The Clark County Education Association (CCEA) wants to get an initiative on the 2022 ballot to raise the tax rate on Nevada gaming revenue from 6.75 percent to 9.75 percent.
John Vellardita, executive director of the Southern Nevada teachers union, said the increase would be designed to target only the largest operators and would also exempt restricted licensees.
It’s one of two fundraising measures the union hopes to place before the state’s voters to generate $1.4 billion for the state’s chronically underfunded public school system.
Nevada’s gaming tax hasn’t been raised since the 1980s, the industry’s lobbying muscle being such that various attempts to change that over the years invariably have been dead on arrival. This latest push is expected to fall into that category.
That didn’t stop the Nevada Resort Association, which represents the industry in Carson City, from blasting the initiative as a “44 percent tax increase” that would be “very damaging to the state’s economy, job creation, capital investment and future economic development.”
The industry’s position historically has been to favor broader-based business taxes that do not single out gaming revenue.
“Unfortunately, one of the teachers’ unions has chosen a path of higher pay at the expense of tens of thousands of other jobs throughout the state,” the group said.
At current rates, gaming taxes are expected to bring in more than $1.6 billion in revenue over the next two years. Beyond that, the last major tax increase enacted by the Legislature was in 2015 when more than $1 billion was raised, partly through new levies on businesses that make $4 million or more a year.
Since taking office in 2018, Governor Steve Sisolak has resisted any more significant increases.
The Nevada State Education Association (NSEA), the statewide teachers’ union, is not part of the ballot drive and believes, moreover, that it could hurt more than help. President Brian Rippet says he believes school funding would be better achieved by building political support for it in the legislature.
“It needs to be done correctly or we risk falling into a hole again in the future. Gaming revenue is diminishing or at best it’s flat. That revenue doesn’t grow along with our states’ needs.”
In 2014, the NSEA got a business tax on the ballot only to have it trounced by a 4-1 margin, an outcome that was used to argue against a 2015 tax package the union favored.
“The concern would be the risk of going it alone and not having support for funding,” Rippet said, “and having that being misinterpreted by the Legislature that there isn’t support for funding, rather than there isn’t support for that particular method.”
The CCEA, meanwhile, has raised members’ dues to back what it calls a Strategic Horizon Campaign dedicated to finding $1 billion or more in education funding. The union also has formed a new political action committee, Nevadans for Fair Gaming Taxes, to support the ballot drive.
“A decade has come and gone. We still are primarily a two-industry economy, and because we have rebounded and come out of the recession, I think people have abandoned investing in public education on the scale that we really need,” Vellardita said. “I would only ask that those enlightened business leaders be part of the conversation to find a final, lasting solution for our K-12 education system because I think it’s strategically in their interests to help grow our economy.”
