Governor Joe Lombardo eyes a special legislative session to take care of unfinished business, plus... -What we're doing together right now through this discussion across jurisdictions, sharing manpower, doing anything we can, having these discussions, and then not just talking about it, but making a plan and doing it.

-...Part 2 of our children and traffic safety conversation focuses on a rise in collisions involving e-bikes And e-scooters.

That's this week on Nevada Week.

♪♪ -Support for Nevada Week is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

In October, Governor Joe Lombardo said he'd call a special session of the state legislature in order to, quote, finish what the legislature left unfinished.

The Republican governor made good on that Wednesday, calling on state lawmakers to convene in Carson City.

That's where Democrats have a majority in both the Assembly and Senate.

Tracking the priorities of each party for this special session is Tabitha Mueller, Capital Bureau Chief and Government Accountability Reporter for The Nevada Independent.

Tabitha, I want to start with the governor.

What does he want to achieve in this special session?

(Tabitha Mueller) I think what the governor wants to achieve is what he's laid out in that proclamation, right?

It's saying, Hey, this is my priority; this is what we need to get across the finish line as soon as possible.

And I think what's critical when you think about this situation is that what happens in this special session is going to carry into the 2026 election cycle.

What he passes, what he signs, what Democrats pass, all of this is going to set the stage for future elections.

And I think at the top of his list is his crime bill.

That's his crime legislation, which died in chaotic final hours of the legislative session, and it's the film tax measure.

This is a proposal that was brought by two Democratic Assembly members who have said that it is a way to bring a new industry to Southern Nevada.

-What about that crime bill stands out to you?

What would it change?

-So we haven't seen formal language yet, so I'm going to put kind of a caveat on there that anything could shift, anything could change.

But what I've been sort of hearing is that the final-- that the version that's going to be sort of talked about or discussed is the version that was waiting on a concurrence vote in the State Senate when it met its untimely death.

And so that version essentially had smash-and-grab policy increases that made advocates really concerned about it.

And it also had what's called kind of this "corridor court."

And this is a court that was phased out previously but, essentially, was targeted at tourist districts as a way to sort of help address crime in those areas specifically.

And the court was targeted at those regions.

It also had protections for hospitality workers and a few other provisions as well.

-And this would be extra important and personal to the governor, being that he was the former sheriff of Clark County.

Can you elaborate, though, what would it mean if this special session were to happen and he did not get that bill passed?

-I think that that sort of leaves the governor in this politically tenuous position where this was his main priority, right?

And the legislation was watered down during the 2025 session.

It originally had a bunch of different-- addressed a bunch of different measures, including raising felony theft thresholds.

So if it does-- If it doesn't get across the line, if it's not something, then what is he going to run on in 2026?

He had sort of campaigned on, I'm going to make public safety an issue.

I am the former sheriff.

We're going to address these problems.

And it is worth noting that crime rates have been going down, right?

We've seen that decrease.

But I think this is, this was his marquee legislation.

-And the film tax credit bill--for our viewers who need reminding of what it is and perhaps, in particular, which bill we're talking about, because during the regular session, there were two competing film tax credit bills--which one is being pushed right now?

-The one that we've really seen a lot of energy and efforts coalesce around is the effort backed by Warner Brothers and Sony Pictures Entertainment.

And that proposal is essentially a massive increase of Nevada's existing film tax program.

It was-- The existing program is about $10 million a year.

This would increase it to $120 million a year in annual transferable tax credits.

And that would basically start-- There's a little bit of a runway leading up to this.

So the proposal says that to build a studio in Las Vegas, you need to invest a certain amount of money.

You need to have I think like $1.8 billion in investment when it comes in.

You also have these like sort of timelines.

But essentially, it would make it so $120 million is set aside in annual transferable tax credits.

