Through the clinic, students research and come up with possible solutions on any topic that may intersect with poverty, including housing, food security and mental health.

“I knew people were suffering and we were trying everything we could do to help them as quickly as we can and we felt like we're fighting … a civil war at the same time,” Gaa said.

The former acting chief of the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) says he blames the governor’s office for actions that slowed down Nevada’s response to a torrent of unemployment claims during the pandemic.

With an extra $15 million added to CHAP, the county expects to have enough funding to help approximately 2,000 households, and to accept applications for assistance through the end of the year.

In a statement following passage of the allocations, Barbara Buckley, executive director of the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada, called them a “transformational package of funding for children’s mental health services.”

Outside of the budget, legislators are beginning their typical ritual of rolling out ambitious bills in the waning days of the session, including a state-based public health insurance option, fixes to the oft-criticized unemployment insurance system, and a major transmission and electric vehicle omnibus bill.

A proposed bill that would recognize UNLV and DRI as land grant institutions in addition to UNR has renewed old divisions over perceived equity and fairness in higher education funding.

Nevada is, once again, healing, just as it did after the tourism industry was rocked by 9/11, the Great Recession and 1 October. That healing, though, has only ever been surface deep. The question now is whether history will repeat itself.

Leaders of the initiative briefed reporters Thursday morning on a final report they are issuing as their six months of work comes to a close. They also offered up long-elusive statistics on the backlog.

Barbara Buckley said Congress’ procrastination has not allowed enough time for state officials all across the country to understand the bill, reprogram computer systems and continue payments uninterrupted. That could have “really, really devastating” effects for claimants who have already burned through their savings.

Officials said it has been difficult to keep up because 1.5 million initial claims for unemployment have been filed since mid-March — the equivalent of every single person in the Nevada’s civilian workforce applying for benefits.

Santeliz said she knows there must be a mistake because she only received a few weeks of benefits before her claim stalled indefinitely, and the amount DETR said she owes is far more than she was ever paid. But it’s still a major stressor for a mother of two who is trying to keep a roof over her head, and she’s far from the only Nevadan receiving such news.

Although claimants continue to report major delays in getting their benefits, and the first batch of hundreds of long-awaited Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) appeal hearings are just now getting underway, leaders working on the issue say they’ve made significant progress in disqualifying large groups of claims that appear fraudulent and bringing in a team of welfare eligibility workers to resolve legitimate claims and get Nevadans paid.

We have updated our judicial race section with analysis on three races — the first of dozens that will go live this week — for the contests for Supreme Court, Court of Appeals and Eighth Judicial District Court Dept. 19.

Powers is one of tens of thousands of people thought to be caught in the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation backlog. Barbara Buckley, head of a strike force trying to address the hangups, said there were about 80,000 in the backlog as of Aug. 1, and more than 18,000 had been resolved as of last week.

Strike force director Barbara Buckley and newly minted Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) Administrator Elisa Cafferata said they’ve reliably estimated there was a backlog of about 80,000 legitimate unemployment claims when they took the reins Aug. 1. As of last week, they’d resolved 18,161 of them.

DETR said it was bringing on staff to work the state’s call centers, but didn’t immediately clarify whether the state was assuming all of Alorica’s duties or just some, or whether the state would have to pay for the duration of the contract in spite of the early wind-down. Alorica was brought on on a temporary basis, with the intention of sending duties back to the state by the end of the year, state officials said.

“I told some of the Employment Security people, ‘Look, you've been inside the house fighting the fire for five months, you're exhausted. Reinforcements are here,’” Buckley said. “So maybe we can just bring a different way of viewing it, and a private sector way of doing something.”

Gov. Steve Sisolak has appointed former lawmaker and legal aid center leader Barbara Buckley to lead a “strike force” focused on improving the processing of Nevada’s backlogged unemployment claims.

Starting in January, people who represent themselves in court and want to file for a Temporary Protective Order (TPO), otherwise known as a restraining order, will be able to do so in the same Las Vegas location that processes custody, divorce and other related civil proceedings.