Deadline Day: Death penalty abolition, cannabis lounge and gun control bills advance

Friday marks the do-or-die moment for hundreds of legislative proposals — bills must pass out of their first committee unless they have a special exemption.

Lawmakers began Friday by holding marathon committee meetings throughout the day on Friday, working to process backlogged bills or cut last-minute deals on controversial legislation.

Proposals that advanced Friday morning include measures repealing the state’s death penalty, allowing operation of cannabis consumption lounges and banning so-called “ghost” guns.

Lawmakers haven’t crammed all pending bills into Friday meetings. Since Monday, lawmakers have already voted out 155 bills from committees, including major election changes, criminal justice modifications, adding additional marijuana licenses and even increasing fees on marriage licenses.

But those measures and likely hundreds already passed face another daunting deadline — the first House passage deadline on April 20, just eleven days away.

Here’s a look at major policies that passed out of legislative committees on Thursday. The Nevada Independent will update this story as additional bills are passed out of committee on Friday.

Abolishing the death penalty

With little comment, members of the Assembly Judiciary Committee voted 9-6 on party lines to advance a bill abolishing the death penalty. All Republicans on the committee opposed the bill.

Friday’s vote pushes the death penalty abolition cause further than it made it in 2017, when it got a hearing in the same committee but never received a vote. The issue did not come up for any public hearing in 2019.

AB395 would turn all existing death sentences into sentences of life in prison without parole. Another death penalty abolition bill in the Senate is more modest, abolishing capital punishment for crimes committed after the law takes effect.

Nevada is one of 24 states that still has the death penalty, although nobody has been executed in Nevada since 2006. The most recent state to end the practice is Virginia, which outlawed capital punishment last month.

“This is a tremendous step forward for sure,” Public Defender Scott Coffee, who is pushing for abolition, told The Nevada Independent. “I think the committee vote today is recognition that Nevada's death penalty is broken beyond repair. A variety of recent events has given the repeal a new sense of urgency, proving it is not an issue which can be ignored or placed on the back burner.”

Ghost guns and businesses banning guns

In a Friday surprise, members of the Assembly Judiciary Committee voted out AB286 on a party line vote, a hotly contested firearm regulation bill that would ban so-called “ghost guns” and make it easier for businesses to prohibit guns on their property.

The bill was amended to include more specifics on what kinds of signs have to be posted for a business deciding to opt-in to the provisions of the bill, and limits the provisions related to not allowing firearms on premises only to businesses with a non restricted gaming license (casinos).

Several Republican members of the committee asked to delay the vote on the bill, saying they received the amendment only a few minutes before the committee meeting. Several Democrats on the committee indicated that they’d like to see additional changes to the bill.

Marijuana DUIs

Members of the Assembly Judiciary Committee passed a bill that will remove from state law specific numeric quantities of marijuana metabolites in the blood that trigger a DUI.

While the bill still allows such measurements to be taken, it cannot be the sole evidence used to prove a DUI case. Prosecutors would have to use other indicators of impairment, such as visual observations or field sobriety tests, to make their case.

Proponents of the bill say that the “per se” limits in the law reflect the lowest detectable levels of marijuana in the blood, rather than indicating impairment, and could ensnare someone who consumed cannabis days or weeks earlier but it no longer high because of the way marijuana works through the body differently than alcohol.

The bill, AB400, was amended so that “per se” limits remain in portions of the law dealing with workman’s compensation. Opponents of the bill said that removing such limits could put an employer on the hook in a claim even if an employee who was high on the job caused an accident.

Cannabis consumption lounges

Nevada residents and visitors may soon have places where they can publicly consume marijuana legally after the Assembly Judiciary Committee passed AB341. The bill authorizes cannabis consumption lounges, which are akin to bars for marijuana use.

Supporters framed the bill as a way to bring a diverse new group of entrepreneurs into Nevada’s cannabis industry, whose upper echelons skew white and male, and which has high financial barriers to entry and a strictly capped number of stores.

An amendment brings more specificity to who qualifies as a “social equity applicant” — defined as someone who has been adversely affected by the previous criminalization of cannabis — and that licensing fees can be reduced by up to 75 percent.

It also bans consumption lounges in airports and calls for the lounges to serve “single-use” servings of cannabis rather than larger amounts that would make the lounges de facto dispensaries.

Requiring legislative approval for large regulations becomes study

A bill by Assemblyman Andy Matthews (R-Las Vegas) requiring state lawmakers to approve any proposed regulations with a financial impact estimated north of $10 million was passed out of the Assembly Government Affairs committee on Friday, after it was amended to become an interim study.

The amended version of AB340 would require the interim Legislative Commission to appoint a six-legislator panel aimed at studying the number of regulations that the original bill would have captured and any potential cost associated with studying the economic impact of state regulations.

Annual behavioral health check-ups for police

Members of the Assembly Government Affairs Committee also voted out AB336 on Friday, a bill by Assemblywoman Daniele Monroe-Moreno (D-North Las Vegas) that requires the state’s police standards board to adopt regulations for annual behavioral health check-ins for law enforcement.

The bill was amended to change language requiring an annual behavioral “healthcare assessment” to an annual “wellness visit,” and changed the effective date of the bill to start in 2023.

Statewide grants office and matching grant funds

The Assembly Government Affairs committee voted along party lines to approve AB445, a bill making various structural changes to the state grants office and creating a new fund for matching grant programs.

