City seeks state PERS law carve-out

If you thought that the pace of state legislation in Nevada — a state with a part-time legislature that meets only every other year — would be a slow stroll rather than a break-neck run, you might be surprised to find out that there are well over 1,000 bills being considered at some level in this session.

Of those, 157 have enough potential to affect Boulder City that staff, and the city’s hired lobbyist, are closely tracking their status.

In their meeting on April 8, City Attorney Brittany Walker presented a report detailing the current status of all the bills that the city is tracking.

The 2025 legislative session began on Feb. 3 and is coming up on the halfway point of the session, which has to come to a close within 120 days or about the beginning of August.

“Staff is diligently reviewing each bill draft,” reported Walker. “We’re still in the process of reviewing a couple of hundred bill drafts to assess their impact on the city. We are tracking what staff’s recommended position is on the bill — neutral, support or oppose — as well as a priority level, so that higher priority bills are tracked more closely.”

The most common reasons for the city to oppose state legislation are intrusions into local power or unfunded mandates.

Intrusions on local power are pretty self-explanatory. A good example would be when the state mandated that cities and counties must allow short-term rentals. Boulder City got out of that because now-Mayor Joe Hardy was a member of the state Senate at that time and got an exception for cities with a population of fewer than 25,000, which allows Boulder City to outlaw the practice while every surrounding jurisdiction has to allow them.

Unfunded mandates refer to an issue where the state says, “Cities, you have been doing x, but now you have to do x+y” without actually giving the cities the funds to handle the additional activity.

Approaches to opposition may differ. If the city can see the writing on the wall and figures the bill is going to pass, they may opt, rather than pushing for the bill’s defeat, to attempt to get a carve-out for the city via the amendment process.

An example of this currently is a bill that would change workers compensation coverage.

“There were several bills that when they first came out we were very concerned about the potential impact, especially fiscally and a lot of those we’ve worked with the bill sponsor to amend and have reduced that impact,” Walker told the council. “For example, there was one bill that would have expanded workers comp protections that are available to public safety employees. The way it was drafted was extremely broad. It could have applied to any civilian employee and so we worked with the bill sponsor and they reduced it to only apply to civilian and law enforcement that investigate crime scenes. That mitigated our concerns and so that’s an example of one that that we were successful in working with the bill sponsor.”

One bill stands out because it has been introduced at the request of Boulder City officials. AB27 would provide a carve-out similar to the one regarding short-term rentals for cities with less than 25,000 population or counties with less than 100,000. (That currently means all Nevada cities except Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, Henderson, Carson City, Reno and Sparks and all counties except Clark and Washoe but Mesquite is getting close to 25,000.)

In this case the carve-out would allow smaller cities and counties to hire former public employees receiving a Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) without the employee losing pension benefits.

This is an issue that arose last summer when the city was beginning the process of finding a replacement for former city manager Taylour Tedder. (Tedder’s replacement, Ned Thomas, officially started the job this week.)

At the behest of Councilman Steve Walton, the council initially voted 3-2 in favor of declaring a “critical labor shortage” in order to invoke an exception to state law that would allow them to hire someone who had retired from a public service job and was drawing a PERS pension. The discussion was very contentious with Hardy warning about political fallout from “double-dipping” and Councilwoman Cokie Booth accusing some council members of “telling a fable” in order to get around the law. Crucially, it is important to note that the law does not require a city to prove a critical labor shortage, only to declare that one exists.

A month later, after saying that the issue was important enough that it required unanimity, Walton changed his vote and no shortage was declared.

If AB27 passes and is signed by Gov. Joe Lombardo, smaller jurisdictions, including Boulder City, could make such hires without having to declare anything. Subtleties in the proposed law include that the person hired would not be re-enrolled in PERS and the hiring jurisdiction would contribute to PERS at the combined rate of both the city and individual contributions even though the job would not affect the hiree’s pension rate.