Amid pending budget concerns, Nevada lawmakers are still considering bills that would require more than $211 million in appropriations beyond Gov. Steve Sisolak’s proposed $8.8 billion two-year budget.

A Nevada Independent analysis of the 51 bills that allocate state dollars beyond the budget proposed by Sisolak show a substantial amount of appropriations — nearly $160 million in the 2019-2020 fiscal year and $52 million in 2020-2021 — going to a wide variety of legislative projects, from funds for school gardens and pre-kindergarten education to construction of a new courthouse in rural White Pine County and a railroad museum in Boulder City.

Legislators have already substantially whittled the list of bills proposed by lawmakers that appropriated money beyond Sisolak’s budget — an initial tally by the Nevada Taxpayers Association in early April found lawmakers had introduced nearly 70 bills with a total price tag north of $1.2 billion over the two-year budget cycle.

Since that list was published, legislators killed 12 bills — including two identical measures implementing the contentious Education Savings Accounts and a bill appropriating $240 million to pay for home economics and financial literacy courses in public schools — and removed all appropriations from another three measures and cut down initial appropriations in other bills. But lawmakers still must make decisions on roughly 50 bills that allocate a substantial amount of funds with less than 30 days to go in the legislative session.

Those pending appropriations come as lawmakers scurry to find a way to fund the 3 percent teacher pay raise and 2 percent merit pay increase promised by Sisolak in his State of the State address, which the nonpartisan Guinn Center has estimated would cost around $107 million more than what’s allocated in the state’s two-year budget.

The appropriations tally only includes bills not included in the governor’s budget, not measures with fiscal notes from local governments or state agencies that do not appropriate money directly from the state budget.

Typically, Assembly and Senate budget committees spend the bulk of the 120-day session reviewing the 3,000-plus page executive budget submitted by the governor before reconciling differences between the two houses and approving budget recommendations, which take the form of bills introduced during the last few days of the legislative session.

But individual lawmakers often submit bills that allocate state dollars to pet projects or other programs — though such bills don’t pass until the very end of session, given the constitutional requirement to pass a K-12 funding bill before any other appropriation. Plus, Nevada is one of 49 states with a constitutional or statutory requirement to submit a balanced budget, meaning approval of any extra spending requests — such as the last-minute bills in 2017 raising state worker pay and $20 million for Opportunity Scholarships — come at the tail end of the legislative session.

Democratic Assemblywoman Maggie Carlton said most of the decisions on which legislative appropriations would come after the Assembly and Senate meet to reconcile budget differences, which usually occurs in late May. She warned that modest revenue increases projected by the state’s Economic Forum last month meant lawmakers would be wary of committing the state to ongoing programs or costs, as opposed to “one-shot” spending or pilot programs.

“There might be some money for one shots, whereas there’s not a whole lot of money for things in (the base budget), because the following two years are fairly low and we don’t want to build a base that we can’t support in the future,” she said. "But if it’s a one-shot type thing, we can have a discussion and figure out where the priorities are.”

Already, some of the funding bills seemed destined for the scrap heap. A measure by Republican Assemblyman Chris Edwards allocating $25 million to Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske’s office to prepare for the 2020 election is likely dead in the water, Carlton said.

“That one is at the bottom of the pile,” she said. “It wasn’t requested by her. It’s not needed.”

Sen. Joyce Woodhouse, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, declined to sign the proverbial death warrant on any of the pending appropriation bills in her committee, but acknowledged that most of the bills would not make it through the legislative process.

“Not everything is going to be funded,” she said. “I’m sorry to have to say that, but it’s not going to be possible.”

Lawmakers with appropriations bills have reacted to budget realities by either attempting to remove or reduce appropriations through amendments or resignation to the fact that a bill probably won’t move forward.

Republican Assemblyman Gregory Hafen, the sponsor of AB358 — which creates a “Tomorrow’s Doctors” loan forgiveness program for medical professionals who practice in rural areas — said he was working with the Legislative Counsel Bureau and Carlton to reduce the $21 million appropriation in the bill to something more in line with what was included with Sisolak’s budget, but said he still wasn’t confident his measure would continue moving forward.

“In some way, shape or form, I think the Tomorrow’s Doctor concept is going to move forward,” he said. “Whether or not my bill moves forward, I’m not exactly sure. It just kind of depends on the process, I guess.”

Another top appropriation bill is Democratic Assemblyman Will McCurdy’s AB326, which as written allocates $10 million in loans to persons operating a fresh food retail store in low-income or underserved communities. In an interview, McCurdy said he planned to lower the appropriation to $5 million and was confident the bill would at least get a hearing.

“We’re in conversations to see what we can do to get to a number that everyone can live with, and make the progress that we want to make in this state,” he said.

Another measure likely to see an appropriation reduction is Democratic Assemblywoman Daniele Monroe-Moreno’s AB322, which allocates $16 million to courts in Clark County to establish and fund juvenile assessment centers and mental health programs. She said that there was widespread agreement that the bill was a “good policy,” but the results of the Economic Forum meant it was highly unlikely she would get the full funding for the bill.

She declined to say how much the appropriation would be cut, but that she had spoken with the county to determine the baseline minimum amount needed to get a limited part of the program funded.

“As it’s written, I asked for a lot, don’t think I’ll get that, but now I know what the county needed to keep the program going, what they’d like to have, and what they consider a win,” she said.

Monroe-Moreno said the most effective legislative strategy can sometimes be to pass a bill without the financial appropriation but still creating a program, thereby getting a foot in the door and opening up the possibility of funding in future sessions.

“Even if I don’t get the money I ask for, if I can get the program, the authorization to create the program, then that’s a big step in the right direction,” she said. “We’re just, unfortunately, limited by how many slices we can make in that pie for the state.”

Other lawmakers were less hopeful. Republican Sen. Pete Goicoechea, the primary backer of a bill (SB149) appropriating $10 million to construct a new courthouse in White Pine County, said the bill’s chances were ”dismal.” Goicoechea said that although he had introduced similar bills in the past two sessions and that improving security at the current courthouse — which oversees legal proceedings at the Ely State Prison — was a paramount concern, but that the budget realities meant it faced slim odds of passing.

“There’s not a lot of money,” he said. “Clearly there’s a need, but I think there’s a need for a lot of things we’re seeing this session. I’m supporting it all I can, but $10 million is a lot of money coming out of this session.”

Michelle Rindels and Jodie Snyder contributed to this report.