Quick Update on the Fallout from 2023's AB519 (Rurals of Nevada art. 23)
The Owyhee Combined School construction is getting underway, but the political fallout from AB519 might continue.
I wanted to do a quick update on the ongoing situation of the Owyhee Combined School at Duck Valley. I had discussed the school and some criticisms of AB519, which guaranteed state funding, right after the law passed in my “Rural Nexus” article.
The school does have a contractor now, and building construction is soon to begin. But the aftereffects of how the state provided the funding continue to reverberate.
On February 7th, the Carson City District Court ruled that the provisions in AB519 that threatened to raise taxes automatically on Elko County taxpayers if they did not establish a school capital projects fund were ruled unconstitutional. The Nevada Independent had a good article on the decision recently.
As I noted in my article, the main problem was the targeting of Elko County with an almost Wile E. Coyote-inspired scheme by having the provision triggered by a ridiculously narrow population band that only included Elko County. It was a blatant effort to avoid identifying a specific county for a tax increase, prohibited by the Nevada Constitution.
But the court decision also mentioned another issue that I had missed. If some other county passed into that population band in the future (a real possibility), that county would have to do the same—but would immediately have their taxes raised by the state because the deadline to institute the fund aimed at Elko County would have passed for other counties.
The fact that the bill was written so poorly is probably no surprise. But what stands out to me is the continued use of population as a proxy for identifying counties (one of the themes of this series, as long-time readers know).
In this case, the problem might be more vital to urban than rural counties. Some bills currently in the Legislature could pose serious future issues since they use the same argument.
We can take AB195, which converts appointed Clark County School Board members from advisory to full voting members, as an example. The full text of AB195 is available on NELIS.
AB195 applies only to school districts with more than 75,000 students—with the same parenthetical notation this only currently covers Clark County that appeared in AB519 about Elko County. Granted, this is a much broader population range than the 5,000-person range used against Elko. The regulatory language, however, is the same in attempting to address a policy issue specific to a single county at the state level by using “nondiscriminatory” population as the trigger.
However, if another county school district—say, Washoe—passes the 75,000 pupil threshold, the law would apply to them as well. I would assume this means that the county would first have to add appointed members (as provided in an earlier piece of legislation that targeted only Clark County) and then make them voting members.
Would not the same legal argument that Elko County made apply to this situation as well? Could opponents claim that AB195 explicitly targeted a single county for the state to modify local governing decisions—and if allowed to stand, the requirement presents a threat to future counties that reach the same population? In other words, the Elko County decision about AB519 might provide a precedent for a legal challenge to other legislation. (Disclaimer: not a lawyer)
Like many other issues for the “rural nexus,” AB519 also might have unintentionally opened a can of worms for the urban counties. So maybe the Legislature should stop with laws attempting to target counties based solely on population.
Granted, this might require a change to the state constitution. In my view, that would be the proper approach and a discussion worth having.