(Marc M. Friedland) – Richard “Tick” Segerblom turns 78 this cycle.
He’s held elected office continuously since 2007 — Assembly, State Senate, and now the Clark County Commission — but his career in Nevada government reaches back further, to a 1988 appointment to the Colorado River Commission and a stint as state Democratic Party chairman beginning in 1990: closer to 38 years on the public payroll or in party leadership than his current title suggests.
He is a fourth-generation Nevada officeholder, following his mother, grandmother, and great-grandfather into public life.
That’s not a legacy. It’s tenure — and it’s time for new blood, not tired blood.
Segerblom likes to say exactly where he stands.
Asked in 2023 whether he was, as some critics claimed, “an open communist,” he told The Nevada Independent he wasn’t sure what a communist was, but that his politics were those of a liberal Democrat in the mold of Bernie Sanders — someone committed to Social Security, Medicare, universal health care, and making corporations pay their fair share.
Even plenty of mainstream Democrats would call that a fairly extreme self-description for a county commissioner.
All District E voters should question whether it’s an accurate one, too.
Follow the Fundraising Money
Segerblom’s own 2026 filings show he’s bankrolled almost entirely by the industries a “fair share” agenda is supposed to hold accountable.
On June 4, 2026 alone, five Caesars Entertainment-linked properties — Caesars Palace, Paris Las Vegas, Planet Hollywood, Horseshoe Las Vegas, and the Cromwell — wrote his campaign a combined $25,000.
Less than two weeks later, Fontainebleau Las Vegas added $10,000 more.
Three separate Republic Services subsidiaries, filed from the same address, each wrote him $5,000 on the same February day — $15,000 from what is functionally one company, the same one that holds Clark County’s exclusive waste-hauling franchise.
Add it all up: across Segerblom’s first two 2026 fundraising reports, roughly 63 percent of the $294,850 he raised — nearly $185,000 — came from just 26 contributions of $5,000 or more.
In the first quarter alone, 85 percent of his money came from checks that size.
This leopard has not changed his spots. He talks like a populist and banks like a casino lobbyist.
It’s not just where his money comes from — it’s what he wants to take from yours.
Segerblom’s signature legislative legacy, marijuana legalization, was sold to voters partly as a school-funding fix.
The results: since 2018, cannabis taxes have raised $716 million for Nevada K-12 education — only about 2% of the state’s $12.9 billion K-12 budget, or roughly $225 per student a year against a $4,000-per-pupil gap between Nevada and the national average.
Do the math: that’s 5.6% of the gap closed, meaning his signature funding fix missed the mark by more than 94%.
The first two years of that revenue didn’t even reach schools; lawmakers redirected it to the state’s Rainy Day Fund before reversing course in 2019, and the revenue is now declining.
Faced with his own signature funding source coming up short, Segerblom’s answer is to ask for more: his current platform proposes a one-percent sales tax to raise $400 million from Clark County residents — a regressive tax that hits working families in District E hardest.
After decades in Nevada government, his answer to a persistent problem is still the same one: more money, not better management.
Follow the Pension Money
There’s another number worth putting next to his age: public pay records show Segerblom is already collecting a state pension — roughly $3,000 a year, every year since at least 2021 — while simultaneously drawing his $120,000 commissioner’s salary and accruing a second, much larger pension on top of it.
Nevada’s pension formula combines years of service, a percentage multiplier, and his highest 36 months of pay.
That multiplier, 2.67% per year for his post-2001 service, is more than double the 1% standard rate federal employees accrue under FERS, and richer than the traditional pensions still held by only about 15% of private-sector workers.
It’s also a legacy rate.
Nevada has already scaled the multiplier down twice for anyone newly enrolling in the system, to 2.5% in 2010 and to 2.25% in 2015 — and post-retirement cost-of-living increases for those newer enrollees are capped lower too, at 3% versus the 4-5% legacy tiers can eventually reach. Every additional year
Segerblom serves keeps compounding at the older, richer rate; a new officeholder starting today would cost taxpayers less over the life of that pension.
When the Legislature passed Senate Bill 116 in 2025, raising commissioner salaries statewide, it raised the base that multiplier applies to without ever revisiting the multiplier itself!
Using his own confirmed commissioner salary — which climbed from about $90,000 in 2021–2022 to $117,287 in 2025 — the years he’s spent on the commission alone are on track to add roughly $22,000 a year to his pension by the end of his current term, and closer to $33,000 a year if he wins and serves a full second one.
Segerblom isn’t just asking for another term. He’s asking District E to help pad a retirement he’s already begun collecting.
