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At the Nevada Legislature, a fiscal note on a piece of legislation is the kiss of death.
The fiscal notes are submitted by agencies to estimate how much it will cost them to implement whatever is proposed. It is a bill for the bill.
Of course, Nevada governments will tell you they have no money. Therefore, any legislation with a price tag attached will stand out like a Mercedes in the Dollar Store parking lot. Either it dies or the sponsor must water it down so much that, in the end, nothing much changes.
Here’s the game, though.
If an agency doesn’t want to do something, there will be a massive fiscal note. Extra people to hire. Computers. Desks. Travel. Training. It’s a long list.
But if the agency wants to do it, well, they’ll somehow be able to fit it into the budget. Fiscal note: zero.
‘We can absorb it,’ they say.
I see this pattern repeatedly in the issues I follow in the Legislature — open meetings, notices, public records.
The most recent example is SB28, where Nevada cities and counties want to raise dramatically the fees for copies of public records because, well, they can’t afford to provide them at the ‘actual cost’ of making the copies.
On the other hand, the city of North Las Vegas, which came within a stone’s throw of bankruptcy, is going to spend $74,000 to upgrade its web site.
Granted, North Las Vegas has a rather crappy-looking site. But maintaining a nice web site is hardly a fundamental government function. Neither is paying for public-relations departments to make sure the public gets the spin that government officials want to see,
Providing public records is a fundamental function of government. If government can’t afford to do that, I have plenty of suggestions where they can reduce or eliminate spending elsewhere.