Crunch time

Geoffrey Lawrence


All bills must pass out of legislative committees by tomorrow and so committees are packing bills into a marathon session until that point.

Check out the calendar of meetings for today and tomorrow. The Assembly Judiciary Committee scheduled 15 – yes 15 – bills to be heard this morning. Senate Health and Human Services has 11 bills on the agenda for this afternoon.

Odds are that committees will meet very late into the night tomorrow as crunch time arrives. Any bill that does not make it through committee before midnight tomorrow dies without a hearing. There are exceptions granted to certain budget bills. However, as per legislative leadership’s new strategy, those bills will go directly to the floor to be heard by a Committee of the Whole anyway.

Geoffrey Lawrence

Geoffrey Lawrence

Director of Research

Geoffrey Lawrence is director of research at Nevada Policy.

Lawrence has broad experience as a financial executive in the public and private sectors and as a think tank analyst. Lawrence has been Chief Financial Officer of several growth-stage and publicly traded manufacturing companies and managed all financial reporting, internal control, and external compliance efforts with regulatory agencies including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  Lawrence has also served as the senior appointee to the Nevada State Controller’s Office, where he oversaw the state’s external financial reporting, covering nearly $10 billion in annual transactions. During each year of Lawrence’s tenure, the state received the Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting Award from the Government Finance Officers’ Association.

From 2008 to 2014, Lawrence was director of research and legislative affairs at Nevada Policy and helped the institute develop its platform of ideas to advance and defend a free society.  Lawrence has also written for the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, with particular expertise in state budgets and labor economics.  He was delighted at the opportunity to return to Nevada Policy in 2022 while concurrently serving as research director at the Reason Foundation.

Lawrence holds an M.A. in international economics from American University in Washington, D.C., an M.S. and a B.S. in accounting from Western Governors University, and a B.A. in international relations from the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.  He lives in Las Vegas with his beautiful wife, Jenna, and their two kids, Carson Hayek and Sage Aynne.