Appointed senator Harris running against ‘small-government guy’

Dallas Harris, a Democrat and public interest lawyer appointed to Nevada’s Senate District 11 seat following Aaron Ford’s election as attorney general in 2018, is competing for her first full term against Republican Josh Dowden, a financial advisor who, like Harris, is running in his first election.

Harris was an administrative attorney for the state Public Utilities Commission when she was appointed to the Senate and now works as a consumer rights attorney with the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada. With the state still staggering financially under the economic strain of the coronavirus pandemic, her interest in how state government is funded is “more immediate now.”

“I think we need to take another look at whether the way we have our system set up is the best, the most efficient, it can be the most equitable, that it can be,” she said. “When you see this $1.3 billion budget hole and it leaves us with no choice but to take from the least among us, maybe there’s some room to rethink where we seek revenue and what sources we rely on, how we distribute that revenue.”

“Our budget issues are not just too low of a tax on mining,” she said, a reference to proposals to increase the state mining tax. The effort failed to pass in special sessions this summer but a trio of measures to amend the constitution will come back before lawmakers next year. “We’re not going to solve any single issue by just raising taxes on gaming or just raising the commerce tax or just raising property taxes or just raising sales tax…. I do think it needs to be a much more holistic.”

Focus on police reform

Dowden, a single father of two, has targeted Nevada’s bottom-dwelling status among states in education, a statewide shortage of health care professionals, and Nevada’s overdependence on the service and hospitality industry for its economic success. He opposes the effort to raise taxes on mining and the Democrat-led push for a mostly mail-in election in November, approved in the second special session last summer.

In speaking to voters during the campaign, he’s also taken up the cause to stop human trafficking, especially involving children. And with rising calls for police reform, he bristles at the idea of “defunding the police.”

“I’m not going to trivialize or downplay any interaction between police and the populace that has ended deadly,” Dowden said. “Lethal force from what I understand is your very last option and that’s how it should be. So the question is, is there something that we can do legislatively.

“I am a small-government guy, I want fewer laws and regulations passed, I want more freedoms, and I want more people to be free of government oppression and government regulations,” he continued. “I’m not going to go on record saying that, these are the one, two and three things that we need to improve in the police force. What I will say is that we need to investigate this more. We need to look at this very hard. We need to talk to all the parties that are involved, you know, the police, the investigators, we need to talk to the citizens. We need to do research and find out what can be done in order to curb this issue do that this doesn’t happen.”

On the same issue, Harris, said police funding is a local government matter and not within the Legislature’s purview, but said the concept behind calls to reallocate resources entails “putting preventative services on the front end.”

“When there’s a mental health issue, do we always need an armed officer? Maybe not. Maybe we should be rethinking crisis response,” she said. “What really gets me is that this is what conservatives are afraid of – this is an over-aggressive government.”

Expanding scholarships

Harris in the 2019 term sponsored legislation expanding Promise scholarships that go to high school graduate to help them attend community college. If elected, she wants to expand the program to all adults in Nevada so people in mid-career could get financial help to go back to school. She also wants to look at requiring localities to create zoning regulations for so-called “tiny homes” to help with housing shortages and costs.

Education and health care were the issues that prompted Dowden to seek office. He wants to create incentives to keep health care professionals practicing in Nevada and has criticized the Democrat-backed plan to rewrite the state school funding formula, approved by the Legislature in 2019. He calls its phased implementation too slow and advocates for better allocation of existing funds.

Democrats in the district hold a 43-24 advantage over Republicans and 11,000-vote edge among active voters, with 27 percent of the electorate registered as nonpartisans.

Contact Capital Bureau reporter Bill Dentzer at bdentzer@reviewjournal.com. Follow @DentzerNews on Twitter.