Spending plan: State parks stay open, museums cut to four days

By Cy Ryan

Saturday, May 2, 2009 | 12:58 p.m.

CARSON CITY – The Assembly Ways and Means Committee on Saturday approved spending programs for eight agencies and now has completed work on 35 percent of the budget for the next two years.

Under the plan, major state museums will be closed three days a week but state parks will continue to be open seven days a week. The state Taxation Department will be able to open a call center to aid taxpayers, using staffing that had previously been cut from the budget. And low income senior citizens will be receiving higher grants in their property tax assistance in the coming two years.

Assemblyman Moises Denis, D-Las Vegas, said closing the museums “was one of the toughest decisions” made in reviewing the budget.

“We had to do what we had to do,” said Denis, who headed the subcommittee that made the recommendations.

The Lost City Museum in Overton, state museums in Carson City and Las Vegas and the Nevada State Railroad Museum in Carson City will be reduced from seven days of operation to four days.

The committee rejected the recommendation of Gov. Jim Gibbons to close the East Ely Railroad Depot Museum. It will operate four days a week.

The committee also agreed to put an annual $40,000 into the Council for Education on the Holocaust in Las Vegas, for which the governor had eliminated funding. It directed the council to seek money from other sources, such as stimulus funding.

Denis said some museum curators already have resigned and the state will lose “some institutional knowledge.”

Assemblyman Morse Arberry, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said these programs were important to the state and added that they could come back to the Interim Finance Committee for additional funding if the economy improves.

Arberry, D-Las Vegas, said it was important for visitors “to know we have culture and are not just a desert.”

The state library in Carson City will be open only four hours a day instead of eight hours for the next two fiscal years under the budget approved by the committee.

The committee agreed to keep 11 state parks open during the winter months, rejecting the recommendation of Gibbons. They would have been closed three or four months under the governor's plan, but the committee found enough money to keep them open year round.

The governor recommended the Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort be cut back to five days a week but the committee put an extra $53,949 in the budget for the next two years to keep it open seven days a week.

The committee again is challenging Gibbons over allowing commercial weddings in the Valley of Fire State Park in western Clark County. The Legislature voted to support this plan in 2007 and raise the fee from $15 to $150.

Gibbons nixed the plan because it was an increase in fees. The committee decided to process a bill to forward the wedding plan, but the administration has told the committee it will again not allow the increased fees to be imposed, even if a bill is approved or the money put in the budget.

The committee agreed to include enough money in the budget of the state Division of Aging to increase the average property tax assistance for eligible senior citizens from the present $294 to $334 next fiscal year and to $339 in the 2011 fiscal year. By the end of the biennium, there will be close to 17,000 senior citizens collecting this grant.

The committee agreed with Gibbons to set up a taxpayer assistance telephone call center in Carson City staffed with 10 employees who were previously cut from the budget. Each employee would handle an average of 50 calls a day. The state Taxation Department says it currently takes three to four weeks before 100 percent of the telephone calls and voicemail messages are returned.

With this center, 91 percent of the calls would be returned within five days. And the information given out will help taxpayers avoid mistakes when filing their returns.

The committee rejected the suggestion of the governor that the operation of the Carlin Armory be transferred from the University of Nevada, Reno to the Office of the Military. The committee determined the military could not accept the transfer until mid 2011.

The committee did not support the governor’s recommendation to consolidate the state Peace Officers Standards and Training Commission with the Department of Public Safety Training Division.

The decisions by the committee will now have to be reconciled with the Senate Finance Committee, but there are not many major differences.