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Senators Marilyn Dondero-Loop and James Ohrenschall today were named First Amendment Champions by the Nevada Press Association for their work preventing a public notice mandate from being eliminated.
In the last three weeks of the 2021 legislative session the Department of Administration introduced SB-445, a budget bill relating to state purchasing. SB-445 included a provision that would have eliminated the mandate requiring the agency to publish a newspaper notice for bids and RFPs solicited through the state electronic purchasing system.
It’s very difficult to get a budget bill amended that late in the session unless legislators from the majority party are willing to stick out their neck to make the case for doing it. Senators Dondero-Loop and Ohrenschall were those legislators.
First, they raised questions about the public notice provision in SB-445 at the Senate Government Affairs Committee hearing on the bill. Then they convinced Democratic Party leadership to assent to eliminating the provision from the bill. Finally, Senator Ohrenschall made the case for an amendment excising the provision when the bill came to the Senate floor. The amendment passed the Senate unanimously and the bill was eventually signed into law by Gov. Steve Sisolak with the public notice intact.
“I was struck by the Senators’ intuitive understanding that public notice is a government transparency issue,” said Richard Karpel, executive director of NPA. “Their willingness to take the steps necessary to protect the bid notice the Department of Administration wanted to eliminate was impressive.”
This is the third time NPA has named First Amendment Champions following a legislative session but the first time it has related to the issue of public notice. Public notice is the term for advertisements mandated by law in order to guarantee transparency about important actions taken by local governments, state agencies or corporations. Such notices are generally required to be published in newspapers. Although not required to do so by law, newspapers in Nevada also publish the notices on their website and/or on NPA’s statewide public notice site.