Feel the excitement. (Photo: Richard Bednarski for Nevada Current)
“In 2022,” Gov. Joe Lombardo observed during his state of the state speech Wednesday, “Nevada voters elected a sheriff to be their governor.”
And then in 2024 Nevada voters elected as president someone found liable of sexual abuse by one jury and guilty of 34 felonies by another for covering up hush money payments to a porn star; a man who four years earlier had illegally tried to nullify a majority of Nevada’s presidential votes; and a man who is supported by their gallant lawman-turned governor anyway.
Well, Lombardo’s regard for law and order can be situational.
The inconsistencies in his thinking, and in his state of the state address, don’t end there .
The Nevada Way: Coddling developers
Lombardo said the “root cause” of unaffordable housing in Nevada is “the federal government’s reluctance to release the land we need for housing.”
And yet despite his frequent assertions that federal land “release” is the one and only solution to the housing crisis, Lombardo on Wednesday claimed he will be “creating a route for housing attainability for all” merely by lifting regulations and fees on developers and providing them with publicly facilitated financing.
First, “attainable” housing is not housing “for all” and is not to be confused with “affordable.” The term “attainable” generally applies to housing for middle income earners with a measure of household financial stability.
Which is great. Those folks have been getting hammered by housing costs too. And an increased supply of “attainable” housing could lead to additional “affordable” housing, over several years.
But the more pressing and immediate housing crisis in Nevada is the one crushing people working in Nevada’s most common jobs, including retail and food services. Lombardo’s speech didn’t say anything about the hundreds of thousands of working Nevadans on the lower ends of the pay scale, with respect to housing or anything else.
Second, Lombardo says that his talks with Donald Trump convinced him that Trump knows “how important it is that more federal land be released.”
But Lombardo also acknowledges that the development industry won’t be jumping with joy over a bunch of federal land going on the market for cheap any time soon.
So if the “root cause” of the housing crisis is, as Lombardo perpetually claims, the lack of available federal land, where might Lombardo’s freshly deregulated developer friends with shiny new publicly assisted financing be developing their additional housing?
Lombardo didn’t say.
Fortunately, researchers recently released a report identifying where housing could be built. And it’s not on federal land too far out on the edge of town to be much use to people with jobs in town, but via infill development on vacant or underused land within already developed areas.
Perhaps that research combined with the very existence of his own housing proposal can convince Lombardo that locked-up federal land is not, repeat not, the “root cause” of housing unaffordability and that developer-coddling urban sprawl is not a solution, but part of the problem.
And hopefully the Lombardo palm will go to the Lombardo forehead and he’ll sign legislation reforming Nevada’s tenant-hostile laws and policies, instead of vetoing reforms like he did in 2023.
More bureaucracy, less filling
Lombardo also proposes to split up the Department of Health and Human Services and create a new department called the “Nevada Health Authority” and a new agency within that called the “Office of Mental Health.”
During his speech Lombardo repeatedly invoked the virtue of government efficiency, perhaps in an homage to Elon Musk’s branding prowess.
It seems in our brave new world the path to government efficiency will be lined with new government agencies.
Relatedly, Lombardo proudly announced that instead of increasing spending on programs and services, he would rather sock money away to collect earnings (and dust) in the state’s Rainy Day account.
If and as the administrative rearrangement of health services moves along, hopefully someone can persuade Lombardo that whatever the virtues of increasing the bureaucracy, increasing the availability and accessibility of mental health care also requires significantly increased spending on Nevada’s infamously underfunded and inadequate care.
C’mon everybody! Jump in and … tread water.
His housing and health care initiatives, along with other legislative proposals outlined in Lombardo’s speech (his default tough-on-crime schtick, some light tinkering on the edges of economic development and education, a Republican red meat broadside against voting by mail) amount to thin gruel, agenda-wise.
It’s as if he decided that since Democrats control both houses of the Legislature — but not with veto-proof supermajorities — neither he nor they can really do much.
Why bother to promote big base-satisifying ideas (a half billion dollars of public money for private religious schools, like Lombardo proposed during the last legislative session) just to let Democrats humiliate him in the eyes of Republican voters by dismissively swatting away his proposals, again.
What’s the point of that?
So maybe Lombardo’s taking a new persona for a spin, the kinder, gentler Lombardo, who hopes to win reelection not by being all manly-man and, as he likes to say, “getting shit stuff done,” but by being Mr. Nice Guy.
(And maybe that’ll get him a priMAGAry challenger, ha ha.)
When it comes to policy, it’s as if the governor, and legislative Democrats too, however much noise they make, have jointly thrown up their hands and resigned themselves to just treading water.
On the bright side… Given the promised “shock and awe” attack of atrocities to be launched in earnest in Washington D.C. Monday, coupled with the impulse in red states to shock and awe on their own, treading water (assuming we’ll have some) isn’t the worst thing that could happen in Nevada.
Credit where credit’s due
At the top of his state of the state address Lombardo ticked off several achievements — “We emerged from a brutal pandemic stronger and healthier,” “a record number of visitors to the Silver State,” “robust job creation,” “over 2 billion dollars in new funding for Nevada students and schools.”
All true.
And none of it was made possible by anything done by Lombardo — or by Nevada legislative Democrats, for that matter.
All of it was made possible by the historically aggressive measures taken to pull the national economy out of the pandemic much more quickly and powerfully than anyone thought possible in January 2021.
In other words, there’s one line that was not in Lombardo’s speech but definitely should have been: Thanks, President Joe Biden.