DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

On the last day of this year's Nevada Legislature, I passed a public broadcasting television crew in the hallway outside the senate hall. They were interviewing Clark County Sen. Steven Horsford, who was telling them of the difficulty of getting anything substantial done when the legislative sessions are so short - only 120 days every other year. The pressure of time, Horsford said, doesn't permit major changes or reforms, only tinkering with the status quo.

In 1998 Nevadans approved a constitutional amendment restricting state legislative sessions to 120 days. The Nevada Legislature itself had placed the measure on the ballot.

Since then there have been five regular sessions of the legislature, a fair basis for seeing how the amendment has worked.

The first observation that must be made about 120 day legislatures is that, as someone once said of Christianity, the idea has not been tried and found wanting - rather, it was found difficult and therefore never tried. So far, the Nevada Legislature has never yet complied with the 120 day restriction. The constitutional amendment limiting the length of sessions also imposed a new requirement that the governor "shall submit the proposed executive budget to the Legislature not later than 14 calendar days before the commencement of each regular session."

So at the 1999 session, legislative leaders - over the objections of some lawmakers who said they were cheating on the 120 day limit - decided to set the budget committees to work processing the budget two weeks before the legislature formally went into session. The supposed 120 day sessions became 134 day sessions. This practice has been followed ever since.

The lawmakers have been able to stay inside even the 134 day limit only once in the five legislatures since 1998. It's unlikely that a major initiative, such as the reform of the state's worker injury insurance system that took place in the 1993 legislature, could be accomplished under the 134-day limit. Instead, legislative sessions have become mere maintenance sessions.

The only legislative session when more than mere maintenance was tried was 2003 when the state's tax system was restructured - and that resulted in a 134 day session PLUS a special session PLUS a second special session, 172 days in all.

The fault is not that of the legislators. It's the arbitrariness of a fixed limit. Imagine telling a plumber that he could take only one hour to do a two hour job. The fixed limit on Nevada legislative sessions is comparable to the Indiana Assembly's 1897 vote that pi is not 3.1416. In effect, we have told lawmakers to do fast work in preference to quality work.

After Horsford finished his interview with the public broadcasting folks I asked him about remedies for the problem.

"Well, you'd have to work hard during the interim to know what is it you want to do during the session because there's not enough time to, you know -- work out all the details during the 120 days," he said. "So you kind of have to have some idea and some of the details worked out before you get here."

"The interim" refers to a longtime practice of the Nevada Legislature of using the year and a half between legislative sessions to set up study committees that tackle problems and are ready at the next legislative session with recommendations and measures already drafted to implement those recommendations.

I asked Horsford if it has been his experience that previous interim studies have served the purpose of solving the problem of short legislative sessions.

"Not for the most part," he answered. "I mean, we had an interim study of a blue ribbon committee on transportation that studied for 18 months the transportation needs, and the recommendations weren't even considered by the governor or the majority of this legislature. So, I don't know if that's politics or that the interim process isn't respected."