Special session day 6: Lawmakers may add housing bill to agenda, school zones bill heads to governor

CARSON CITY — Lawmakers are planning to amend the governor’s special session proclamation to consider another piece of legislation regulating corporate homeownership.

A measure to amend the special session proclamation requires a petition signed by two-thirds of both houses, which state Sen. Ira Hansen, R-Sparks, said lawmakers spent Tuesday preparing. Democrats make up just under a two-thirds majority in both houses. Hansen said he was the deciding signature in the Senate, while his wife, Assemblymember Alexis Hansen, R-Sparks, was the additional supporter in the Assembly.

Ira Hansen said that legislators will be addressing a bill from the regular session proposed by state Sen. Dina Neal, D-North Las Vegas.

“We have a housing crisis for younger people in the state, so this bill is trying to address that,” Hansen said.

The move to add another piece of legislation comes as lawmakers are on their sixth day of the special session dealing with Lombardo’s agenda.

That agenda includes the Republican governor’s widespread criminal justice bill and the effort to bring film studios in Southern Nevada. Both of those bills were eligible to be voted on in the Senate on Tuesday but were tabled as legislators negotiated changes to the special session behind closed doors.

“We received a petition from the legislature just after 5 p.m and immediately sent it to the attorney general’s office,” said a spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office. “We are still awaiting legal review.”

Hansen said he was working with Senate leadership and the governor’s staff all day on the language required to amend Lombardo’s proclamation.

Senate Bill 391 from the regular session proposed allowing corporate investors to buy no more than 100 residential units in a calendar year. It was one of the key housing efforts brought by legislative Democrats this year — and an issue that Lombardo also highlighted in his State of the State address in January.

That bill required a two-thirds vote to pass because it imposed fees. It failed along party lines in the Senate. During floor debate in late May, Hansen said he was concerned that young first-time homebuyers were being priced out of the housing market by corporations and out-of-state buyers, but that governor had asked him to vote against the measure.

Transparency concerns

Recent days of the special session have been defined by closed-door negotiations between lawmakers. While lawmakers were in and out of offices for hours, the Senate has only been in public session for a few minutes on Tuesday.

This is how the sausage tends to get made in Carson City. But the special session has also been marked by calls for increased transparency.

The Republican governor issued the session’s proclamation and agenda with less than 24 hours’ notice, and Democratic Assembly leadership drew fire for not including telephone options for public comment, essentially barring input from anyone who could not make it to the state’ capital or a Las Vegas hearing room on short notice.

Meanwhile, multiple bills have been moved through the legislative bodies using emergency rules that reduce how many times a bill is read, speeding the lawmaking process along.

Of the 16 bills and resolutions introduced in the session, nine have passed both houses and are on their way to the governor. They include: investments in the state’s cybersecurity infrastructure; the establishment of a state public assistance program based on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and others like it; additional funding for the relocation of households in the Windsor Park neighborhood of North Las Vegas; and a broadening of the existing conclusive presumption that first responders’ lung diseases are work-related, among other measures.

School safety zone bill heads to Lombardo’s desk

On Tuesday night, the Senate passed Assembly Bill 6, which doubles traffic penalties in school safety zones, and gives local governments greater control over the zones. The measure will be sent to the governor’s office after it was passed unanimously with 18 votes — three senators were absent from the floor session.

Bills yet to be passed through both houses are Assembly Bills 4 and 5, measures to broadly update Nevada’s penal code and significantly expand the state’s film tax credit program. Those measures are widely considered the biggest bargaining chips of the session.

Contact McKenna Ross at mross@reviewjournal.com. Follow @mckenna_ross_ on X. Contact Katelyn Newberg at knewberg@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0240.