The Senate Commerce and Labor Committee will hold a month-long series of hearings examining the workplace safety and worker compensation laws in Nevada.
The first is today with a discussion of workplace safety.
The review was ordered after a series of deaths and serious injuries at construction sites on the Las Vegas Strip this past year. Officials say a dozen construction workers died there in the past 18 months, more than the number who died in the en tire decade of the 1990s on Strip projects.
The meeting begins at 1:L30 p.m. in Room 2135.
Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev., said Tuesday that Democrats pulled consideration of the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act because they didn't want to have to vote on his amendment to protect the Second Amendment Rights of Washington, D.C. residents.
"The Second Amendment exists to protect the right of all Americans to buy, own, and use firearms," he said in his floor statement. "It does not provide exemptions based upon region, state or city."
Heller's amendment would repeal a number of D.C. laws restricting access to semiautomatic weapons, handgun ammunition and other firearms related purchases.
He said it restores D.C. residents' right of self-defense within their home.
Governor Jim Gibbons has announced the formation of a special Stimulus Package Working Group to provide recommendations on handling the technical details of the Stimulus Package.
"The stimulus dollars must be used create jobs and kick-start the economic recovery," Gibbons said in announcing the plan.
The working group will be made of representatives from the Governor's Office, the State Budget Office and all major agencies in the executive branch.
Legislative representatives were also invited but Legislative Counsel Bureau Director Lorne Malkiewich said the top fiscal analysts, Mark Stevens and Gary Ghiggeri, were too busy with legislative budget work to attend, although they would add input when possible.
Assemblyman James Settelmeyer, R-Gardnerville, has introduced legislation that would prohibit the Department of Corrections from feeding prison inmates three hot meals a day.
AB228 would limit hot meals to two per day. It would apply not only to the prison system but to all jails and detention centers in Nevada.
Settelmeyer has said in the past there is no reason inmates can't get by with a bowl of cereal in the morning instead of a cooked meal. He said the change would save prisons money.
The bill was referred to the corrections, Parole and Probation Committee for study.
The Nevada Assembly paid tribute to those who went before them Tuesday, holding their floor session in the old Assembly Chambers in the state Capitol.
Retired State Archivist Guy Rocha gave the body a tour of its history, focusing on the history of the Legislature during the Great Depression of the 1930s to remind them, as he put it, that "no state, such as Nevada, is recession proof."
The Assembly holds one floor session every Legislature in the old chambers.