Lawmakers must sort through chaotic finish of session

Wednesday, June 6, 2001 | 11:07 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- The New York Stock Exchange during a panic has nothing on the closing hours of the 2001 Nevada Legislature.

And at least when the final bell rings in New York people can immediately learn what happened. Not so in Carson City, where the Legislature wrapped up early Tuesday morning after a madcap spectacle of 11th-hour lawmaking.

It's no use asking lawmakers for an accounting of their votes.

"We don't know what happened," Assembly Speaker Richard Perkins, D-Henderson, said. "We're going back over our paperwork."

Sen. Bernice Mathews, D-Reno, said the closing hours "looked like a zoo."

Legislators and lobbyists scrambled to tie up loose ends. The session still ran an hour past the deadline. The Senate computer crashed.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, said it will probably take staff members three days to untangle what passed and what didn't.

Raggio conceded the ending was wild, but no more so than in 1991, which was named "The Session from Hell."

Perkins and Raggio intend to meet with Gov. Kenny Guinn, who plans to convene a special session and set the agenda. Guinn indicated he would call the lawmakers back next week, giving them a chance to cool off and possibly develop a compromise for reapportionment.

"Our state is in the midst of extraordinary circumstances and as governor, it is my responsibility to proceed as judiciously as possible in determining the timing and topics of a special session," Guinn said.

Perkins said, "We have a number of decisions to make. And it depends on what is on the list" of bills that failed in the final hours.

The Nevada Constitution requires the session to end at midnight. But as that time approached, Republicans noted that, according to the Constitution, the session was to end on Pacific Standard Time. Since Nevada is on Daylight Savings Time, an extra hour was added to the session.

Some lawmakers said anything that passed after midnight could be challenged in court.

Guinn said he is awaiting a legal opinion from the Legislative Counsel Bureau on which bills were passed out of the Legislature after midnight Monday. Also, the Clark County Commission Tuesday directed the district attorney's office to investigate the legality of the additional hour.

It was during that last hour that the Legislature approved Assembly Bill 653, a tax-revenue shift that will give Henderson $4 million in additional state funds to compensate for its rapid growth. This will include taking more than $2 million from the county, $1 million from Las Vegas and about $200,000 each from North Las Vegas, Boulder City and Mesquite.

Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates said she was particularly incensed that state Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas, was not given a voice in the last-minute agreement on the bill, because his constituents stand to be hurt by the revenue shift. Fellow Commissioner Myrna Williams said Henderson has the lowest property taxes among the county's municipalities.

In the confusion that surrounded the closing hours, the bill to provide $1 million for start-up costs for the state college in Henderson failed to pass in the Senate. And a bill to increase the pay for state and county elected officials got stuck in the rush to adjournment.

Assembly Majority Leader Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, said the governor can decide when to convene the session and the topics on the agenda. But she said that doesn't stop lawmakers from making changes.

Reapportionment was the major casualty of the session. Democrats and Republicans agreed on seats, which will give House of Representatives incumbents Shelley Berkley, a Democrat, and Jim Gibbons, a Republican, seats in which their own party holds the majority voter registration.

Sun reporter

Steve Kanigher contributed to this report.