(Chuck Muth) – I worked my butt off last year to keep Democrats from getting a super-majority in the Nevada State Senate and Assembly so Democrats wouldn’t have the 2/3 needed to pass tax hikes and override Gov. Joe Lombardo’s vetoes.
Republicans successfully stayed out of a super-minority in the Senate and got out of the super-minority in the Assembly by a razor thin one-vote margin in both houses.
But I’ve also warned of the danger that one or more Republicans might wander off the reservation and give the Democrats the one or more votes they need to raise taxes or override a veto.
It’s happened before – and it’s happening again.
AB530 is referred to in Carson City as the “fuel revenue indexing” (FRI) bill. FRI adjusts the gas tax rate to go up every year with inflation. In other words, a tax hike on autopilot.
Currently you’re paying around $1.11/gallon just in taxes – with the current total cost per gallon being around four bucks in Nevada.
However, in 2016 it was the VOTERS who approved this automatic increase in the gas tax for a period of ten years. In other words, temporary. Set to “sunset.” Expire.
Unless “the people” were allowed to vote on extending it – as was promised us when it passed.
But now Carson City politicians have used AB530 to go around taxpayers and extend the FRI on their own.
Which is a tax hike. That’s not me saying it. That’s what the Nevada Supreme Court ruled in a similar case a few years ago.
“Continuing the (fuel revenue indexing) tax hike…is deception, pure and simple,” editorialized the Las Vegas Review-Journal recently.
“Clark County residents approved the levy in 2016 with the assumption that they would have the option of revisiting the issue 10 years later,” the RJ continued. “Lawmakers who would deny local residents that opportunity are engaged in a cynical bait and switch.”
Two Republicans in the Senate and twelve Republicans in the Assembly joined every Democrat in engaging in this bait-and-switch by voting for AB530.
I have no idea what they were thinking.
A similar bill (AB359) was proposed in the 2023 session and Gov. Lombardo vetoed it, writing that “circumventing an affirmative vote of the people is concerning to me.”
“The arguments in favor of fuel revenue indexing are compelling,” the governor added, “but a decision on this issue, which impacts household budgets every day, is most appropriately rendered by the voters.”
Amen.
Yet I’m still getting grief from some of the Republican legislators who voted for AB530 claiming it isn’t a tax hike – it is – and all manner of other excuses.
If only Republican legislators in Carson City bent over backwards and fought as hard for school choice, spending cuts, etc., as they do trying to excuse and justify tax hikes.
