LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — The 36th special session of the Nevada Legislature took seven days to complete, passed 13 bills and one joint resolution and saw two major bills fail, all at an estimated cost of about $810,000.
Now that it's all over, here are four takeaways:
Rise of the resistance
From almost the very start, an upstart coalition of Democrats showed they were not going along with one of the major proposals of the session, a plan to approve more than $1.6 billion in film tax credits.
During a routine motion to refer the film tax bill, known as Assembly Bill 5, to a committee, Assemblywoman Selena La Rue Hatch, D-Washoe County, invoked an Assembly rule in an attempt to kill the bill outright.
The unexpected move required consultation with lawyers and a lengthy delay (which, in fact, could have been the slogan of the entire session) before a vote was held.
The bill didn't die at that moment, but it showed that just because it was proposed by the Democratic majority leader and the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party in a chamber controlled by Democrats, many people with a "D" behind their name weren't just going to go along.
The drama played out again and again, as members refused to allow for the waiver of rules to speed the bill's passage. And when it came to a final vote, Assemblywoman Selena Torres-Fossett, D-Clark County, objected to the remote participation of two absent Republican members who favored the film tax.
Torres-Fossett forced a vote of the Assembly on the question, which she lost, but the message was clear: Opponents of the film tax were going to fight using every tool they could think of.
Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager later criticized La Rue Hatch's tactic, calling it a slap in the face to not give people on both sides of the issue a chance to testify on the bill in an open hearing. La Rue Hatch later replied that Yeager was "mansplaining."
Strange bedfellows
The split on the film tax credit did not break down on partisan lines; both Democrats and Republicans supported it, and both Democrats and Republicans cast votes in opposition.
You don't usually see progressives like La Rue Hatch and Torres-Fossett on the same side of votes as conservatives such as Assemblywomen Jill Dickman and Alexis Hansen, both R-Washoe County.
Instead of political ideology, what united the coalition against the film tax was a belief that the state should not hand out subsidies to the wealthy corporations seeking the film tax, Howard Hughes, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros./Discovery.
State Sen. Ira Hansen, R-Washoe County, and husband of Assemblywoman Alexis Hansen, detailed the net worth of the people and entities backing the project in his floor statement in opposition, saying they didn't need money from Nevada taxpayers.
Even union backing and the promise of thousands of jobs didn't persuade lawmakers who are union members themselves or generally sympathetic to organized labor to get on board.
Which raises the question...
Is the era of government subsidies coming to an end in Nevada?
In recent years, Nevada's state and local governments have given away a lot of money.
Using tax credits, they subsidized the building of a Tesla gigafactory in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center in Northern Nevada.
They gave away money to Apple Computer to get the company to move some operations to Reno.
They raised room taxes on the Las Vegas Strip to give $750 million to the Las Vegas Raiders organization to build Allegiant Stadium on the Las Vegas Strip.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority gave $80 million for the "naming rights" to the baseball stadium in downtown Summerlin, which ended up being called ... the Las Vegas Ballpark.
The City of Henderson sold the Raiders' land at cut-rate prices for a headquarters building on St. Rose Parkway, as well as money for what's now called the Lee's Family Forum off Green Valley Parkway and the Lifeguard Arena in downtown Henderson.
And, most recently, a special session was held to obligate taxpayers to provide $350 million for a baseball stadium on the old Tropicana site that may someday be the home of the Athletics.
Usually, when a coalition of political leaders, developers, unions and special interests gather behind a project, it happens.
But not this time.
A combination of a hefty price tag ($1.8 billion over 15 years), public outcry from both progressives and conservatives, an aggressive (some say pushy) lobbying campaign that calcified rather than persuaded and the introduction of the bill in a special session that's supposed to be reserved for emergencies all combined to kill the idea.
Then again, it almost happened. The bill passed the Assembly by a vote of 22-20, the bare minimum necessary, and came within one vote of passing in the state Senate (10 in favor and eight opposed, with 11 needed for approval). Had just one senator changed her or his vote, they'd be ordering gold shovels for the studio's groundbreaking right now.
So maybe it's too early to declare the era of big handouts as over.
Strange bedfellows II
The film tax issue wasn't the only one that saw Democrats and Republicans teaming up in unexpected ways.
For the first time in history, the Legislature called itself into special session under a provision added to the state constitution by voters in 2012.
Under the constitution, a legislative special session supersedes the session called by the governor. But it takes the signatures of two-thirds of the entire Legislature — 42 people — to convene one.
And lawmakers reached that goal, led in part by Ira Hansen.
The subject? Putting limits on corporate purchases of "residential units" in Nevada, which many believe is pricing regular people, especially young people, out of the housing market.
Putting limits on corporate purchases was the subject of a bill in the regular session, but the bill failed to pass. Hansen said during the session that he was sympathetic to the idea, but was voting against it because Gov. Joe Lombardo had asked Republicans to oppose it.
During the special session, Hansen claimed the governor had not made such a request, however.
The bill that emerged from the discussion — Senate Bill 10 — would have limited corporate entities to purchasing 1,000 residential units max per year.
It passed the state Senate unanimously, but failed in the Assembly by a single vote. Alexis Hansen, who, along with her husband, had signed the special-session proclamation, nonetheless voted against SB 10. An email seeking comment about her reasoning wasn't returned.
But anyone who says Republicans and Democrats can't come together to support something — or to oppose something — wasn't watching Carson City this week.