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In case you’re keeping score, First Amendment and open-government advocates this week had a couple of successes, took a continuing loss and will look forward to another significant contest next week.
One of the wins came in the Nevada Supreme Court, which said a district court judge was wrong to order the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Associated Press to give back an autopsy report and stop reporting on it.
That may have seemed like a slam dunk, because the report — like the other 57 from the Oct. 1 massacre in Las Vegas — already had been stripped of the victim’s name and other personal identifying information and given out to dozens of other organizations. Still, the district judge, Richard Scotti, had agreed with a police officer’s widow that her privacy concerns outweighed the public’s interest in the autopsy results.
Had the outcome gone the other way, it would have had a consequential effect on prior restraint of the press. The Nevada Press Association and Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed a brief in support of the Review-Journal and AP.
Censoring yearbooks
On another front, the Washoe County School District backed off a proposed policy that would have prevented student yearbooks from covering club sports, such as lacrosse or rodeo.
Steve Ranson, past president of the Nevada Press Association, weighed in on the issue, pointing out how the Nevada Legislature last year adopted a New Voices bill that prohibited just that sort of meddling from school officials.
Marijuana secrecy
Unfortunately, also this week, the Legislative Commission adopted marijuana regulations that continue to allow broad confidentiality on ownership of licenses to operate both medical and recreational marijuana establishments.
It wasn’t a surprise, although the process exposes a serious flaw in Nevada’s legislative process.
Despite lengthy hearings leading up to the drafting of the regulations, the Tax Commission rubber-stamped the rules drawn by its staff without much comment and with no changes. The regulations then went to the Legislative Commission — which essentially functions as the Legislature during the 20 months between sessions — but it has only two options: approve or reject. It can’t tinker with the regulation by amending or deleting sections.
On the marijuana regulations, however, the legislators really had only one option. Temporary regulations expire on Thursday (March 1), so rejection by legislators would have left Nevada without any regulation of the marijuana industry at all for whatever period it would take to draft revisions.
This is how regulatory agencies are able to write law without oversight. There is no statute granting confidentiality to marijuana growers and sellers, which would be an exception to Nevada’s public records act. But by placing it in statute, and getting the Legislative Commission’s approval, it becomes law. So once tax regulators had drafted their language, nothing was changed by either the appointed Tax Commission or elected Legislative Commission and the public hearings they conducted were merely for show.
PERS again. Still.
Coming up next is oral argument before the Nevada Supreme Court on the Nevada Policy Research Institute’s lawsuit against the state’s Public Employees Retirement System on a long-running dispute over records. That’s set for 10 a.m. Wednesday, March 7. Here’s Robert Fellner’s excellent recap of that saga.