Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Legislative briefs for May 20, 2005

Payment to triage center forwarded

The Senate approved and sent to Gov. Kenny Guinn a bill Thursday for $370,000 to reimburse West Care triage center in Las Vegas for providing temporary care for mentally ill patients who are crowding hospital emergency rooms in Clark County.

Assembly Bill 40, approved 20-0, sends this money to West Care for care for the remainder of this fiscal year.

State mental health facilities have been full and those with mental problems have been piling up in the emergency rooms and the jails, awaiting acceptance by the state. West Care gets the patients stabilized and then refers them to community programs or to the state mental hospital.

Still pending in the Legislature is a decision whether the state will supply money for the next two fiscal years to care for these persons.

Bill provides new judges for county

Clark County will get seven new District Court judges starting in January 2007 under a bill approved by the Senate on Thursday.

Clark County has 33 District Court judges now. The bill calls for s the new positions to be filled in the November 2006 election. Of the seven, one will be assigned to Family Court.

Senate Bill 195, approved 20-0 and transferred to the Assembly, provides $335,105 to pay the salaries for the judges during the second half of fiscal year 2007. The county picks up the other costs.

Senate panel OKs sage grouse funds

The Senate Finance Committee approved Gov. Kenny Guinn's recommendation to allocate $300,000 in state funds for improvement to sage grouse habitats.

Bill Bradley, a member of the state Commission on Wildlife, called it good news for hunters.

The committee Thursday approved the full budget of $24 million each year for the Department of Wildlife. Of the total, the state contributes $1.6 million next year and $1.3 million the following year. Most of the revenue comes from the federal government and fees.

Included in the budget is reinstatement of money from the room tax receipts from the Commission on Tourism. Sen. Dean Rhoads, R-Tuscarora, convinced the committee to require $400,000 a year to be transferred from room tax collections to the Wildlife Commission.

State retirees on Medicare get help

The Senate Finance Committee Thursday approved a plan by Gov. Kenny Guinn to spend an additional $4.8 million in state funds to help state retirees on Medicaid to pay their rising health insurance costs in the state policy.

A controversy broke out when the state Public Employees Benefit Program earlier this year proposed increasing the rates for a state retiree and his spouse who are covered by Medicare from $234 a month to $510 a month for the state's policy.

Other rates for those on Medicare would have also experienced sharp increases of near or above 100 percent.

After several attempts to remedy the problem, the Guinn administration decided to provide greater subsidies to this group to offset the proposed big jumps.

Michael Hillerby, chief of staff for Guinn, outlined the new proposal in which the employee and spouse would now be out of pocket $391 a month starting in July compared to the present year of $234.

Another proposal that the committee approved would have cost more than $6.2 million to reduce the rates. The committee junked that proposal.

The new compromise was reluctantly accepted by Marty Bibb, executive director of the Retired Employees of Nevada, and Jim Richardson, representing the Nevada Faculty Alliance that is composed of professors and instructors in the Higher Education System of Nevada.

This proposal must be approved by the Assembly Ways and Means Committee before it can be written into the upcoming budget.

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