IMPACT

Producers Alliance of Southern Nevada

Help, Hope, Home - Housing Assitance Program

Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada

Links for this episode:

Barbara Buckley Named to Form  DETR Task Force

Elissa Cafferata Named Third New DETR Chief in Five months

Producers Alliance of Southern Nevada

Help, Hope, Home Clark County Housing Assitance

The LEAP Commission, Nevada Pandemic Response

MOLODI - Jason Nious

If you wish to donate guitars or other instruments to Del Sol:

Amazon Wish List: https://bit.ly/dsaguitarwish

Donate to Guitar Program: https://bit.ly/dsaguitardonate

Nevada's second special legislative session of 2020 drew some contentious discussions - about criminal justice reforms (lawmakers didn't think they went far enough, but voted for the bill anyway), about DETR (technical fixes that most lawmakers can't even name), about voting (that's clear, but the president seems to think it isn't) and about COVID19 liability protection.

That last bill, SB4 - which was first argued into the wee hours of the night - drew the most astonishing admission of the session, when Governor Steve Sisolak's General Counsel Brin Gibson said the bill - which did not include the input from hospitals or schools or the small business community - did include the “important members of the Nevada economy.”

Meaning resort/casinos. And Culinary workers.

Hospitals were specifically left out of liability protection for COVID19. Lawmakers continuously asked why, but the closest they got to an answer was this from Gibson:

"There's a potential that this deal falls apart if we started amending our certain provisions in there and for reasons that might not be obvious, some are messaging related, some are optical related, some are substantive." 

Assemblyman Glen Leavitt of Boulder City couldn't even get Gibson to say who was in the room negotiating the deal.

Carrie Kaufman talks to election law specialist Daniel Stewart about the Trump campaign's lawsuit on mail ballots, with the Nevada Legislature approved last month.

This is an addendum to Episode 62: Impact on School Schedules and Mining Tax

This is Impact. I’m Carrie Kaufman.

The special legislative session is over.

The Clark County School Board is in disarray.

COVID 19 rates are soaring so high in Nevada - especially Southern Nevada - that we are being grouped in with states like Florida.

I hate when we get grouped with Florida.

As of this taping, we have 41,000 Coronavirus cases in Nevada, 722 deaths. We have a 12% positivity rate. Meanwhile, less than 500,000 people have been tested for coronavirus - in a state with a population of 3 million.

Today we’re going to look at what happened in the legislature, and what happened in the school district this week. With a look ahead to the coming week, when CCSD Trustees will be meeting about Superintendent Jara’s Contract. That meeting will be Wednesday, July 29 at 1pm. I will post the live stream on Nevada Voice’s Facebook page.

Trust. Everybody says it’s the key to true democracy, and relationships. But it seems to be pretty elusive these days. Especially in Nevada, where the trust meter went off the scale this week. 

First, we were shown emails that showed CCSD Supt. Jesus Jara asking for the legislature to consider moving money from individual schools to the district’s general budget, causing an uproar. Then he denied it, and blamed the state supt., Jhone Ebert, and Governor Sisolak. Then those two wrote a scathing press release essentially calling Jara a liar.

Not long after that, CCSD Trustee Linda Cavazos called the State Dept. of Education and found out the Trustees had not been told the truth regarding reopening plans.

Now Cavazos and two other trustees are calling for a special meeting to discuss Jara’s employment, as two unions - including one that represents principals - have called on the superintendent to resign.

Meanwhile, the legislature actually considered a tax proposal Thursday night into Friday morning. They argued vociferously about lowering the amount of deductions mining companies can take when calculating their taxes.

It’s something Republicans and Democrats have said they’d be open to. And it would have brought in $55 million dollars - roughly a fifth of our deficit.

Alas, it failed along party lines at 2:30am on Friday. After over an hour of public comment.

We’re taking to Senator Yvanna Cancela and Assemblywoman Maggie Carlton about the vote and what it means for Nevada in a pandemic. And later on in the show, we’ll talk to CCSD Trustee Danielle Ford.

What a year this week was. TWO Clark County School Board meetings about a reopening plan. The start of the legislative special session. Gov. Sisolak re-establishing some phase 1 COVID protocols. We explore it all on IMPACT.

We’re starting our weekly show today with an update on the coronavirus, and a look at other issues in the news.

And there’s a lot going on.

Monuments are coming down all over the country. And a lot of white people - and some Black and Brown people - are learning for the first time about how racist policies are interwoven into our societies. The most interesting story for me in the last couple of weeks is an LA Times article on how Southern California freeways were built to obliterate well off Black populations.

Here are some other antiracist websites:

Teaching Anti-Racism

Robin DiAngelo on White Fragility

Berkeley's The Greater Good

Schools have also been in the news in the last couple of weeks. CCSD and Washoe County Schools have come out with plans to have students in buildings half time, and learning at home half time. This seems to be the model for most large cities around the country. CCSD is holding a special board meeting July 6 to discuss the plan.