The bill transfers the current Office of Grant Procurement, Coordination and Management in the Department of Administration to the governor’s office, and renames it the “Office of Federal Assistance.” It requires that the office create and maintain a state plan for maximizing federal grants and assistance, and creates a grant matching program funded by proceeds from the state’s Abandoned Property Trust Account.

Protecting wage and salary history

The Senate Commerce and Labor Committee passed out a bill sponsored by Sen. Nicole Cannizzaro (D-Las Vegas) that would prohibit employers from inquiring about a job applicant’s wage or salary history.

Amendments attached to SB293 included a section allowing anyone who believes they were discriminated against by an inquiry into salary history to request a right-to-sue notice and a requirement for employers to disclose salary range or wage rate to an applicant.

The amendment also removed a provision stipulating that applicants can voluntarily disclose their wage or salary history, and employers are not prohibited from using the information to determine pay rate.

THURSDAY

Permanent expanded mail-in voting

In a contentious vote, members of the Assembly Legislative Operations and Election Committee voted Thursday to approve AB321, the bill from Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson (D-Las Vegas) making expanded mail-in voting similar to the 2020 election a permanent feature of Nevada elections going forward.

The measure included several proposed amendments that were previewed during the bill’s first hearing last week, including mandating a minimum number of in-person voting locations, setting deadlines on mail ballots for new voters and allowing for uninterrupted online voter registration all the way through election day.

Assemblyman Glen Leavitt (R-Boulder City) said he was appreciative that the amendment addressed some of the “concerns of constitutions,” but still planned to vote against the bill.

That irked Frierson, who said the amendment was crafted to address concerns from Republicans in the Assembly and that “until recent cycles, (it had) been customary to make concessions and make good bills better and make bills that you don't agree with less bad.”

“If someone's a no, then be a no, and don't list out things that are the problems, if those problems get addressed and it’s still a no,” he said. “I think that AB321 goes a long way in addressing both constituent concerns concerns we received via email and concerns expressed by members of this body.”

Police ticket quotas

Police agencies in Nevada generally maintain that they do not set quotas for tickets or arrests for their officers, although some people in a recent hearing on AB186 said there’s widespread suspicion that police are judged by departments on being prolific ticket-writers.

Democratic Assemblywoman Rochelle Nguyen’s (D-Las Vegas) bill banning quotas passed from the Assembly Government Affairs Committee on Tuesday. Although it still prohibits law enforcement agencies from ordering, requiring or mandating a specific number of citations or arrests, or from considering how much ticket revenue a police officer is generating in a performance revenue, the amended version of the bill now allows agencies to “suggest” a certain number of citations an officer should be making.

Proponents of the bill said police should be spending time on activities in the community that are not punitive. But law enforcement agencies cautioned that if the bill was too stringent, they may not have a way to address officers who are simply not doing their work and are slacking on the job.

Additional marijuana licenses

Marijuana companies that did not win permits to open a dispensary in a contentious 2018 licensing round initially sought to double their licenses through Democratic Sen. Dallas Harris’ bill SB235. But groups including the Nevada Dispensary Association strongly opposed the concept, saying that the industry — which includes 81 dispensaries — would be destabilized if a proposed amendment took effect and added up to 110 new marijuana stores.

The bill that passed out of the Senate Revenue and Economic Development Committee on Tuesday no longer seeks to grant additional licenses to those who previously did not win them. Instead, it seeks to take steps such as creating a single, streamlined marijuana dispensary license rather than requiring stores to have both a recreational and medical store license.

But committee members raised the concern that creating a consolidated license for marijuana stores would halve the revenue that the state brings in from dispensary licenses. While the bill lives for another day, lawmakers said they had reservations about it and wanted to explore how to avoid a precipitous drop in revenue.

Tiger King bill

Nevadans will be banned from keeping, breeding, importing or selling a dangerous wild animal unless they fall in a certain category such as maintaining a zoo or being a veterinarian under Democratic Sen. James Ohrenschall’s SB344, which passed from the Senate Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday.

The measure, nicknamed the “Tiger King bill” after the Netflix series about tiger collector Joe Exotic, grandfathers in people who already own the animals. People could keep any exotic pets they had as of July 1, 2021.

An amendment also clarifies that casinos and the film industry would be exempt from the bill’s provisions. Las Vegas entertainers who use live animals in their shows were some of the most prominent opponents of the bill during an earlier hearing.

Marriage licenses

A fee on marriage licenses that supports services for victims of domestic and sexual violence would increase from $25 to $50 under a bill passed Thursday by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

SB177, sponsored by Democratic Sen. Julia Ratti, seeks to shore up funding for victim services that has suffered with the decline of marriages, especially during the pandemic.

Republican Sen. Ira Hansen forcefully opposed the bill, arguing that higher fees would discourage marriage, and cited a study drawing a correlation between marriage and a lower risk of domestic abuse. And Republican Sen. James Settelmeyer asked why federal aid funds are not being used to bolster the services.

Ratti said the marriage certificate funding stream is a stable way to address the issue, rather than the one-shot help that federal funding represents. She also said that putting fees on divorce certificates was not a workable alternative because there are significantly fewer divorces than marriages, and often people don’t have enough money to get a divorce.

Top down voter registration system

Members of the Assembly Legislative Operations and Elections Committee voted to approve AB422 on Thursday, which requires the secretary of state’s office to begin implementing a top-down voter registration system. The bill was amended to push the implementation date back to 2024, and require the secretary of state’s office to provide biannual updates on the project’s progress.

— This story is used with permission of The Nevada Independent. Go here for updates to this and other stories.