Now, when we talk about tax credits, what that means in reality is that the companies that receive them, so these film companies, can either use them to offset taxes, of which, an analysis that my team and I did, shows there's very little actual taxes that film companies pay here in Nevada, and most of it is then sold at a discount, usually to other entities that have maybe a larger tax burden here in the Silver State.

-Democrats have also proposed legislation to help with SNAP benefits that are at risk that have not been fully paid out in November.

What does that look like?

Where does that go, also, if the government shutdown ends?

-I think if the government shutdown ends, it sort of makes this less of a problem.

But we still are facing a fact that SNAP benefits are not fully given to the recipients yet.

People are reporting that they're receiving much lower dollar amounts than they would normally receive.

There's a huge strain on our food systems.

Infrastructure right now, the governor did-- The governor and lawmakers did allocate money to food banks to help address what many are calling a crisis, but it still may not be enough to meet the need that we have right now, while the economy is sort of a little bit tenuous, especially during a government shutdown, where a lot of federal workers are now also relying on this type of aid.

And so essentially what Democrats have said is that, look, we'd like to make it so that we can fund, meet the need and the demand by funding sort of a state-- an alternative state-run program.

And so if that may or may not be on the agenda, but we'll kind of see how that plays out.

-Okay.

So we're talking about a crime bill, a film tax credit bill, perhaps a SNAP funding bill.

Those are a lot of topics to cover in one special session.

If you think about the last special session to fund the A's stadium, that was a process of about seven days.

How long are you hearing this session might take?

-It's hard, because we don't know how long this is going to last.

I think that the shortest special session that we've ever seen is one day.

The longest is 27 days, based on research that I've conducted.

Now, in the Constitution, it's mandated that it only lasts a maximum of 20 days.

So we could go 1 to 20 days, but I think that what we need to keep in mind is that there is-- lawmakers themselves are on a timeline.

When a special session is called, there is a period of a fundraising blackout, meaning they can't fundraise before-- They can't fundraise once the announcement comes out, and they can't fundraise, I believe, up to 15 days after the legislative session ends.

So there's an incentive for them to get this done very, very quickly.

And someone that I spoke to on the condition of anonymity, because discussions are still going on, they said that at least one lawmaker has a hard out after the 15th, so they can be there through the 15th, but they've got, you know, other things going on and other schedules that they have to keep in mind.

-And I've been hearing the same, that this is going to be a quick session, regardless of how much content is in it.

But that raises some questions about, about the ability of the public to, to weigh in on these issues.

I mean, the crime bill and the film tax credit bill had a lot of public input during the regular session.

Is there going to be that kind of an opportunity?

I know the ACLU of Nevada has been wanting to have a voice in the crime bill and told me via text message that "Organizations like ours are pushing for amendments on items, including the governor's crime bill.

We have been advised that amendments to bills will not be considered, including amendments to protect against federal overreach on issues like immigration.

If that ends up being the case, it would be truly embarrassing, especially as many politicians continue to push the line that they are fighting for our communities."

What is the level of concern about how much time the public has to react to this potential legislation?

-So I called a couple of different advocates in this space, and what they were saying is that they're frustrated by what would likely be a quick turnaround on the proclamation, you know, and then a special session called and then bills quickly processed.

And what you need to understand about this is, when we're saying that legislation is on the agenda, things are pretty-- They're mostly baked, right?

From the outside looking in, things have been discussed.

There have been negotiations.

There might be some shifts to bills or changes that come along during hearing processes, but generally what you see on the agenda is what is going to be signed by the governor at the end of this legislative-- at the end of the special session.

-And that makes sense, because, as you talked about earlier, if the governor does not pass these bills, this does not look good for him.

So you're telling me that a lot of this has already been decided upon prior to the session even starting?

-Right.

And there will be, you know, bill hearings and conversations about it, but I think what we sort of heard from folks who are on the outside looking in is this frustration of like, we want to have more dialog.

Now, my understanding is that there has been dialog going on behind the scenes.

I think that the ACLU acknowledged that and said, look, we've been pushing for this; we've been advocating for change.

