In November, the Attorney General’s Office hosted a day of training for members of state boards and commissions subject to Nevada laws regulating their processes and conduct, including administrative rule making, state contracting and ethics in government. The training also featured modules on the responsibilities of official boards …
Read More »Public Notice 101
Generally, a public notice (also called a legal ad) is placed with the classified section of a newspaper in the county of jurisdiction where the court action is taking place. Public notices in Nevada can be published only in newspapers that are qualified by state statute to run notices. Here …
Read More »Why? Because there’s only one way to build trust
Why? When newspapers ask for records from government agencies — and then have to go to court to make sure Nevada’s public-records law is enforced — the question often is raised as to why such information needs to be laid out in the open. Much of the time, it’s obvious …
Read More »Open-meeting complaints continue to decline
Complaints to the Nevada attorney general of violations of the state’s open-meeting law have continued to decline over the past half-dozen years, according to the attorney who investigates them. Since January 2014, the Attorney General’s Office has averaged 32 complaints a year, according to George Taylor, the senior deputy who …
Read More »What the prison still didn’t want us to know
As is often the case, it didn’t take long for a judge to recognize the value in opening some previously sealed state records in the case of two inmates shot by a prison guard. According to the story by Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Sandra Chereb, U.S. District Judge Andrew P. …
Read More »Welcome, judge, to the public-records problem
Now a judge knows what it’s like to try to pry records out of an uncooperative Nevada agency. I should say another judge, as U.S. Magistrate Judge Peggy Leen isn’t the first to confront the problem. We saw it in several rulings on the Reno Gazette-Journal’s lawsuit to get access …
Read More »Public records are public records
A bill coming up for hearing this week in the Nevada Legislature would strike two blows against a fundamental precept of the state’s public-records statute. The bill, SB28, was proposed by the Nevada League of Cities and Municipalities. It’s scheduled to be heard by the Senate Government Affairs Committee at …
Read More »Latest NPA testimony on bills
After a couple of busy weeks, let me catch up on bills that were heard in committees of the Nevada Legislature Feb. 16-25. [Here are Week 1 and Week 2 recaps.] AB113 — Changes the provisions for when a juvenile’s court records may be sealed. It doesn’t change the public’s …
Read More »That Jack White contract was worse than we thought
Forget the guacamole. The Oklahoma Daily, student newspaper at the University of Oklahoma, received some good play for its story about a Jack White concert on campus mainly because they found a clause in the contract with some specific demands for guacamole. And no bananas. Those were the initial reasons …
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