Casinos urge court to speed appeal

By Cy Ryan (contact)

Saturday, April 12, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Carson City — The casino industry has asked the Nevada Supreme Court for speedy handling of its appeal to stop a petition by school teachers to raise the state’s gaming tax.

The Nevada Resort Association and Las Vegas Sands Corp. filed a notice Friday to appeal Senior Judge Miriam Shearing’s April 3 decision that the initiative petition was legal and the teachers could gather signatures to qualify the issue for the November ballot.

Todd Bice, the resort association’s attorney, asked the court for “expedited consideration” of the appeal, with a decision before May 20, the deadline by which the Nevada State Education Association must submit its petition.

To qualify the measure for the November ballot, the teachers union must gather the signatures of 58,628 registered voters. Voters would have to pass the initiative this year and again in 2010 for it to become part of the Nevada Constitution.

Lynn Warne, president of the teachers association, said Friday she has not discussed with her group’s attorneys whether to oppose an expedited handling of the case. Bice said he expects the education association to protest any speeded-up consideration of the appeal.

The teachers association this week started gathering petition signatures statewide, Warne said.

Bice, in his motion to the Supreme Court, argues that the petition is flawed because it does not fully describe the measure’s impact.

The 200-word description, Bice says, “omits disclosing the initiative’s most serious effect — that the state’s education budget for each biennium will be voided for any violation of the initiative’s provisions.”

Under the initiative, the gaming tax on casinos grossing $1 million-plus a month would rise from 6.75 percent to 9.75 percent, with the extra money going to boost teachers’ salaries and improve education. If the Legislature considered using the money for other purposes, the entire education budget could be tossed out.

Bice calls that a “harsh remedy” excluded from the shortened description of the initiative that appears on the petition. Prospective signers, therefore, would not be informed of that effect. That omission, he contends, invalidates the initiative petition.

However, in her decision, Shearing rejected a similar argument by the resort association, noting it would be impossible to detail every possible ramification of an initiative in the 200-word description printed on the petition.

“It would not even be possible to set forth in 200 words every provision of an initiative of any length,” she wrote. To list every change in policy “would be confusing and difficult to understand, defeating the very purpose of the description of effect.”