Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval briefs legislators on sequestration

In a 7 a.m. meeting Friday, Gov. Brian Sandoval briefed legislative leaders on the coming impact of sequestration.The Nevada government could lose $38.6 million in the remaining seven months of this federal fiscal year if Congress and the president don’t reach agreement on preventing the coming cuts, he told the press corps Thursday afternoon.Exiting the meeting, Sandoval said one of the things he discussed was providing his administration with some flexibility in moving money around to meet the challenges of those federal cuts — especially within the Health and Human Services Department.He said they also discussed creating a pool of money “so that state agencies have a place to go for money.” He said that pool would consist primarily of money in the rainy-day fund.The state really won’t know the impact of sequestration until the continuing resolution on the federal debt ceiling expires March 27, Sandoval said. If no agreement on that issue is reached, there will be more impacts on the state, he said.Assembly Speaker Marilyn Kirkpatrick, D-North Las Vegas, said lawmakers didn’t receive a lot of new information in the morning meeting.“We got what you got yesterday,” she told a reporter.Sandoval said Thursday that the $38.6 million figure is just the direct impact to the state budget; it doesn’t include the impacts to numerous federal employees and programs in Nevada.“I’m very concerned for federal employees who will be taking those 20 percent furloughs,” he said, adding that amounts to an unpaid day off every week.A large number of those workers are military employees at Fallon Naval Air Station and Nellis Air Force Base.