Plan for Northern Nevada’s colleges is unfair to south, Horne says

Assembly Majority Leader William Horne, D-Las Vegas, on Tuesday objected to the university system’s plan that “holds harmless” both Great Basin and Western Nevada colleges from further budget cuts this coming cycle.

“It seems to me that held harmless, some of that backfill keeping Northern Nevada harmless is coming from the south,” he said. “There is overall belief that we’ve got to eliminate the pain in the north in order to make this work, but there’ve been cuts for years in the south without any bridges or delays.”

The budget as proposed would cut 10 percent to 15 percent for Great Basin College in northeast Nevada and Western Nevada College in Carson City and rural western Nevada, including Fallon. The system’s plan is to try to keep the two colleges’ funding for the coming biennium at about the same level as now.

“I think that in order to do that, we need to find additional money instead of calling for these rollbacks in the south to effectuate that position,” Horne said.

Horne’s argument runs counter to what Sen. Pete Goicoechea, R-Eureka, said in one of the system’s first hearings. He said that while the cuts to the two community colleges only amount to a couple of million dollars, “when you take a couple of million dollars out of a $15 million budget, that’s a lot.”

Goicoechea said he intended to fight any further cuts to either of the two rural colleges.

“They can’t take any more and won’t,” he said in January.