LAS VEGAS — It’s not a good sign in Carson City when members of your own party vote down your bill.

But with less than two hours left in the Nevada Legislature’s 83rd session, a new version of Gov. Joe Lombardo’s landmark health care proposal — heavily amended by Democrats in the state Senate — left Republicans with little choice but to reject Senate Bill 495.

Senate Minority Leader Robin Titus said the bill initially achieved many of the governor’s goals to improve health care access, but it was amended in a way that “takes that good bill, and now that good bill will do harm.”

The episode was an example of “poison pill” amendments and policy changes that characterized the end of session. Although Titus, a Republican, said the session had largely been characterized by improved cooperation across the aisle, observers told The Las Vegas Review-Journal more could have been achieved.

The Nevada Legislature concluded its 83rd session last week, and while there were some successes, political experts in the Silver State say it was dysfunctional, chaotic and also underwhelming. Legislative leaders, however, push back on that and said they achieved policy reform that matters to Nevadans.

“When you talk about housing and education, health care, elections — these are things that matter to folks,” Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager said in a Friday interview. “So I think when we focused on those issues, it really did seem to be smoother this year. I just wish that we had more time.”

Policymakers had some successes: They pushed forward legislation for charter school raises, housing reform, a bipartisan education proposal and made a concerted effort to address health care challenges in the state.

David Damore, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, political science professor, said the success with the charter school raises cannot be discounted, since that is what “almost killed” the 2023 session.

After threatening to veto the state’s education budget, Lombardo and legislative leadership found compromise through funding the public charter school teacher raises at $19.3 million for each year of the 2025-2027 biennium. Both branches also kept their goal of maintaining the $250 million in public school teacher raises first passed in 2023.

“You had willingness for the Democrats to give ground on that after they dug in so hard last session,” Damore said.

Budget bills passed earlier than usual and were not subject to the usual drama of past sessions, said Warren Hardy, a political consultant and former Republican state senator.

“I thought they could have sine die’d Sunday night,” Hardy said, referring to the official term used when the Legislature adjourns.

Both sides attended to the budgets well, and the Legislature passed a robust capital improvement project budget, said Fred Lokken, a political science professor at Truckee Meadows Community College.

“For the state to modernize facilities, to build roads and all of that is just good for the economy, and really shows a government that’s still pretty optimistic about the future,” he said.

But many politicos said there didn’t seem to be an appetite for major policy reform. Annette Magnus, a political consultant who has worked in 10 legislative sessions, said she doesn’t think either Democrats or Republicans “won” the session, and neither did the business community.

“I think, generally, the feeling leaving Carson City on Monday was one of disappointment,” she said.

It was unsettling the way the session ended, Lokken said. Republicans were upset about the number of “poison pill” amendments that were not traditionally a part of Nevada politics, and Democrats were upset by late discussions on the governor’s policy agenda, Lokken said.

“It was almost like it was supposed to be blessed, not reviewed in the legislative way,” he said.

Multiple bills were ultimately turned into studies — something Damore jokingly called “the Nevada way.”

For example, Assembly Bill 487, known as “Cindy Lou’s law,” originally intended to ban retail pet stores from selling cats and dogs. It was ultimately gutted and made into a study on those stores and the treatment of animals there. The bipartisan bill died after the Assembly did not agree to the study amendment.

One of the highest-profile examples of death by study was Assembly Bill 238, which proposed to expand the state’s film tax credit program to support the construction and operation of a film studio campus called Summerlin Studios.

The bill narrowly passed the Assembly on May 30, but by Monday evening, a proposed amendment from a competing bill sponsor suggested scrapping the entire bill language in favor of a study on the viability of the film and creative media industry in the state.

Chris Giunchigliani, a former Democratic lawmaker and president of education unions, said turning proposals into a study is just a delaying tactic that doesn’t get anything done. She pointed to lawmakers’ and Lombardo’s choice to increase per-pupil education funding by $2 in the upcoming year despite a legislatively mandated report in 2022 that detailed how to increase the state’s education funding to match the national average.

“How many damn task forces and study committees do they have out there?” Giunchigliani said. “It doesn’t allow for (the) public to really follow an agenda.”

Leaders of the Democratic majority in the Legislature were more willing to negotiate with Lombardo this session, but some say it came a little too late — and partisanship still ruled the day as both sides positioned themselves for the 2026 election.

Nowhere was that more obvious than in the last 20 minutes of the session, when Senate Republicans learned they’d have unequal representation in the Legislative Commission, an interim body of lawmakers. The eight GOP senators attempted to delay proceedings through several parliamentary motions until the constitutionally mandated end of session at midnight. Still, the changes to the commission were adopted.

Giunchigliani and Magnus, both Democrats, understood why Republicans were mad about the unequal representation in the legislative commission. Giunchigliani said it shouldn’t have been an issue.

“You don’t bar their voices. What’s the purpose of that?” she said. “So I can’t blame the Rs for arguing against that change. … Don’t be sneaky if you don’t have to.”

Nevertheless, party leaders negotiated on an election bill to expand ballot drop boxes and implement voter ID requirements. They also found consensus on Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro’s education bill and Lombardo’s housing bill.

“I was pretty encouraged by what seemed to be some bipartisanship,” Hardy said.

He called Yeager’s inclusion of voter ID a “huge olive branch” and said there was better communication in the governor’s office this session. Hardy said he believed the governor worked in good faith to get elements of his priority bills passed.

The uncertainty of the federal budget loomed heavily over the session and may have played a role in bringing more bipartisanship, Hardy added.

“There’s sort of that feeling that when we’re being attacked from outside or … when there’s uncertainty in Washington, D.C., we tend as Nevadans to rally around each other,” he said.