But it'll kind of depend on what, you know, how it plays out and what's in those actual bills as they're introduced.

-All right.

Tabitha Mueller of The Nevada Independent, thank you for joining Nevada Week.

-Thanks so much for having me.

-And the Indy recently did a fact brief about our next topic, finding that injuries from collisions involving e-bikes are increasing across the country.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department says so far this year, at least three e-bike users and five e-scooter users have died in traffic collisions, and some of them were children.

Collectively known as e-devices, e-bikes and e-scooters were the focus of Part 2 of our children and safety traffic discussion with Deputy Chief Jose Hernandez of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department; Lieutenant Mike Campbell of the Clark County School District Police Department; Jennifer Grube, Coordinator for Safe Routes to School; and Rebecca Dirks Garcia, Board Member of the Nevada PTA.

(Lieutenant Campbell) Nearly half the kids that are at fault for the crashes that we're seeing in our school district school zones are on e-devices, on e-scooters, on the bikes.

If you're under 18, the law now says you have to wear a helmet.

That's not being done.

It's a fresh law.

It's going to take time.

But again, the speed of those vehicles... We're already having enough issues with the kids that are pushing the scooters, that are riding regular bicycles under their own power.

Now you're adding a whole other category of having to be so skilled to understand how to stop fast enough, how to maneuver around things, and that doesn't even factor in when you start adding more kids on devices that they're not supposed to be on.

It should be one person to one device.

And nobody thinks about the other things with that like, is that device-- well, how much weight can that device hold?

And everything has a weight.

So if you add another person, you're probably over the weight.

It might break.

But on the thing with traffic safety is if something pops out, if a car pops out, or a person's crossing and you're doing 35 or so with another person on your e-bike, those brakes on the, on that bicycle are only made to stop the weight that is recommended.

So if you add another 150 pounds to it and an unskilled driver who doesn't have any helmets on, it's just an absolute recipe for disaster.

(Jennifer Grube) We see that a lot with students doing two per a device, where there should just be one rider.

So that's a message we want to just come across if you see parents, to educate and for our students to realize that the importance of following the rules of that device, that one per.

And we even see parents picking up students on e-scooters and regular scooters, because it's convenient and it's quicker because they can zip in and out of traffic.

And they're putting their kids on the back of them and taking them to and from school as well.

Noted, most of the time not wearing a helmet, unfortunately.

(Rebecca Dirks Garcia) One of the challenges with this is we have to recognize the reason behind some of this.

It is convenience, but it's also cheaper.

And for a lot of, you know-- CCSD says if you live under two miles, you're not going to get a bus.

If you want to go to a magnet school out of a zone, you're not going to get a bus.

If you have work at certain times of day, parents can't pick up, drop off.

If you're trying to get a high school kid to get to an elementary school within that 10-minute window to get your kid, a scooter is going to do it-- an electric scooter is going to do it a lot faster than walking.

And so I think part of what's driving all of this is not just fun; it's real family needs, challenges with economy and timing and jobs and all these types of things.

So we need to recognize that it's not going to go away, and instead focus on all the ways that we can make it safer.

For me, one of the things that I've seen is I don't understand why all these are flowing into a school zone.

And I've seen not a single staff member at my daughter's high school say a peep about, Where's your helmet?

Why do you have two kids on this?

And you know, those are things, to me, that if you're on a school campus, then it should be well within the limits of the school to say, you're not riding on this campus if you don't have a helmet.

You're not riding on this campus with two kids on that device.

And that there should be intervention and also education so that they know that it's not going to be allowed.

-There are proposals right now that I've assisted with, that they're discussing right now.

So I agree with you.

Anytime there's an adult involved anywhere, a kid is going to be safer for the most part, especially with traffic safety.

We have a crossing guard out there.

We have more staff members.

We have more police.

We have anybody being patient or slowing down that just has the knowledge or the forethought that can say, what could happen if I don't do this?

