Little room for pork, fight expected for scraps

Saturday, April 28, 2007 | 7:22 a.m.

CARSON CITY - Higher education projects are usually magnets for legislative pork, but this year politicians will be hard-pressed to bring home the bacon.

With state revenue falling short, legislators are struggling over whether they'll even be able to cover the top priorities of university officials, much less their own special projects at those universities.

Out of $135 million in appropriations requests for research, education or community outreach at the state's universities and colleges, about $43.5 million is requested by legislators for projects that fall outside of the Board of Regents' priority funding list.

The most expensive project is a $25 million police academy at the Community College of Southern Nevada, a bill requested by former Assembly Speaker and Henderson Police Chief Richard Perkins before he left office in November.

Other projects include:

Those requests by legislators are in addition to the regents' priorities and requests by private foundations such as the Nevada Cancer Institute and the Ruvo Brain Institute that work hand in hand with the state system.

But given the state's dreary revenue projections, few - if any - of even the regents' projects will be funded this session, lawmakers say. So the pork bills face even gloomier prospects .

The lawmakers supporting the individual funding requests say those programs are crucial in meeting state workforce or research needs. But others see them as pork - and a luxury this legislative season.

"I wouldn't expect support for any appropriations other than base budgets and operational needs," Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, said. "It's a very different budget process this year - more severe than any I've seen in all my years."

What little is available for pork will be fought over bitterly, lawmakers said, and many projects - such as a $25 million request to build a Southern Desert Regional Police Academy - are dead in the water.

"If there is any extra money, there would never be enough to fund a $25 million police academy, not at this stage," said Assemblyman Morse Arberry Jr., D-Las Vegas, head of the Assembly money-controlling Ways and Means Committee. "It's very bleak."

Legislators want to bring the bacon home to their districts, but they don't want to raise taxes to pay for those needs, Arberry said. "It's hypocritical."

University and college presidents are banned from seeking appropriations that are not on the regents' priority list, but are encouraged to make friends with lawmakers, said Dan Klaich, executive vice chancellor and head of the Nevada System of Higher Education's lobbying team. Presidents need to make sure their campus needs are remembered when those legislators go behind closed doors to pound out who gets what.

"The goal is to always have a common agenda, with the critical players pushing that common agenda," Klaich said.

Chancellor Jim Rogers overhauled the system's lobbying efforts after a chaotic session in 2003 that led to one college president and his lobbyist being removed for trying to fund programs that were not system wide priorities.

The "united front" in the 2005 Legislature preempted such internal competition for money. If a lawmaker decides to support a project on his own, presidents and other system officials will politely testify that although a program is certainly worthy of support, items on the regents' priority list should be funded first, Klaich said.

Such was the case when Perkins introduced a bill to fund the police academy facility at CCSN. Perkins requested the bill in November before he left office, and testified for it as Henderson's police chief.

The academy trains Henderson and North Las Vegas police, as well as law enforcement agents with 13 other agencies.

The program has outgrown the classroom space at CCSN, which isn't equipped to do the training officers need, Perkins said.

Often, it takes a few sessions to get projects funded, Perkins said. "The best we can do is just get it on the radar."