Plan to save scholarships offered

Cy Ryan and Kirsten Searer

Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2005 | 11:02 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- Gov. Kenny Guinn and the state Legislature's top leaders are expected to announce an agreement today that would save the financially troubled Millenium Scholarship program for at least a decade without floating state bonds.

But Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, said she thinks both Republicans and Democrats will support a plan to put $32 million into the program in the upcoming fiscal year, plus another $8 million each year from the state's unclaimed property revenues.

The scholarship for high school students was established with the state's tobacco settlement money, but those funds are coming in at lower levels than expected and more students are taking advantage of it.

When the program was proposed in 1999, the state expected to receive about $44 million a year from four major tobacco companies. Smoking has since declined, and the state may actually receive less than $40 million a year in the future.

Titus was one of many vocal opponents of Guinn's original plan to issue a $100 million bond for the program, which he discussed in his January State of the State speech. The state would have paid off the bond using excess funds from the unclaimed property program.

Titus, like other legislative leaders, has said that the state should fortify the program now while it has a surplus, instead of borrowing money through a bond.

A proposal is "not a done deal yet" because Guinn is still running it by legislators, said his spokesman, Greg Bortolin.

Bortolin said there was "not a lot of appetite" in the Legislature for issuing the bond when there was a big surplus of state money.

Guinn's main priority is to save the program while funding the program is almost secondary, he said.

Guinn's plan also would trim about $10 million annually from the program by mandating three things: That students must remain enrolled in the program; the state would pay a flat rate for the minimum number of credits required by statute; and the state would pay only for fall and spring semester classes.

Titus said she still would like to discuss during this session the possibility of limiting Millennium Scholarship funds so they could not be used for remedial classes.

She said she also would like to discuss setting a minimum GPA that students would be required to maintain in their core classes so students couldn't use extracurricular classes to beef-up their grade point averages.

"I don't think you should throw them out after one bad semester, maybe two," she said.

State Treasurer Brian Krolicki, who administers the fund, told lawmakers last month the program has been successful in helping Nevada's best high school students finish college. But it will be $16 million in the hole next year if changes are not made, he said.

Krolicki said the program could be $73 million in the red by 2010 if some of the requirements were not tightened.