DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

There's always a certain reluctance to have a special session of the legislature, mainly based on the general proposition that it's a good idea for the lawmakers not to be in session. But that cynical view is the least rational reason for opposing special sessions. One of the best reasons is that special sessions are nearly always poorly planned and too short to produce good legislation.

Examples of bad legislation produced by special sessions are not hard to come by.

In December 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt, naively accepting the word of Nevada officials that there was a threat to the peace in Goldfield, Nevada, sent troops that used to break labor unions' power. After Roosevelt discovered he'd been duped, he told state officials they'd have to provide their own police and ordered the troops out. Gov. John Sparks called the Nevada Legislature into special session where lawmakers created a state police force that was plagued for years with the reputation that it was a labor-bashing force.

In 1927 the legislature went into special session to make a change in state law to accommodate the construction of a Las Vegas hotel that, as it turned out, was never built.

In 1966 amid reports that lysergic acid diethylamide caused birth defects, Gov. Grant Sawyer (in the fourth addendum tacked onto the original call of that year's special session) asked the lawmakers to outlaw LSD. They did, helping to spread word about the allure of the drug and increase usage, but strangely, the epidemic of birth defects never materialized. In 1971 a study found that the birth defect claims were nonsense.

The necessity of special sessions is made greater because Nevada's regular legislative sessions happen only every other year, and budget crises like the current one are made more likely because the regular sessions happen so infrequently. Imagine a company whose board of directors meets only in odd numbered years--and tries to predict its income in two-year periods.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Nevada, in effect, had annual legislative sessions. There were special sessions in 1954, 1956, and 1958.

The voters in 1958 approved annual sessions, leading to a regular legislative session in an even numbered year for the first time, in 1960. It did a good job, but opponents of annual sessions never gave up and kept up a drumbeat of criticism of that year's legislature. As a result, Nevada voters repealed annual sessions later in 1960. But special sessions were then held in 1964, 1965, 1966 and 1968.

Eventually the legislature devised mechanisms for avoiding special sessions. They created the Legislative Commission and the Interim Finance Committee to handle legislative business, studies, and allocation of public funds when the full legislature was out of session.

This created a new problem. Public funding was being allocated without all Nevadans being represented, as with the full legislature. There are some attorneys who believe the powers of the Interim Finance Committee are unconstitutional, but so far no one has challenged its authority in court.

Later the legislators also created the Economic Forum, made up of financial experts to independently predict two-year state income, predictions the legislature uses in putting the budget together. The Forum was created because legislators came to distrust predictions provided by governors (they suspected governors of adjusting the revenue predictions to get pet programs approved).

Since 1960, the legislature has put annual sessions on the ballot only once, in 1970s, and the voters rejected it.

Now, however, annual sessions have picked up support from a surprising place -legislator Bob Beers, an extreme conservative from Clark County. He's exactly the kind of person who usually thinks the less the legislators meet, the better. But he says that the Economic Forum cannot reliably make two-year predictions and it is creating problems for the state. "It is just a super-human request to plan out revenue for a complex entity such as state government that far in advance," he told a reporter last week.