More trouble in the Legislature for mining

Add Sen. Elizabeth Halseth, R-Las Vegas, to the list of freshmen frustrated with Nevada’s politically entrenched mining industry.

In a post Tuesday evening on her blog Halseth accused the industry of not taking southern Nevada lawmakers seriously and suggested there may be a price to pay for the slight.

Her post comes a day after Sen. Michael Roberson, R-Las Vegas, another freshmen, asked Nevada Mining Association President Tim Crowley several questions about mining taxes and was clearly disappointed in the lack of answers.

Halseth apparently shares Roberson’s frustration.

“During the 2010 election cycle, the mining industry didn't take the southern Nevada Republican senate candidates very seriously,” she wrote in the post. “Considering the legitimate and penetrating questions posed by Sen. Roberson, that may be a calculation the industry's lobbyists may live to regret.”

In addition to the questions, Roberson said lawmakers could increase taxes on mining without running afoul of pledges to oppose tax increases, so long as tax cuts elsewhere offset the increase.

Conservative political consultant Chuck Muth, Nevada’s foremost promoter of such pledges, said Roberson’s interpretation was “100 percent correct”, giving some measure of political cover to anti-tax Republicans who might consider a mining tax increase.

Mining has long been the subject of complaints from left-leaning activists who say the industry is protected from taxes by deductions it is allowed to take in calculating “net proceeds of minerals” taxes.

The criticism from Halseth and Roberson is new because it is coming from the right side of the spectrum.

Halseth and Roberson are among a new crop of freshman Republicans who are staunch fiscal conservatives and less beholden to Nevada’s traditional power brokers than some of their predecessors.