But others argue the effort for bipartisanship was too little, too late.

“Sure, there was cooperation, but did they get it over the finish line? Did they get it voted on at the last minute?” Magnus said, pointing to Lombardo’s bill on crime and public safety having its first Assembly committee hearing at 4 p.m. on the final day of the session “Fundamentally, that is not good leadership.”

A lack of leadership and communication caused bills to fail, stakeholders said.

Magnus called the session “totally dysfunctional” and said there was a “fundamental communication breakdown.”

She pointed to Yeager’s legislation — for which she helped lobby — that would have created the charter and regulatory framework for a new kind of bank only processing payments. The Democrat’s bill was put up for a vote twice, but failed both times. Its second vote failed by a larger margin than the first.

“You saw it multiple times that (the Democratic) caucus kind of rebelled against leadership because they weren’t getting briefings, or they weren’t getting information, or they weren’t having caucuses where they talked about bills,” Magnus said.

Yeager said it was a complicated bill that had to go through Ways and Means to get positions funded, and he didn’t know if that was going to happen until late in the game. Because of the budget uncertainty throughout the session, bills with appropriations like that were delayed.

“There’s not adequate time at that point to be able to sit down as a caucus and go over that bill in detail,” Yeager said. “So I don’t know what else we could have done about that.”

Lawmakers on multiple occasions received significant bill amendments with little time to digest them before the session ended. On Monday evening, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle lamented changes were made available only hours or minutes before consideration.

“You should never drop humongous bills like that on people,” Giunchigliani said. “That violates public process, in my opinion, and it just doesn’t give you time to really be thoughtful about how everything interconnects.”

Magnus said both parties — and the institutions — are to blame.

“The speaker, the majority leader and the governor: The buck stops with the three of them at the end of the day,” she said.

Legislative leaders and their representatives denied a lack of communication, and said it was an improvement from the previous session. The governor, Cannizzaro and Yeager met regularly since the session began, Yeager and Elizabeth Ray, spokesperson for the governor, said.

“I think we had a better game plan for what it was going to take to get out of the session,” the speaker said. “Unfortunately, some of that just didn’t come together the way it should have the last 48 hours of session.”

Still, leaders — or their representatives — placed fault on each other as to why many bills failed.

Ray said the governor outlined his priorities during his State of the State address and submitted his bills in early February to the Legislative Counsel Bureau. She said it is unfortunate that many bills were killed at the end of session because of “legislative leadership’s lack of time management.”

“Legislative leadership squandered valuable time, and they are well aware of their mismanagement and the issues it caused,” Ray said in a statement.

A spokesperson for the Senate Democratic Caucus attributed bills moving late in the session to the executive office’s continued negotiations until the final day. Senate Bill 457, Lombardo’s priority crime legislation, failed on Monday night because the Senate did not receive the Assembly’s amendments in time.

“Unfortunately, in every session some policy bills don’t get all the way through the process before the deadline,” the spokesperson said. “In this case, because Republicans wasted the final few minutes of floor time with preplanned stunts a few remaining bills coming back from the Assembly were lost.”

A Senate Republican Caucus spokesperson said the actions of the Republicans in the Senate had nothing to do with the failure of the crime bill to advance because it had never made it out of the Assembly.

Yeager said there were multiple omnibus-type bills that were hundreds of pages long with dozens of big concepts — such as the governor’s priority bills and Cannizzaro’s education bill — that took the Legislative Counsel Bureau a long time to draft. He wishes those bills were released at the beginning of the session to give legislators more time.

On that last day, it was difficult for the Assembly when bills were coming over from the Senate and had to be declared emergency measures, or amendments had to be concurred on, Yeager said. There is a lot of back-end and administrative work that happens. Staff has to have enough time to process bills and reprint amendments to get over to the other house, he said.

“It would have been my preference to have all that done by the middle of the day on Monday so we could reassess, figure out where we were and address any open issues,” he said. “But unfortunately, it didn’t happen that way, and we were where we always seem to be in sessions with this mad dash at the end of session, and when you’re in that spot, things are inevitably going to get missed and not make it through.”

Lawmaking bleeds into 2026 election

Political experts also pointed to legislative term limits, first applied in 1998, as a reason for some of the problems in the Legislature, from in-party quarreling to the seemingly constant eye on future elections.

Hardy called adopting term limits the “worst thing we’ve ever done in the state.” It created an environment where the people with the most institutional knowledge were not the lawmakers, but rather the lobbyists and bureaucrats, he said.

Rather than putting the focus on making good policy, term limits put legislators’ focus on needing talking points every two years when they have to run, Magnus said.

“It doesn’t lend itself to good policy-making,” she said.

Though the 2026 election is more than a year away, it didn’t feel so far away in Carson City, observers said.

Consider the Summerlin Studios proposal. It’s possible the film tax credit bill did not make it because of politics and the optics of approving tax credits at the same time as perceived budget cuts, Magnus said.

“How are you going to give an industry billions of dollars and then turn around and cut Medicaid, potentially, and other programs that people rely on?” she said.

A measure to bring a ballot question on property tax reform also failed in the Legislature, and experts cited lawmakers’ fear of the electorate’s response — despite it being a necessary reform.

“I think the odd thing about the 2025 legislative session is that the 2026 election was smack dab in the middle of almost every day of it — just the feeling in the room,” Lokken said.

Yeager said he felt they were able to “leave all that campaign stuff behind” toward the end of the session and figure out how to address issues that matter.

“I understand the frustrations, but if you look at what we’re able to do on the Assembly side, I think we moved heaven and earth to be able to get our work done on that last day,” Yeager said.

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