The second Nevada special legislative session of 2020 is over, and we look at the bills that were passed - and what we THINK they will do. That's the hallmark of this session. Nobody's sure what exactly happened.
Nevada's second special legislative session of 2020 drew some contentious discussions - about criminal justice reforms (lawmakers didn't think they went far enough, but voted for the bill anyway), about DETR (technical fixes that most lawmakers can't even name), about voting (that's clear, but the president seems to think it isn't) and about COVID19 liability protection.
That last bill, SB4 - which was first argued into the wee hours of the night - drew the most astonishing admission of the session, when Governor Steve Sisolak's General Counsel Brin Gibson said the bill - which did not include the input from hospitals or schools or the small business community - did include the “important members of the Nevada economy.”
Meaning resort/casinos. And Culinary workers.
Hospitals were specifically left out of liability protection for COVID19. Lawmakers continuously asked why, but the closest they got to an answer was this from Gibson:
"There's a potential that this deal falls apart if we started amending our certain provisions in there and for reasons that might not be obvious, some are messaging related, some are optical related, some are substantive."
Assemblyman Glen Leavitt of Boulder City couldn't even get Gibson to say who was in the room negotiating the deal.