Policy Analyst Anahit Baghshetsyan’s op-ed for the Las Vegas Review Journal about the New York City Mayor’s race and what it could mean for Nevada.
Read the op-ed here.
Policy Analyst Anahit Baghshetsyan’s op-ed for the Las Vegas Review Journal about the New York City Mayor’s race and what it could mean for Nevada.
Read the op-ed here.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal wrote an article based on Policy Fellow Cameron Belt’s piece about a need for changing regulations in Nevada. Read the article here.
The Reno Gazette interviewed Policy Analyst Anahit Baghshetsyan about the changes to Nevada’s home insurance law. Read the full story here.
The Reno Gazette Journal featured an op-ed by Policy Analyst Anahit Baghshetsyan about film tax credits in Nevada. Read the full article here.
Nevada Policy’s Policy Analyst, Anahit Baghshetsyan, was interviewed by NPR affiliate KUNR about the legislature’s options for the difficult insurance situation in the Silver State. Read the article here.
Nevada Policy President, John Tsarpalas was interviewed on the American Potential Podcast about the grassroots victory over RCV ballot question in the 2024 election. Watch the interview here.
The Las Vegas Review Journal cited Nevada Policy’s research in its article about Governor Lombardo’s vetoes this legislative session.
The Review-Journal’s editorial quotes Research Analyst Anahit Baghshetsyan.
Article written based on Nevada Policy’s 200 Boards report
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LAS VEGAS—Nevada ranks 21st out of all 50 states in this year’s Economic Freedom of North America report, released today by Nevada Policy in conjunction with Canada’s Fraser Institute.
Last year, Nevada ranked 19th, which suggests Nevada is moving in the wrong direction, according to NPRI Policy Director Robert Fellner.
“Significant increases in government spending and taxation in recent years are responsible for Nevada’s declining economic freedom ranking. Lawmakers must reverse course so that all Nevadans can benefit from the opportunities and prosperity that result from a government that seeks to maximize freedom, rather than restricting it.”
This year, Florida has surpassed New Hampshire as having the highest level of economic freedom among all U.S. states. It scored 7.87 out of 10 in this year’s report, which measures government spending, taxation and labor market restrictions using data from 2016, the most recent year of available comparable data.
“The freest economies operate with comparatively less government interference, relying more on personal choice and markets to decide what’s produced, how it’s produced and how much is produced. As government imposes restrictions on these choices, there’s less economic freedom and less opportunity for prosperity,” said Fred McMahon, the Dr. Michael A. Walker Research Chair in Economic Freedom at the Fraser Institute and report co-author.
Rounding out the top five freest states are New Hampshire (2nd), Texas (3rd), Tennessee (4th) and South Dakota (5th). For the fourth year in a row, New York was ranked least free (50th), followed by Kentucky (49th), West Virginia (48th), California (47th) and Alaska (46th).
The report also includes an additional all-government ranking, which adds federal government policy to the index and includes the 50 U.S. states, 32 Mexican states and 10 Canadian provinces.
From 2004 to 2013, the average score for U.S. states in the all-government index fell from 8.24 to 7.66, but increased slightly to 7.9 out of 10 this year, driven largely by changes at the federal level.
In the most-free states, the average per capita income in 2016 was 7.3 per cent abovethe national average compared to roughly 10.5 per cent below the national average in the least-free states.
“The evidence is clear—lower levels of economic freedom lead to less prosperity, slower economic growth, less investment and fewer jobs and opportunities,” said Dean Stansel, economics professor at Southern Methodist University and co-author of the report.
The Economic Freedom of North America report, also co-authored by José Torra, the head of research at the Mexico City-based Caminos de la Libertad, is an offshoot of the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World index, the result of more than a quarter century of work by more than 60 scholars including three Nobel laureates.
See the full report at www.fraserinstitute.org/economic-freedom.
Nevada’s scores in key components of economic freedom (from 1 to 10 where a higher value indicates a higher level of economic freedom):
“This report should serve as a wakeup call to the Nevada Legislature. It should be the goal of all lawmakers to make Nevada the most economically free state in the nation, which is the most effective way to improve the well-being of all Nevadans.”
