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A young Reno woman named Brianna Denison, a first year student at Santa Barbara City College, disappeared from a friend's house in Reno where she was sleeping on the couch. The couch had a drop of blood on it when she was discovered missing. The disappearance prompted an unusual community-wide burst of volunteerism - people joining search parties, designing signs and leaflets, walking door to door and so on.

Soon the police had linked the disappearance to a couple of crimes on the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno. The home from which Denison vanished is near the campus.

At that point, the investigation ran into a roadblock. The Washoe County Sheriff's Department had a backlog of 3,000 untested DNA samples taken from recently convicted felons and it was possible that in that pile of evidence was information that could tell investigators something important as they probed links among the campus crimes.

The reason the sheriff's department had that backlog was that the 2007 Nevada Legislature enacted Assembly Bill 92, expanding the list of offenders who must submit to genetic marker tests to all felonies, a measure that took effect Oct. 1. But the lawmakers had neglected to enclose a check with the legislation. They ordered the tests but provided no funding. So counties had started taking the samples but were unable to pay to keep up with processing the samples so they could be used for comparisons.

With search parties beating the bushes all over the Truckee Meadows, time was important. Washoe Sheriff Mike Haley made a public appeal to the business community to pony up donations to cover the $150,000 needed to process those 3,000 samples. Businesses, local citizens, people across the nation, foundations and others were sending donations of money and soon $165,000 was in hand. (Brianna Denison's body was found last Saturday.)

Amid all this, the Washoe County Commission voted to commit its bonding authority and a car rental tax hike to the construction of a ball park in Reno for a commercial ball team. There was a furious reaction in the community to the notion that DNA testing required donations from car washes and bake sales while public revenues and bonding were being used for sports. County officials quickly pointed out that the legislature permitted the county to use the car rental money only for the ball park.

Incidents like these carry important lessons, but we rarely take close looks at them. Consider:

-State lawmakers often showboat during legislative sessions by passing anti-crime bills and then flee the state capital, leaving state and local officials to make sense of those measures.

-Local governments in Nevada are frequently hit with unfunded mandates like the DNA bill and just to make things even more difficult, the legislators also put cities and counties on short fiscal leashes with tax caps.

-Back in the days when Nevada journalism provided more substantive coverage of legislative sessions, reporters newly arrived in Nevada who were accustomed to the legislatures in other states were often astonished by how little home rule there is in Nevada. Legislators never tire of reminding county officials that "counties are the creatures of the state."

-After the public reaction to the ball park funding, journalists accepted the explanation from county officials blaming the problem on state lawmakers. The reporters then failed to follow up by demanding explanations from the lawmakers, so the story died when it was only half completed.

What happened to Reno and Washoe in this case happens time after time on other issues, other taxes, other programs to every other county and municipality in the state, which makes it all the more important to get decent news coverage of these disputes and their lessons.