Health care, taxes top chamber’s priorities for legislative session

Kevin Rademacher

Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2005 | 10:38 a.m.

One would expect the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce to spend most of its free time talking business, but the head of the organization said she plans to turn up the volume in the coming year.

"Las Vegas is an icon for entrepreneurship," Chamber President Kara Kelley said recently. "A real key moving forward is to continue to maintain a vibrant economy. When business is good, life is good."

With that in mind, Kelley and other chamber brass said 2005 will be spent touting the role the business community has played in keeping the Las Vegas economy humming along, even when other states and communities have slumped.

While leveraging local business accomplishments, the chamber has a short list of proposals it is planning to push during the legislative session.

"I think celebrating the success of business really equates to an education process about the importance of a healthy business climate and how that affects the health of the community and the state," Kelley said.

Top on the chamber's legislative agenda is health care and a plan to give the smallest Southern Nevada businesses the opportunity to provide affordable coverage to their employees, said Christina Dugan, the chamber's director of government affairs.

"Our members are really interested in health insurance," she said. "We want to find ways to leverage what employers are able to pay with what low-income workers are able to afford."

The chamber will seek legislation that would leverage a $91 million surplus in federal funds that the state received to create Nevada Check Up, Dugan said. Under the chamber proposal, the funds would be used to subsidize insurance plans for businesses with between two and 50 employees.

"On a whole, it's a very positive bill," she said. "It's about small businesses trying to get by and still being able to provide health insurance."

Additionally, Dugan said the chamber will be looking carefully at how the lawmakers address the budget surplus created by the record tax increase passed in 2003.

"We are definitely going to take a look at the surplus and how that's going to be allocated," she said, adding that more needs to be known about the surplus before plans are made to spend it.

"We obviously need to get a handle on what's really in there," Dugan added. "The concern is for the long-term situation in Nevada."

Other key issues for the chamber include affordable housing, which Dugan described as an extension of efforts to tackle the construction defect issue that became a hot legislative topic in 2003.

"We need employees to have affordable housing," she said.

Chamber officials also are expecting a fight over perceived challenges to Nevada's status as a right-to-work state. Dugan said she expects legislation to emerge that would allow "agency shops" as an alternative to union shops. Agency shops, she said, allow unions to charge fees to nonunion employees for certain services.

The chamber would oppose any such moves, she said.

Proposals to mandate nurse staffing ratios also will be opposed by the chamber, Dugan said, describing such moves as a bad means of tackling a nursing shortage.

"It sounds great," she said. "But when dealing with health care, hospitals need the flexibility to manage their own internal operation as need be."