About the Economic Freedom Index
Economic Freedom of North America measures the degree to which the policies and institutions of countries support economic freedom. This year’s publication ranks 92 provincial/state governments in Canada, the United States and Mexico. The report also updates data in earlier reports in instances where data has been revised.
For more information on the Economic Freedom Network, datasets and previous Economic Freedom of North America reports, visit www.fraserinstitute.org. And you can ‘Like’ the Economic Freedom Network on Facebook at www.facebook.com/EconomicFreedomNetwork.
Nevadans still have the right to see what the government is doing with their money, thanks to today’s state Supreme Court ruling that firmly rejected a series of legal arguments that, if adopted, would have eviscerated Nevada’s public records law.
The ruling means that the Nevada Policy Research Institute has prevailed in its public records lawsuit against the Public Employees’ Retirement System of Nevada (PERS), but the impact extends to all Nevadans, according to Nevada Policy Research Institute Policy Director Robert Fellner:
“PERS argued that public records should be defined narrowly to only include existing documents or reports, rather than all forms of recorded information related to governmental affairs. Had the Court accepted this argument, governments across the state could simply hide information they did not wish to be made public by keeping it stored in a computer database. Thankfully, the Court upheld the plain, statutory definition of a public record to include information stored in a computer database.”
The lawsuit stems over PERS denial of Nevada Policy’s request for records documenting how taxpayer-funded benefits are calculated and distributed.
Specifically, Nevada Policy requested the precise information ruled public by the Court in the 2013 Reno Newspapers decision, simply updated for the then-current 2014 fiscal year.
However, because the Reno Newspapers ruling was narrow in its scope, PERS argued they could lawfully conceal this public information in future years by simply changing its record-keeping practices so that there was no single report with all of the requested information.
But this argument — that PERS could hide public information by scattering it among multiple reports, and then refuse to compile those reports together — directly contradicted binding Supreme Court precedent from a different case, not to mention the plain intent of the state’s public records law.
In Blackjack Bonding, the Nevada Supreme Court addressed a nearly identical situation and held that if “an agency has a computer program that can readily compile the requested information, the agency is not excused from its duty to produce and disclose that information.”
Today’s decision reaffirms that ruling, with the Court finding that when a request for information “merely requires searching a database for existing information…the Act mandates [disclosure].”
Today’s decision was published as an Advanced Opinion, which is intended to provide guidance to courts, lawyers, legislators and the public and can be cited as precedent to help resolve future cases.
Nevada Policy sought the records to aid public understanding of a system which consumes nearly $2 billion tax dollars annually.
These costs don’t just impact taxpayers, however. The past decade’s 40 percent cost hike has left new teachers paying national-high rates, while receiving the lowest PERS benefits of any member in over a generation — an inequity which is expected to negatively affect teacher quality and recruitment.
Need for penalties in NPRA
As this case shows, even when a requester prevails in court, the government is still able to keep the requested information hidden for several years.
Fellner believes that Nevadans will never receive the full transparency promised to them under state law unless government officials who knowingly violate the law face some sort of penalty for doing so.
“No regular Nevada citizen can violate state law with impunity, so why should government employees be treated any differently? The Legislature must impose penalties on government officials who knowingly violate the law and deny Nevadans their fundamental right of a transparent and open government.”
For a complete chronology of the legal events and arguments that preceded today’s court ruling, please click here.
And to learn more about how PERS impacts Nevada taxpayers, teachers and the public at large, please click here.
The Clark County School District is unlawfully and deliberately withholding records necessary to investigate allegations of wrongdoing within two divisions of the district, a just-filed lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit was filed by Nevada Policy (NPRI) after CCSD denied a request for copies of email correspondence between members of the district’s Employee Management Relations (EMR) division and Katrina Nicosia, a regional director of the Student Support Services Division.
Nevada Policy requested the emails to investigate whether Nicosia was pressured by EMR leadership to suppress and seek termination of a whistleblower who reported a new incident of test falsification to the district, about the time of the Matt Kelly testing scandal.
NPRI Senior Vice President Steven Miller made the request as part of his research into the abuse of special-education students within the district, and unlawful retaliation against whistleblowers who refused to go along, as documented in his upcoming 8-part investigative series, “Catch Me If You Can.”
Despite the fact that emails sent by government employees on their government-provided email accounts are unquestionably public records — and have been routinely disclosed by all governments across the state, including CCSD previously — the school district denied the request in its entirety and refused to disclose even a single email.
