After Nevada recently raised the minimum age for buying tobacco from 18 to 21, lawmakers may also stiffen penalties for those who sell the products to minors.

The appointment of former Republican state Sen. James Settelmeyer as director of the state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) spurred questions this week over whether the appointment might clash with the Nevada Constitution.

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.”

Nurses in red T-shirts — some with the word “heroes” crossed out and replaced with the word “humans” — held signs and played music outside of St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center on a June afternoon.

With the primary election dust starting to settle, legislative race results began to shed light on which candidates will be in the spotlight come November.

Wednesday’s meeting marked the first opportunity for legislators to approve awards for nonprofits from a $30 million ARP community grant program announced by the governor’s office in December. 

Of the 63 newly drawn districts, only four place incumbents against one another. Almost half of those eight incumbents, however, are either termed out or not planning on running for reelection.

When lawmakers kicked off their 120-day legislative session in February, the state was still recovering from a brutal winter surge of COVID-19, which saw a thousand new cases of the virus reported across the state each day.

Democrats controlled both houses of the Legislature during the 2021 session, and hundreds of high-profile Democratic measures sailed through the Assembly and Senate while a vast majority of Republican-backed measures failed to make much headway in the legislative process.

From permanent expanded mail voting to the state public health option, the 2021 Legislature saw no shortage of headline-grabbing partisan disagreements — but a look at actual vote totals reveals that the vast majority of bills were passed with at least some bipartisan buy-in.

The final hours of the Legislature traditionally see a host of last-minute amendments, compromises and changes to legislation — something already readily apparent on Monday.

Some of the higher-profile measures signed by Sisolak over the past two days include bills aimed at allowing collegiate athletes to receive compensation, lowering the penalties for minors caught in possession of alcohol or small amounts of marijuana, requiring teaching about minorities and historically underrepresented groups and raising the legal and age prerequisites for a person to become state attorney general.

During its hearing in the Assembly Committee of Revenue on Tuesday, comments from lobbyist Mary Walker in neutral testimony, representing Carson, Douglas, Lyon and Storey counties sparked a conversation about tax revenue and future growth concerns in Storey County — the likely location of any Innovation Zone, as the concept backers Blockchains Inc. owns about 67,000 acres of land and spearheaded efforts in favor of the concept earlier this year. Blockchains did not testify in the committee hearing.

In an attempt to bridge the gap, Nevada Assembly lawmakers on Wednesday approved AB376, which allocates $500,000 in state funds for the UNLV Immigration Clinic to expand its no-cost legal resources for immigrants.

The three bills were heard Tuesday morning during a meeting of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee, with Democratic lawmakers and progressive groups heralding the measures as ways that the state can make it easier to vote, but with Republicans questioning the proposed costs and benefits of several of the bills.

Black has been vocal against the mask rule in place for almost the entirety of the session and claimed a win in an email newsletter for catalyzing for the policy change.

With just two weeks to go before the end of the 2021 legislative session, state lawmakers boosted the Nevada System of Higher Education’s (NSHE) budget with the allocation of more than $93 million in federal COVID relief dollars aimed at lifting a system-wide hiring freeze.

During a joint budget hearing on Monday, members of the Senate and Assembly split over funding for the Nevada Knowledge Account (also called the Knowledge Fund), a grant program for higher education facilities (UNLV, UNR and the Desert Research Institute) aimed at spurring “research and the commercialization of research in areas the state has targeted for economic growth.” The program was initially created under former Gov. Brian Sandoval nearly a decade ago.

The bill’s transformation was one of the more dramatic ahead of Tuesday’s deadline for bills to pass out of their first house. Four bills died, and more than a dozen — including AB376 — were re-referred to money committees, where it’s possible a lack of money to implement them could seal their fate.

Though a majority of the bills surrounding tenants’ rights and evictions survived the first legislative deadline in early April, a cluster of affordable housing measures that supporters emphasized would give local governments more tools to address the housing crisis ended up on the cutting room floor.