Transparency
The truth will set you free
Knowledge about use of tax dollars is essential to freedom
Knowledge about use of tax dollars is essential to freedom.
Taxes trump transparency
Politicians’ priorities show contempt for taxpayers
When given a choice between putting Nevada's checkbook online or paying for a study that will be used to try and raise taxes, guess what Nevada's politicians chose?
CCSD remains hostile to transparency
Trustees continue to flout open-meeting laws
Why are Clark County School District trustees so eager to circumvent Nevada's open-meeting laws?
Highly combustible situation
Firefighter union blocks road to reasonable spending reform
The union representing Clark County firefighters is holding its breath and stomping on the budgets of other departments. To rein in costs, the county has turned to its various public-employee unions and sought concessions in the annual cost-of-living wage increases called for by previously negotiated bargaining agreements.
Playing with the PERS
Lawmakers should not seek to influence investment decisions
Constitutional provisions prohibit the Nevada Legislature from dictating how money in the Public Employees' Retirement System is invested. However, in the final days of the recent legislative session, state lawmakers passed a law attempting to do exactly that.
NPRI's Transparency Project on the LVCVA: May 19, 2009 update
LVCVA vice chair ducks advance payments issue
Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority Vice Chairman Keith Smith is refusing to answer questions about the authority's long-standing policy of advancing millions of dollars in interest-free operating funds to Airwave Productions, an affiliate of the authority's advertising firm, R&R Partners.
Buckley transparently hypocritical
Speaker abandons a key ‘principle’
Before the current Legislative Session began, Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley spent months touring the state and promoting four "governing principles that must guide the State Legislature in achieving the mission." One of those principles was: "transparency." Unfortunately, "was" has become the key word in that sentence. Since leaving the town-hall circuit for Carson City, Buckley seems to have forgotten all about transparency.
Legislature’s dirty little secret revealed
Backdoor spending is the norm
For decades here in Nevada, the caterwauling from tax-consumers and their political allies has been loud and constant: Silver State budgets, they wail, are much too tightfisted, "selfish" and "unprogressive." What they haven't been telling you, however, is about all of the spending state lawmakers have been perpetrating through the back door – after the biennial budgets are approved – in a practice that's been going on for at least 30 years.
NPRI's Transparency Project on the LVCVA: Apr. 20, 2009 update
LVCVA's financial float documented
Millions of dollars in advance payments from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to a company owned by R&R Partners CEO William Vassiliadis would not be allowed under state procurement regulations, a state purchasing official said Wednesday.
NPRI's Transparency Project on the LVCVA: Apr. 9, 2009 update
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority will gather Tuesday to hear the marketing and lobbying firm R&R Partners explain why it believes its expiring $92 million-a-year advertising contract should be extended.
