Money to make homes more energy efficient starts flowing from state

By Cy Ryan

Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2009 | 2 a.m.

The state Housing Division — caught in the middle of the battle between Gov. Jim Gibbons and the Legislature for control of the state’s stimulus funds — began releasing this week $10.5 million in stimulus money to weatherize homes.

The division will send the money to five nonprofit agencies, which will hire contractors for the work.

The Legislative Interim Finance Committee on Aug. 3 blocked the division from spending the money until it meets again in mid-September. The vote was along party lines with Democrats favoring a delay.

But division Director Charles Horsey — who compared being in the middle of the fight to being a pingpong ball — said the governor’s executive order on the stimulus cleared the way for him to distribute the money.

Two Clark County recipients are Help of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas and Neighborhood Services in Henderson.

Horsey said the money can be used to install new windows, wrap hot-water heaters, insulate homes and replace inefficient air-conditioning units. Officials were concerned that if the division did not quickly distribute the money it would lose the opportunity to get additional dollars.

The division will receive a total of $38 million for the weatherization program.

During the Interim Finance Committee meeting, lawmakers expressed concern that not enough union labor was being used and that bidding should be opened to more contractors.

A spokesman for Sen. Steven Horsford, D-Las Vegas, said the senator was willing to support distributing the $10.5 million immediately if the Housing Division follows conditions set forth in a bill passed by the Legislature. The legislation requires more training for workers, health benefits and the involvement of more contractors.

Horsey said the $10.5 million was readied to be spent before the Legislature approved its bill and the conditions in the bill will be incorporated in the next release of money.

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Joe Neal, Nevada’s first black state senator, tells of his experiences breaking that color barrier and throughout his 32 years in the Senate in a new oral history.

In the history, which is being printed by the Legislative Counsel Bureau, the Las Vegas Democrat said that during his early years in the Senate his white counterparts expected him to remain in the background. Neal, however, emerged as the most outspoken and most liberal member of what was in the early 1970s a conservative Senate.

Neal said the white senators compared him unfavorably to former Assemblyman Woodrow Wilson, who was the state’s first black legislator and whom Neal had defeated to win his Senate seat. Wilson was “a quiet person; go along to get along. I do not do that,” he said.

Fellow senators would pick apart Neal’s bills, and when he gave a floor speech recommending ways to improve legislation “they (the senators) would just get mad,” he said.

Neal detailed an early fight he had with then-Gov. Mike O’Callaghan, who had introduced a plan to require the death penalty for killing a police officer. Neal recalls he told the press: “Why not give the death penalty for killing a janitor? Life is life. It’s just as important to a janitor as it would be to a policeman.”

Neal said O’Callaghan “was (upset) over the fact that I had kind of upped him and took his press away from him on that particular issue. So our road became a little bit rocky from that point on during that particular session.”

Neal said his last big fight was with the gaming industry over increasing the gaming tax. Sixteen years passed before the Legislature approved a tax increase of a half-point, to 6.75 percent, on gross gaming revenue.

Neal argued that gaming is a privilege and the tax should have been raised to 8 percent or 8.5 percent.

Neal was inducted into the Senate Hall of Fame in 2005.