But we are discussing that.

I'm a proponent for that.

I'm trying to push for-- I mean, obviously they can't have those certain e-devices on the road as it is.

They can't have the motorcycle.

They can't have the bicycle over 750 watts.

They can't have a scooter that goes faster than 20 miles an hour or it's over 150 pounds.

-How well aware are people of that, that some of these aren't even legal?

-Well, we're sharing with it across all jurisdictions.

We've done a PSA with Henderson.

We're planning on doing plenty with Las Vegas Metropolitan.

It is out there.

Safe Routes put together a whole guide about bikes, which is awesome, that should be shared.

We sent it out in the Weekly Wire.

The school district did in the beginning of the year.

It's available.

It's everywhere.

We're in a time where, you know, you have a thought and you put it on Facebook, and everybody knows how you feel about something.

But they won't take the time to look for this information or read it.

It comes home in backpacks.

It goes like, through emails to parents.

It's on school district websites.

It's how do we get them to read it?

And that's the hardest part, is that we're looking at all these different tragedies.

Vegas is very different compared to a lot of different cities.

It's very people moving, coming and going.

So they're learning about the law, then they're leaving.

Then people are coming in where it was different.

And it's happening so often.

But then we're just glazing by all of these things that are just traumatic tragedy just because that's all that life is now--social media, the news--it's just, really, that's the things that gather people's interest is the worst thing that happened that day.

Oh, I want to read about that, but I won't read about what the best thing was or how to keep myself safe.

And you know, there are plenty of laws that are being added every year to drivers, to everything else, and it's incumbent of them that they read them, because you're out on the road.

You're driving that multi-thousand pound vehicle, and even if you're not under the influence, which we hope you aren't, Vegas is very fast paced.

There's a lot of lanes.

They're wide, they're big, they're straight.

There isn't a lot of curves.

And all these things add together.

Just goes back to that same thing: We have to slow down.

We have to work together.

And law enforcement is doing it.

We're partnering with Safe Routes.

We listen to the parents.

We're doing everything right.

We just need to do it more, I guess.

-Metro, from your perspective, from the Metropolitan Police Department's perspective, do you just start giving out more tickets for people driving these that are illegal, and are you doing that?

-Absolutely.

(Jose Hernandez) For us, this is a zero tolerance approach to unsafe driving.

I mentioned several causal factors that we've identified, and those are-- Those are violations that you will absolutely get a citation for.

If a vehicle isn't safe to drive, we're going to tow that vehicle.

If you don't have a driver's license and you shouldn't be driving a vehicle, we're going to tow your vehicle.

That's the-- That's the approach we've taken.

I know that's the approach all our law enforcement agencies have taken.

It has to be a zero tolerance approach, because if, if we're not making it clear how critical it is that safe driving be a priority, we're going to do everything we can to make sure that we send that message across.

And so the zero tolerance is one thing, but we also look at this from an education perspective.

So we always talk about the three Es, the education, the enforcement education, and the engineering all have to come together so that we can, as we identify those, those school zones that need attention or we identify, you know, for instance, Las Vegas is unique.

We have blocks that go for hundreds of, you know, feet.

Very unique.

In other cities, blocks are much smaller.

Well, what happens when you have a very long block?

Well, you build up speed, unintentionally, intentionally, whatever the case is, but we begin to build up speed.

Not good.

And so but these are things that we are looking at, you know, as from an engineering perspective.

I'll give you an example.

Over in the southeast part of town, on Boulder Highway, for pedestrians it was one of our most critical areas.

We were-- Pedestrians were getting hit quite often.

And so part of the engineering process is to put up pedestrian railing along Boulder Highway.

Now, it's a long stretch of road, but we were able to put some in the areas where we saw a majority of the crossings.

And so it's helped quite a bit.

It's reduced the number of pedestrians that are being hit.

And so we have to look at that.

We have to look at how can engineering help us.