The Same Ethics Excuse, On the Record, for Nine Years
Asked in December 2017 by the Center for Public Integrity and the Associated Press how state lawmakers manage to keep voting on matters touching their own financial interests, Segerblom said everybody in a citizen legislature brings what they know and their job to the table — there’s simply nobody you could pull off the street who wouldn’t carry “some type of conflict.”
Segerblom isn’t shy about explaining why that’s fine with him.
That’s a damning admission, made on the record and never walked back — and it’s legally hollow.
Nevada’s Ethics in Government Law (NRS 281A.420) doesn’t require officials to be conflict-free; it requires disclosure of lesser conflicts and full abstention in the clear cases where a reasonable person’s judgment would be compromised, a standard the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld in Nevada Commission on Ethics v. Carrigan (2011).
Segerblom, a practicing attorney for decades, could not plausibly have missed that the law provides exactly the tool his own quote dismissed as impossible.
The same mindset led him and four fellow commissioners, six years later, to each accept an individual four-day festival pass to the 2023 Las Vegas Grand Prix worth $10,900, without disclosing it before voting on Grand Prix-related matters — a violation that forced the county to finally adopt a formal gift-disclosure policy.
A lawyer who said outright that conflicts don’t trouble him is not someone who forgot to disclose a $10,900 gift.
No Accountability, No Real Results
Segerblom sat on a Clark County Commission that Democrats controlled entirely — all seven seats — for more than fifteen years, until Republican April Becker broke that monopoly in January 2025.
He spent his entire tenure insulated from the accountability a real opposition provides.
Becker is now the lone Republican voice on a seven-member board, and she needs reinforcements — not four more years of Segerblom governing exactly as he has for decades.
For all his time in office, it’s worth asking if District E voters are getting their money’s worth.
Every biography his campaign circulates leads with the same accomplishment: leading the legalization of marijuana in Nevada, work that drew national coverage from outlets like Vice and Quartz.
It’s a real achievement — and it happened in the state Senate, a decade before he ever became a county commissioner.
He chaired the Clark County Commission itself from January 2024 to January 2026, the most powerful leadership post on the board.
In that time, the one initiative he’s known to have personally driven was a surprise 0.125% sales tax he added to a commission agenda in 2024 — and when a reporter asked him to explain it, he declined to say anything until he knew how his colleagues felt.
Two years chairing the board produced a tax proposal he wouldn’t defend in public, not a record voters can point to.
A Different Kind of Candidate
Segerblom’s opponent, Manny Kess, has never held office.
He spent fifteen years building a hospitality business from nothing after losing his family’s New York restaurant in the 2008 recession — a collapse serious enough to end in bankruptcy, which he discusses openly as the reason he understands what it means to rebuild.
He’s made payroll for fifteen years, fighting permit boards from the applicant’s side of the counter.
As a first-time candidate, Kess has still raised roughly $156,000 from a dispersed base of friends, family, and business contacts — real grassroots support, not a handful of concentrated casino and utility checks.
He’s personally loaned his campaign several thousand dollars, putting his own money behind his own candidacy — something Segerblom, bankrolled almost entirely by others, hasn’t had to do.
Kess has also drawn support that crosses the usual lines: Lieutenant Governor Stavros Anthony and Assemblywoman Danielle Gallant have endorsed him for 2026, as has Pipefitters Union 525 — a building-trades union backing a Republican businessman, a notable break from labor’s usual pattern — and the Nevada Young Republicans had already named him in their official pre-primary endorsement guide.
Asked by the Review-Journal whether he’d support public funding for private projects like sports stadiums, Kess said any such investment needs a clear public benefit and shouldn’t happen without one.
Segerblom answered that same question with his vote — for the A’s stadium bonds.
What Voters Deserve
District E doesn’t need another four years of a commissioner who talks like Bernie Sanders and banks like a casino lobbyist, who told a national investigation nine years ago that conflicts of interest just come with the job, and whose decades in office have produced a political machine rather than a personal connection to the people he represents.
Every year he stays adds to a pension locked in at a richer rate than any new officeholder would get today — a cost District E taxpayers will keep paying long after he’s left the dais.
Voters have a choice on November 3.
One candidate has spent nearly two decades in elected office — closer to four decades counting the party and commission posts before it — at 78 and still wanting to continue his reign.
The other has spent fifteen years making payroll. District E can decide which résumé actually prepares someone to represent them, and which one costs them less to keep paying for.
Marc M. Friedland is a Political Analyst and Clark County Resident. The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Nevada News & Views. Digital technology may have been used in the research, writing, or production of this article. Please verify information and consult additional sources as needed.
