This session was full of many election reform bills (most vetoed), education related bills (lots happening in that K-12 space), and public worker/labor related bills. Although there were not many successes for public sector workers (as there never are in bad budget years), there were a few notable wins:

• AB 232: School district employees will now get a full year of credit towards their Public Employee Retirement Systems (PERS account) as long as they work 900 hours a year. For some education paraprofessionals or other workers (bus drivers, office administrators, etc.), their full workday might be less than 8 hours, so they previously only received a partial year credit.

• SB 418: provides more mechanisms to collect delinquent PERS payments when agencies or schools do not pay their share. Charter schools have been one of the main culprits of delinquent payments, with some charter schools closing before they pay up on these accounts. Our own Kent Ervin gave notable testimony on this issue as covered in the Nevada Current. 

• AB 356: Changes the timelines for collective bargaining by public employee groups so that contracts can be finalized before the Governor finalizes the executive budget proposal. If the Governor cannot budget for the agreed upon contract terms, rationale also has to be provided. This should prevent problems as we saw this legislative session when bargaining agreements for AFSCME and other public workers were not approved until near the end of the legislative session and where the Governor did not include anything in the executive budget related to expected contract salary increases that might result from the negotiations. As we can attest, the Governor not anticipating outcomes of the CBA negotiations did not sit well with quite a few members of the Assembly Ways and Means committee.

• AB 596: This bill funds appropriations for state public workers in collective bargaining units. Although the negotiations and approved contracts for these groups included cost of living and other funding asks, given the budget constraints, the state was not able to fund the full negotiated contract amounts. For these workers, they still will receive a small cost-of-living increase and retention bonuses. If NSHE faculty and professionals were in state-recognized bargaining units, we, too, might have been able to get contracted raises from the legislature. Without our collective bargaining rights in statute, we rely on NSHE and our institutions to budget in raises (as with merit pay).

One bill we aren’t really sure whether to see this as a full win is SB 161 that was brought forward by the Clark County Educators Association (CCEA). We should note that the Nevada State Education Association (NSEA) was opposed to this bill in all its iterations as it leaves out different educator and education worker groups they represent. The bill was originally introduced as a compromise: instead of CCEA sponsoring a ballot initiative to make it legal for some K-12 teachers to go on strike, the bill initially limited strike rights to being court approved. It also changes processes related to arbitration to hopefully allow those to be resolved more quickly. Somehow the bill was amended to remove the court approval  part, which basically allows some teachers and employee organizations representing teachers to engage in strikes, as long as they are not district wide. We’re still not sure how this one got signed by the Governor, but as these changes are now part of the same state law that covers all other public employee collective bargaining (where we are trying to get into), we will have to see how these provisions play out.