Governor, lawmakers keeping eye on clock

CARSON CITY — There is a chess game going on between the Legislature and Gov. Jim Gibbons.

It could end in a constitutional crisis, or it could lead to the first on-time legislative session in a decade.

Lawmakers are desperate to avoid the former, but time is rapidly running out, and any delay at this point could lead to a battle too ugly to contemplate.

“Legislators don’t want to raise that issue,” said Lorne Malkiewich, director of the Legislative Counsel Bureau. “They don’t want to get to the point where passage of the budget they want becomes dependent on a Supreme Court decision between the legislative and executive branches.”

The situation has produced a compacted schedule unlike any previous legislative session. Rather than racing to finish by the end of the 120-day session on June 1, lawmakers are shooting to get their biggest work, the budget, done by May 21 — Thursday — so Gibbons can veto it and they can get it back and override the veto before the clock runs out.

To understand the situation, you have to be familiar with the worst-case scenario.

In it, legislators pass a budget just before the June 1 end of the session. The budget uses tax increases to fund a pared-down budget for the next two years. It goes to the desk of Gibbons on, say, May 30.

By law, Gibbons has five days to act on the bill by signing or vetoing it. (If he does nothing, it becomes law without his signature.)

In this hypothetical scenario, Gibbons sits on the bill for a couple of days. June 2 arrives and the legislative session is over. Only then does he veto the bill.

Without a budget — in reality, not a single bill but a bundle of bills that allocate funding for things like education and salaries and specify revenue sources to pay for them — state government would shut down at the end of the fiscal year, June 30.

Only the governor can call the Legislature into special session, and the state constitution gives him the power to set the agenda.

“The Legislature shall transact no legislative business, except that for which they were specially convened, or such other legislative business as the Governor may call to the attention of the Legislature while in Session,” states the constitutional provision on special sessions of the Legislature.

Gibbons believes he could specify in his special session proclamation that the Legislature may only consider his budget and may not pass any tax increases. Lawmakers and their lawyers disagree; they believe if Gibbons calls them to enact a budget, they can pass whatever budget they please.

Inevitably, if it came to that, the two sides would end up in court, and that’s a legal case nobody wants to have to deal with.

“It would end up being a protracted legal battle,” said Assembly Majority Leader John Oceguera, D-Las Vegas. “It could be several months, and all kinds of bad things would happen.”

Oceguera said the amount of time left on the clock is getting low enough to make him “nervous.”

It all carries overtones of 2003, when the battle over the constitutional requirement that two-thirds of legislators vote for any tax increase wound up in a Supreme Court case pitting then-Gov. Kenny Guinn against the Legislature. The special session that year didn’t end until late July, and legislative followers still shudder at the memory.

To avoid that nightmare, factoring in weekends and the Memorial Day holiday, legislators believe they need to pass the budget by May 21 and have it on Gibbons’ desk by May 22.

“If it’s the 22nd, they’ll still be OK,” Malkiewich said. “Anytime up to the 25th, they’re probably still OK.”

But if a budget is not passed before May 26, he said, there will not be time to override a veto if Gibbons waits out his allotted days.

Last week, lawmakers settled the first major budget debate by approving state spending for the next two years. Their $6.8 billion spending plan adds about half a billion dollars to Gov. Jim Gibbons’ proposal and will require at least $1 billion in new revenue.

It took days longer than the legislators had planned to settle a dispute over a small amount of higher education spending, a delay that set back the overall schedule, leaving little margin for error. The setback also served as a reminder of the unforeseen snags that arise in such discussions, sending seemingly harmonious negotiations suddenly off the rails.

Later in the week, plans for a tax package to include payroll and sales tax hikes began to solidify quickly, an encouraging sign.

Though big progress has been made, much remains to be settled, from rounding up individual votes to satisfying Republicans’ demands for public employee pension reforms as a condition of their support.

It’s not actually known that Gibbons would sit on the budget and run out the clock if he had the chance. You might think he would want to veto the tax hikes right away in a show of decisiveness, rather than waiting around.

This Legislature has extremely poor relations with the governor, though, and doesn’t want to give him the opportunity.

“It depends on what the governor’s goal is here,” one veteran legislative observer said. “Does he really want to strategically do everything in his power to prevent them from passing taxes? Or does he want to make his point and get out of the way so they can do what they’re going to do, what they have a right to do, which is override his veto? He’s not saying. So the best thing they can do is stop it from becoming an issue.”

In an interview, Gibbons said his approach would be deliberate.

“We’re going to have to look at the budget to make sure that the information in the budget we understand,” he said. “This is not something we’re going to jump instantly to do, but we’re going to look at it and make sure that we understand the details of the budget they’re submitting.”

The governor noted that legislators have known they had 120 days since the beginning, suggesting that if they can’t get their work done they have no one to blame but themselves.

“I will maintain my promise that I will veto a budget if it contains tax increases,” he said, but “I do not have a time frame for that.”

Since the 120-day limit was imposed on legislators, only the first session to come under the rule, in 1999, has finished on time.

Every other time, a special session has been required, from the six-week brawl of 2003 to 2007’s four-hour wrap up right after the deadline. It seems that even with the best of intentions, legislators just have a hard time finishing their business on schedule.

This time, the stakes are high. A few days’ time will tell whether that’s enough motivation.

“Stay tuned. Things change by the hour here,” said state Sen. Bob Coffin, D-Las Vegas. “It’s crunch time, a week and a half earlier than usual.”

Contact reporter Molly Ball at mball @reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2919.