LETTER: Where are the cuts to state boards?
After these many months of either closed gambling establishments or visitor levels that are a small fraction of former volumes, one state agency has become an instant arbiter of and subject-matter expert in public health protocols at casinos, while its ordinary work has massively contracted.
Yet the expansive state Gaming Control Board bureaucracy has had no layoffs despite few gambling operations to audit or investigate and effectively no new employee background applications to process. Under pre-virus conditions, the board was a textbook case study of a bureaucracy with too many managers, chiefs and deputy chiefs for too few workers.
Why aren’t the more than 200 other state boards and commissions for roughly 3 million Nevadans voluntarily adjusting their staffing levels downward to reflect the new, reduced activity in our state’s economy?
When will the governor and Legislature get serious about pruning the many non-essential state workers among more than 18,000? Robust economic times are unlikely to return anytime soon in a discretionary, tourist-based economy.
