Nevada News Bureau - Rory Reid Calls for Reform and Consolidation to Balance State Budget

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Democrat gubernatorial candidate Rory Reid told the Nevada News Bureau yesterday there are other options for moving the state out of its current budget crisis besides increasing taxes and cutting programs.

In an interview at a local coffee shop, Reid pulled out two pieces of paper. One showed an organization chart for the state's public education system from 1989. The other shows how it looks now.

The newer chart showed many more layers of government, including advisory panels, legislative committees and other bureaucratic creations that have evolved over the past 20 years.

Reid said the two charts demonstrate one way Nevada can save several hundred million dollars: by streamlining government services to eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies in state government.

Reid, who is trailing GOP candidate Brian Sandoval in the polls, said he has experience balancing budgets as chairman of the Clark County Commission, budgets that are as big as the Nevada general fund budget.

"I know how to do this," he said. "I've balanced it in good times and in bad for seven years running without new taxes. There are more than two options. The third option nobody talks about is to remake our government."

Clark County had multiple housing authorities at one time, but Reid said he worked to consolidate them into one agency. There used to be multiple public health agencies, now there is one.

Reid did not back off his no new taxes stance, saying the state unemployment rate, the foreclosure crisis, and the overall economic situation in Nevada makes the idea of expanding such levies a nonstarter.

"We need a leader in Carson City that knows how to reform government structures," he said. "If we do what needs to be done, we will save hundreds of millions of dollars and still maintain services by reforming our government."

Reid said he will be putting out a proposal in the next several days addressing this issue in more detail.

Reid said Sandoval is offering no realistic solutions, instead saying he will avoid layoffs, protect vulnerable citizens and government services and still balance the budget.

"That is impossible," Reid said.

The Sandoval campaign offered this response: "As a two-term legislator, an attorney general who returned money to the general fund and as a private law practitioner, Brian is proud of his budget experience. It's curious that just a few months ago Rory Reid refused to say how he might balance the state's budget. Now he's attacking Brian -- the only candidate to lay out how he would have approached balancing our state's short term budget deficit without mass layoffs or new taxes."

Reid weighed in on the state's budget problems as state Budget Director Andrew Clinger has spoken in recent days of the severity of the impacts facing Nevada when the Legislature convenes in February.

Clinger said the state is facing an estimated $3 billion shortfall in the revenues needed to sustain state government for the next two years, or nearly 50 percent of what would be a $6.5 billion general fund budget.

On Monday Clinger said new taxes might be avoided if the state and counties worked together to more efficiently divvy up the delivery of government services and the revenues used to pay for them.

Even so, both Sandoval and Reid have steadfastly rejected any notion of raising taxes as a partial solution to the state's budget problems.

In an interview today on the KRNV Channel 4 noon news, Senate Minority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, said he would not reject out-of-hand the idea of new or increased taxes as one option to solving the state's budget crisis.

"There is no question that we are facing a very severe problem, the largest shortfall in our history," he said. "We did take money from counties last time, cities and counties, and there is a bottom to that well also.

"No one wants to advocate raising taxes, or new taxes," Raggio said. "We will probably have to look at restoring the taxes that are going to sunset. But I don't think anybody should take a blood oath that we're not going to look at that."

Raising taxes is a last resort, he said.

"But I wouldn't take it off the table," Raggio said.

The 2009 Legislature raised the sales tax and the modified business tax on the state's largest employers as part of a solution to balancing the current budget. Those taxes will expire on June 30, 2011 unless they are extended by the Legislature.

Reid said there is one other way that Nevada can get out of its budget crisis, and that is "growing" out of it through economic development. There are $5 billion worth of energy projects getting close to construction that will generate construction jobs and tax revenues to the state, he said.

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