The district claims that all of the requested emails contained confidential information and were thus exempt from disclosure. But even if this highly unlikely claim were true, the school is still required to disclose the non-confidential portions of those emails, according to NRS 239.010(3):
A governmental entity… shall not deny a request…to receive a copy of a public book or record on the basis that the requested public book or record contains information that is confidential if the governmental entity can redact, delete, conceal or separate the confidential information from the information included in the public book or record that is not otherwise confidential.
Sadly, CCSD has a well-documented history of violating the state’s public records law, which not only denies Nevadans their fundamental right to a transparent government, but also takes millions of dollars out of the classroom, according to NPRI Policy Director Robert Fellner.
“CCSD has spent millions of dollars on legal fees fighting to keep the district’s affairs shielded in secrecy. That’s millions of dollars that should have gone to children and classroom needs, not the district’s self-serving efforts to conceal crucial information from the public,” Fellner said.
“Despite state law mandating government agencies to be fully transparent to the people they ostensibly serve, CCSD knows it can violate the law with impunity, secure in the knowledge that none of its officials will ever face any penalty for their deliberate lawbreaking.”
Nevada Policy is calling on the Nevada Legislature to ensure government officials are treated the same as all Nevada citizens, and finally impose penalties on those who violate the law.
“Nevada citizens face a litany of penalties for failing to comply with any of the numerous edicts passed by the Legislature, so why should government officials be treated any differently?”
NPRI filed the lawsuit on October 15, 2018 in the Eighth Judicial District Court of Clark County, Nevada and is represented by Clark Hill PLLC.
Nevada governments are becoming more brazen in their willingness to flout the state’s public records law, a direct result of the fact that officials who choose to knowingly violate the law face no penalty of any kind.
Yesterday’s public records lawsuit filed against the Incline Village General Improvement District (IVGID) by area resident Mark Smith is just the latest example of that agency’s long history of fighting transparency.
IVGID was previously cited by the Attorney General’s Office for numerous violations of the state’s open-meetings law, as well as for having actively “discouraged public participation” in its public meetings.
Last year, NPRI filed a formal complaint with the Attorney General after learning that IVGID adopted the felony-level crime of concealing public records as a matter of policy.
In fact, IVGID has even gone so far as to deny its own Board Treasurer access to key financial records.
Against that backdrop, the mishandling of Smith’s recent request for copies of emails between IVGID General Counsel Jason Guinasso and other executives is par for the course, according to NPRI Policy Director Robert Fellner:
“The pattern alleged in Smith’s lawsuit is consistent with IVGID’s well-documented hostility to transparency. First, IVGID unlawfully denied the request outright, forcing the requester to educate IVGID of its obligations under the law just to get the request processed. After it became clear that its initial denial was unlawful, IVGID then agrees to provide the records, but delays production for nearly an entire year only to then demand payment of an unlawful fee before agreeing to turn over the records.”
Because Nevada imposes no penalties for government officials who unlawfully withhold public records, Nevadans are being denied their fundamental right to a transparent and accountable government, said Fellner.
“By failing to impose penalties on government officials who violate the state’s public records law, the Legislature has created a loophole the size of a Mack Truck that some governments are exploiting in an ever-more flagrant fashion.”
Beyond IVGID, Fellner points to recent examples like
While Fellner said he’s confident Smith will ultimately prevail in his lawsuit, the agency will still have succeeded in keeping the public in the dark for the many years the legal process takes to complete — highlighting just how broken the current system is.
“The Legislature was correct to recognize the importance of a transparent government,” said Fellner. “It now needs to follow the same process used for all other laws and impose penalties on those who break this law. Only then will Nevadans realize the transparent and accountable government that has been promised to them for over 100 years.”
Viable solutions include amending the law to allow courts to hold government officials violating the law personally liable for the requester’s fees, as well as allowing for additional monetary sanctions above and beyond the prevailing requester’s attorney’s fees, he said.
You can read a copy of Smith’s lawsuit by clicking here.
For more information, please contact NPRI Policy Director Robert Fellner at 702.222.0642 or via email at RF@NPRI.ORG.
This morning the US Supreme Court released a 5-4 ruling, affirming that non-union workers cannot be forced to pay fees to public-sector unions.
