Reno residents and service providers sound off at Reno Town Hall Meeting over state budget crisis

By Phillip Moyer | Nevada News Bureau
Over 90 Nevada citizens voiced their opinions about Nevada’s economic condition to Nevada legislators at a recent Reno Town Hall meeting. An estimated 500 citizens showed up at Reno City Hall to hear the speakers, many of them health care and education public employees as well as people advocating for the arts. The majority of the speakers emphasized the importance of the interests they represented to the state as a whole and cautioned against making cuts that would be particularly damaging.
Marilyn Scholl, a facilitator from the National Alliance of Mental Illness, argued that cutting funding to programs to aid the mentally ill, such as the Program of Assertive Community Treatment (PACT) will result in Nevada prisons and hospitals having to deal with them instead.
“It’s important we recognize that the mentally ill are here to stay, and we can pay for them one way or another,” she said. “We can choose to find a humane way – a-responsible care for them — and help pay for them. Or we can fill our jails, our emergency departments, and our hospitals, and pay for them. But we’re going to pay for them.”
Scholl mentioned how her son, who suffers from schizophrenia, was frequently in and out of prisons and hospitals before being enrolled in PACT. Now, Scholl says, her son is working on his GED and hopes to be employed in the near future.
Linda Hunt, a 7th-grade teacher and member of the Washoe Education Association and the Nevada Education Association, had similar views about cutting funding to education, citing links found between school dropouts, welfare rolls and prison rolls.
“We need to pay for education, or in the future we’re going to be paying the unemployed, the uneducated, and we’re going to be paying to support these people in prison that cannot get an education,” she said. Hunt also voiced concerns that cutting funding on education would the widen the achievement gap between children with higher-income parents who can afford to pay for a private education and children whose parents can only send them to public schools.
During the meeting, Senate Minority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, addressed the crowd and lamented the need to cut almost $900 million from the Nevada state budget due to Gov. Gibbons‘ refusal to allow legislators to raise taxes.
“I don’t sleep at night, knowing what we’re going to be doing in this special session to the areas of our state budget that we are charged with the responsibility of funding,” he said. “These are going to be very ugly cuts […] and I know you’re all addressing them. I just want you to know that it’s not a pleasant duty, and it’s devastating what we’re going to do to this state. I just think we have to tell you, I wish there were other options.”
Several speakers offered ideas on how to raise revenue, including a representative from the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN) promoting its mining tax proposal.
Other speakers suggested the legalization and taxation of marijuana, the creation of solar power plants in the desert to sell energy to other states and the promotion of private donations for government programs.
Many of the speakers at the meeting expressed a willingness to endure a tax increase in order to save some of the programs in danger of being cut.
One of the speakers asked everyone in the audience who was willing to pay more taxes to raise their hands. A majority of the audience raised their hands. Not all of the speakers agreed with this general consensus, however. Kim Bacchus, a small business owner, said she thinks many of the causes facing cuts may be able to receive their needed funds from the private sector.
“When thinking of your causes, I please ask that you consider what the appropriate source of funding for all of these causes is. Is it the state government, or could it be foundations and private corporations?” Bacchus asked. “I believe that requiring small business to fund public employees, public causes, and public needs will inevitably backfire as you ask more and more small businesses to support the public causes you can’t afford.”
A minor disruption occurred when a PLAN representative heckled Bacchus after her speech and then attempted to have her arrested for assault when Bacchus covered the PLAN representative’s mouth with two of her fingers in response.
The Reno Police Department arrived in response to the incident but left without making any arrests after questioning witnesses.
Assemblyman Tom Grady, R-Yerington, expressed his appreciation for the willingness of so many people to come out and state their opinions on the financial situation. “I think most of them realize what a dire strait the state of Nevada is in,” Grady said. “I took away from it that there’s a lot of people who want to help. Nobody wants their services cut, but I think that the people realize we have problems right now.”