we would do less damage and also because it would be cheaper," Titus said.

"We know it's not cheaper because the Legislative Counsel Bureau has a budget of 9 percent more, and that eats up any savings from a shorter session. And we have introduced more bills this session than we did last session. It's costing more in a shorter session.

"There's less public access so there is more room for mischief and mistakes," Titus said.

For instance, she added, skeleton bills are being marked up by the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee on the important subjects of restructuring the electric and telecommunications industries and the former State Industrial Insurance System, now restructured as the Employers Insurance Co. of Nevada.

"The danger is that we're not going to know what is going into those bills," she said.

The bills will be in a slimmed-down version and all the amendments won't be available when they are ready for final passage in the Senate.

"These are not simple bills, and by the time the public in Southern Nevada finds out about them, they will be out of here (the Senate)," she said.

Titus said there has not been as much teleconferencing of committee meetings to Las Vegas as in the past, but Assembly Speaker Joe Dini, D-Yerington, said more people are testifying at hearings this year than in the past. A bill that may have taken 20 minutes in prior years now consumes two hours in testimony, he said.

Hettrick agreed, saying testimony sometimes gets repetitive. It doesn't take 25 speakers to make a "salient point" on a bill, he said.

Dini, the senior member in the Assembly, who has served since 1969, called it "a fast session." This time, he said, both parties are working together, rather than staging partisan battles.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, also said things are moving along. He said the Senate Finance Committee, which is building a state budget, has completed most of its major hearings and has started to approve budgets of some minor agencies.

Lorne Malkiewich, director of the Legislative Counsel Bureau, said the session runs about $70,000 a day and should end up costing about $12.5 million, a savings of about $3 million from 1997.

The next major deadline facing lawmakers is April 9, when committees must approve all bills originating in their houses or the measures die.