We know we're doing the enforcement, and we're going to continue to do more enforcement.

We know-- I'll tell you what we're missing.

We're missing education.

We're missing an education, an educational piece that truly grabs people and that makes them understand, makes them realize just how critical.

Because if not, the only time we think about this is when we lose a child.

And it becomes-- It's tragic.

Yes, it's tragic.

And we-- and we can't, you know, we start to scratch our heads and wonder how this could have been prevented.

But that's when we draw attention, right?

And then two weeks go by, and then we completely forget about how horrific that incident was.

-We use something on our department.

It's our Facebook, our social media, where we do things different.

We try to go against the grain to grab people's attention.

We haven't gone into that avenue of using it for scooters and e-bikes.

We have put out information.

We have shown that they're being towed, that kids are getting cited or parents can be cited for allowing their kids to do this behavior.

But we are out there.

We are probably writing a record amount of citations.

We have officers that have a directive now to be in every single school zone with at least their lights on and looking for offenses to try to curb behavior with officer presence.

But I don't know what the answer is.

I don't know what the magic pill is, because as soon as we get the magic pill, there's probably going to be some sort of repercussions from that, too, that we never thought of.

I think we're all doing everything we can with what we have.

And in a perfect world, like I said, I wish we could have more police officers and manpower, but what we're doing together right now, through this discussion across jurisdictions, sharing manpower, doing anything we can, having these discussions and then not just talking about it, but making a plan and doing it.

That is what we need to do.

-That was the second part of a larger discussion on traffic safety in school zones.

To see the rest of it, go to vegaspbs.org/nevadaweek.

We move now to a new documentary set to premiere right here on Vegas PBS.

Ahead of the United States celebrating its 250th anniversary next year, filmmaker Ken Burns is taking an extensive look at the Revolutionary War titled The American Revolution.

We held an advanced screening featuring some of this six-part documentary series here in studio and after, a panel of experts shared their takeaways.

Here's some of their discussion about the role of the Iroquois Confederacy, one of the first and longest lasting participatory democracies on Earth.

(Mark Hall-Patton) Part of what I enjoyed, and I'm looking forward to seeing the whole series, I loved the comment at the beginning about the Iroquois Confederation, especially since the American Revolution destroyed that.

That's one of the things that came out of the revolution was the six tribes ended up splitting, with four tribes going with the British and two tribes, the Oneida and the Tuscarora, going with the Patriots.

And that split that confederation, which had said very clearly, Don't disagree.

Well, that's what happened.

And I'm going to be-- It's going to be interesting to see how that is handled.

-You brought up how what we are taught in elementary school is a lot of pride and, yeah, we gave it to the British.

But there are a lot of misconceptions about I guess unity, like we just discussed.

The Iroquois Confederacy that you brought up as a democracy, how influential was that in the creation of this democracy, and how well understood do you think that is, A.B.?

(A.B.

Wilkinson) That one is somewhat debated, because some people will say, Well, Benjamin Franklin and others were looking at the Haudenosaunee, or the Iroquois Confederacy, and saying that, look at how they're united.

At first, there's five tribes, and they add the Tuscarora as the sixth.

There's no primary source that says that they exactly copied that confederacy, but it's very clear that Franklin and others who were there at the Albany Plan, they're also meeting with native peoples at that conference there.

And they knew about their strength in numbers.

And so it was, it was interesting to see a lot of this and saying, Oh, I teach that.

I tell my students that's the first meme up there is the divided snake.

And they get a kick out of that, but it failed, right?

And, yeah, I think that it's really interesting that Mark brings up that this war breaks that confederacy, and out of it rises the 13 colonies that come together.

- The American Revolution premieres Sunday, November 16, right here on Vegas PBS.

Each of the six episodes starts at 8 p.m.

for six consecutive nights.

For more information on other ways you can watch, go to vegaspbs.org/nevadaweek.

And I'll see you next week on Nevada Week.

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