In case you missed it…
Education:
To complete the job on Nevada’s precedent-setting education reform, Education Savings Accounts, all lawmakers need do is fix the funding formula. Then 8,000 students currently in political limbo will be able to pursue personalized education that best suits their needs. While Governor Sandoval has refused to place the issue on the agenda for next week’s special session, he’s pledged to focus on fixing the program’s funding when the 2017 regular session begins. (Read more)
Public Employee Retirement System:
NPRI’s Transparency Director, Robert Fellner, made it out to Pahrump Thursday, to talk about the need for public employee pension reform. “The biggest problem I see with the [current] system,” he explained, “is that the highest costs are pushed out onto future generations.” As a consequence, he said, new hires are increasingly seeing fewer and fewer benefits, despite paying higher and higher contributions into the system. (Read more)
Fiscal and taxes:
Despite not using “More Cops” funds to actually provide Las Vegas with the promised influx of more police officers, Metro is now asking for an increase in the More Cops tax — to supposedly hire more cops. Digging deeper into the numbers, it is now clear that Metro has actually gone out of its way to keep a huge balance of unused funs in the More Cops account. In fact, the agency even dipped into its general fund to hire police officers, despite having more than $100 million in money earmarked for that very purpose. (Read more)
Free speech:
The president of a nonprofit think tank once found a gutted rabbit outside her house after she dared to oppose public financing for a local hockey arena. “This is a world where sometimes people do crazy things and they get very heated about issues, even sports,” says Darcy Olsen, president and CEO of the Goldwater Institute. “All Americans have the right to support causes they believe in without fear of harassment or intimidation,” she says — and now Olsen is fighting to make sure that right is preserved. (Read more)
Government waste:
A government watchdog has found that the federal government spends big sums of money on trying to sell itself to the American people. The Government Accountability Office found that over the last decade, annual federal spending on public relations and advertising activities averaged $1.5 billion. The report detailed how much was spent on PR and marketing contracts, as well as on salaries for public workers hired to carry out such work. (Read more)