“The ruling affirms a right that, thankfully, Nevada teachers already have: The right to decide for themselves whether or not they wish to financially support their union,” explained Nevada Policy Research Institute Communications Director Michael Schaus.
The ruling comes the week before Nevada’s annual “Opt-Out” period of July 1st through 15th, when Nevada Teachers can opt out of paying dues to their respective unions.
The landmark case of Janus vs AFSCME represents one of the most crucial labor cases to come before the Supreme Court in years, if not decades. The majority decided unions are unable to force public workers who have opted out of membership to pay so-called “agency fees” in lieu of membership dues.
“We applaud the decision,” says Schaus. “No worker should ever be forced to financially support an organization with which they don’t agree, and in affirming the position of Mark Janus, the Supreme Court has extended all public-sector workers the same basic right Nevadans have enjoyed for years.”
The ruling makes it possible for public-sector workers in non-right-to-work states to decide for themselves whether they wish to pay dues or fees to a collective bargaining agent or union — a right that, until this morning, did not exist for government workers in roughly half of the United States.
According to Schaus, the decision should be welcome news for public-sector workers, regardless of whether they belong to their local union.
“For too long, union leadership has taken their members for granted — treating them as little more than a bunch of walking membership dues. But when members are given the right to opt-out, suddenly workers are free to vote with their wallets on how well union leaders are representing their interests,” explained Schaus.
“In some cases, we’ve seen this in dramatic fashion. In Clark County, for example, over 40 percent of teachers have already exercised this right over the years — deciding to keep their hard-earned money rather than hand it over to an organization that continually fails to provide its members with substantial value.
“Thankfully, this right is now available to every public-sector worker in the United States.”
Nevada teachers who are interested in opting-out of paying union dues can visit NVTeacherChoice.com for more information on how to opt-out of membership in the first two weeks of July.
“We congratulate Mark Janus on his victory at the Supreme Court, and we’re pleased that the Supreme Court has affirmed the right that a growing number of Nevada teachers are already exercising,” said Schaus.
###
The average wage for Clark County local government workers is richer than what their peers in 99 percent of counties nationwide receive, according to an NPRI analysis of the most current wage data available from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In the 2017 third quarter, local government workers in Clark County received an average weekly wage of $1,155 — which ranked 55th out of the 2,867 counties surveyed nationwide, and was about 22 percent higher than the $943 received by local government workers nationally.
When the average wages are adjusted to reflect the different price levels faced by the average consumer in each state, as calculated by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis’ Regional Price Parities 2015 report, Clark County jumps to number 25 on the list — placing its employees firmly within the top 1 percent of counties with the highest paid local government workers nationwide.
Cost borne by taxpayers who, on average, earn much less themselves
“The findings are significant, given that much of the cost for this excess is borne by Nevada residents who, on average, earn much less themselves,” explained Nevada Policy Research Institute Director of Transparency Research Robert Fellner.
“Clark County local government workers are among some of the best paid in the nation, but this excess is being funded by a private sector that earns significantly less than the national average,” explained Fellner.
While the $1,155 average weekly wage received by Clark County local government workers was 22 percent above the national average, the $866 earned by private-sector workers was 15 percent less than the national average of $1,013.
But Clark County government workers don’t just fare well in comparisons of wages, they also receive vastly richer non-wage benefits than the average private-sector worker.
The NPRI analysis found that Clark County government workers receive nearly twice as many paid holiday and sick days, significantly greater job security and a retirement plan that costs nearly 6 times more than what the average private-sector worker receives.
Despite receiving wages that already place them in the top 1 percent of counties nationwide, the SEIU of Nevada recently rejected Clark County’s offer of a 2 percent pay increase, and is instead demanding a 3.25 percent raise instead.
The move shows why collective bargaining in the public sector was historically opposed by so many, including some of the labor movement’s greatest champions like former President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“As the SEIU of Nevada has made clear, unions in the public sector are not about eliminating an imbalance that results in below-market wages. Instead, the incentives are such that both government unions and campaigning lawmakers profit from inflated public pay and the increased burden that imposes on taxpayers.
“That is precisely why extending collective bargaining to the public sector was opposed by so many across the ideological spectrum, for so long. ”
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