Members of a Nevada committee examining child deaths are crafting legislation that would push back the cloak of secrecy obscuring failures in the child welfare system.

Retired state Supreme Court Justice Deborah Agosti, chairwoman of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Child Death Review, won approval to write a bill draft aimed at increasing accountability to the public and bolstering state authority to force compliance from county family services agencies.

"The state's oversight means nothing if it can't compel compliance somehow," Agosti said at a Friday panel meeting in Las Vegas.

Agosti suggested that in cases where county family services entities are uncooperative in meeting state and federal mandates, the state should have the power to step in, correct the problem and bill the county for the cost of intervention.

The panel also supported Agosti's desire to increase the public's access to information in cases that involve child deaths. Agosti recommended requiring local district attorneys to file a public document with the courts in cases where they choose not to pursue prosecution. The document would include the identity of the child, the people involved in the investigation, the agencies that collaborated with the investigation, and the rationale for declining to prosecute.

"What I'm trying to get to is a way to require the agencies that investigate these things to demonstrate that they have done so," Agosti said.

The preliminary language of the bill draft already includes language that, if approved by the Legislature, would require public disclosure of key information in cases of child fatalities or critical injuries related to abuse of neglect.

Michael Willden, director of the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services, said that information includes: the date child welfare was informed of a fatality or near fatality; the child's age; the location of the child at the time of death; and the cause or manner of death.

Willden said the bill draft also seeks to make public whether the child or family was known to the welfare system and a summary of services that had been provided.

The panel was formed in the wake of an expert review that found Clark County underreporting child fatalities related to abuse and neglect. The panel also reviewed staffing levels within state and county family services.

Several panel members criticized Clark County for its ratio of one supervisor for every five to seven workers.

Assemblywoman Susan Gerhardt, D-Henderson, said that with that level of supervision, there's no excuse for the disarray and spotty record-keeping that routinely surfaced in the panel's review of county family services cases.

"My point is, we've got a situation that's been allowed to continue, supervisors who aren't doing their jobs," Gerhardt said. "If you see these things occurring, why aren't supervisors rolling up their sleeves and saying: 'I'll take care of that.' "

Tom Morton, who recently took over as director of Clark County Family Services, conceded that in the past, it appeared that individuals did not face consequences for poor job performance. Since his arrival in the county, Morton said, he's been made aware of cases that have not had case notes added in two years. Morton said one of his goals is to establish a performance baseline for the department so that it's easier to see if the situation is improving.

"Are things better today than they were in 2004? I have no way to answer that," Morton said.

"If you don't know, what certainty does the public have?" Gerhardt responded. "What certainty does this panel have?"

The panel is expected to finalize its recommendations in December.