Does anyone else feel like the “the public” didn’t get much of a say in whether or not we finance a new ballpark somewhere along the Strip? 

Even as the legislature began its second week of the special session to give the Oakland A’s a truckload of “public financing,” almost none of the process had been terribly open to the public. The clandestine nature of backroom deals that defined the special session is the type that generally doesn’t instill confidence the interest of the public good is being prioritized above all else. 

Judging by the testimony submitted by the public, Nevadans aren’t exactly leaping with joy over the passing of the bill. More than 80 percent of public testimony had been in opposition. 

However, one has to imagine that at least part of the public’s frustration with throwing $380 million at the worst team in Major League Baseball stems from the fact that we never really got an honest glimpse at the behind-the-bar dealings that shaped the deal over the course of the past several months.  

As lawmakers reconvened the special session Monday after a three-day weekend, there was little information for reporters to share with the public despite a full day of lawmakers and lobbyists negotiating furiously behind closed doors. Sure, the Assembly had scheduled a meeting for the following morning — however, that was nothing more than an informal presentation, indicating that a final bill was still at least a few revisions away from becoming a reality. 

And while a few more details were leaked on Tuesday morning, much of the process had been representative of the legislative opaqueness for which Nevada’s capital building has, unfortunately, become known. Indeed, such backroom wheeling and dealing has long been a feature of the legislative process in Nevada — which shouldn’t be a surprise, given that the legislature is exempt from the state’s open meeting law. 

However, the A’s deal put the Legislature’s routine usurpation of transparency on full display in a way that often goes unnoticed by the general public. From the beginning, we only really managed to receive slow trickles of details about the emerging deal for funding a stadium — despite the fact that it was obvious there was plenty of political maneuvering and legislative lobbying behind the scenes. And following each headline about the latest “binding agreements” or tentative deals, lawmakers and lobbyists would once again disappear into the backroom to calculate what else had to be done to win over a majority in each chamber. 

And while lawmakers and lobbyists leaped from one bill revision to another, many of the most basic public concerns over a publicly financed baseball stadium went unexamined by legislative leaders. For example, even as our electeds entered their second week of the special session — and passed a final draft — they never seriously probed the A’s financial ability to fund its $1.1 billion share of the project. And that little tidbit of information feels like a fairly crucial thing to consider when evaluating the proposal’s economic viability. 

The A’s, for their part, have insisted details will be made available after Nevada provides it with a wheelbarrow full of public financing. (How convenient.) 

No wonder there’s so much skepticism among the general public about the process. When lawmakers and lobbyists effectively spend weeks behind closed doors building some legislative deal to give a private entity hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s not likely to sit well with ordinary Nevadans.

What’s taking place here isn’t unique to the A’s — it’s mostly par for the course when it comes to lawmaking in the Silver State. 

Indeed, in a long Twitter thread criticizing the timing of the special session, Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager (D-Las Vegas) argued that the governor should have waited until summer so lawmakers and lobbyists could “allow the A's bill to be further refined” before being called back to the capitol. 

However, “refining” a bill with lawmakers and lobbyists while legislative business is supposed to be done for the biennium hardly feels like a transparent practice. 

The fact that the Assembly leader finds it odd that lawmakers would be asked to come to a consensus during a session, rather than outside of it, demonstrates the degree to which public debate simply isn’t seen as a normal (let alone crucial) piece of the legislative process. From the mad dash in the final days of the regular session to the routine practice of bending legislative rules, subverting public scrutiny is a depressingly normal part of Nevada’s approach to representative governance. 

There are plenty of reasons for Nevadans to be skeptical of any deal that lavishes public financing on private sports teams — let alone one that has so casually altered its “binding agreements” and relocation intentions in the past. The way in which everyone involved with the A’s deal has been so conspicuously averse to public involvement is a telling indictment of our legislature’s anti-transparency tendencies. 

Given that it’s “the public” who will be financing the deal, one would think we would have at least had the right to be a bigger part of the conversation. 

Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist, and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him at SchausCreative.com or on Twitter at @schausmichael.