It is a tense time in government. And while all eyes are on the upcoming November elections, state leaders in Nevada focus on the day-to-day grind of what impacts its citizens most. That includes concerns of recruiting and retaining talent, navigating antiquated systems, and trying to predict future funding with a legislature that meets every other year. Not to mention the ongoing battle of a public image that government lacks transparency and can’t be trusted. Silver State leaders have their hands full. Recently, a group of state leaders met at a roundtable sponsored by City National Bank and held in Las Vegas to discuss these many challenges and their solutions.
Connie Brennan, publisher and CEO of Nevada Business Magazine, served as moderator for the event. These monthly roundtables bring together different industries to discuss issues and solutions.
Is Recruiting and Retaining Talent an Issue?
Jack Robb: My biggest challenge is workforce development. Getting the right employees in the right places and getting an adequate number of employees for the state of Nevada [is difficult]. Nevada [is not the only one] that has that problem right now, it is every industry. From mining, to gaming, to other municipalities, we need a stronger workforce in Nevada.
Tonya Laney: We do not have an issue right now obtaining staff. It is retaining staff and creating that work-life balance that they desire [that is challenging]. [Employees] are not willing to work full-time, [they want] instant gratification, and want to take vacations the second week on the job.
George Togliatti: The atmosphere in the country as far as law enforcement [is a challenge]. From my experience with UNLV, one of our best recruitment pieces is the fact that we have parole and probation. There are a lot of young people that want to turn someone’s life around and be involved in social work. [They are attracted to the idea of being] in law enforcement, and still having the satisfaction of turning somebody around rather than just putting everybody in jail. [It has been] a little easier in some ways to recruit in that area. [But in general] our numbers are substantially down, and vacancies are up. [Vacancies] have come down, but we have a way to go.
Robb: We look at what other municipalities, cities, states, the surrounding areas and the private industry [are offering] and how we match up with them. [Nevada needs to become] competitive in our ability to recruit people because we do not pay enough. In some places we are competitive. [For example], we made law enforcement more competitive with the recent pay raises at our last legislative session.
Togliatti: The increase in salaries recently has been helpful for recruitment and retention. But [law enforcement] is on the same retirement plan as all the counties are. They could be here today and gone tomorrow and bounce from agency to agency. They are doing a better job at recruiting outside the state and inside the state we are getting more people from Metro and other law enforcement agencies to come on board with us because we can maintain their retirement and then they also get a salary with us. That has been advantageous.
Robb: Through the last legislative process, state employees were given a 12 percent raise in the first year, and then an 11 percent raise the second year. That has made a tremendous impact on recruitment and retention. Some of our longer tenure employees are looking at the end of their career in a different way because retirement is based off your high three (an average of the highest 36 months of base pay). [If you recently] got a 25 percent raise, your high three looks a lot different if you stay another three years.
Laney: The number one comment we hear at the DMV is [a suggestion to] hire more people. [But] we do not have unlimited pocketbooks. We can only use [what is] under our cap to fund our full operations. That [includes] buildings, staffing, utilities, but everything is inflated now. We have the same staffing model, minus a couple of big programs [that allowed us to] get a handful of additional staff, that we have had since 1999 to serve a growing population. Nevada is a destination state. People love moving here, but we do not get additional staff to assist in supporting [the growing population].
Francisco Aguilar: You can interview somebody in the private sector and have that person working that afternoon or at that same time. [For a position in the] government it takes a while. That person is also interviewing at other agencies, and we are losing opportunities to get good people.
Laney: We are filling the seats, but we are living in a generation of instant gratification and our applicants are not thinking about their long-term retirement. They are not looking at the benefits that the state has to offer. They are so used to three-second TikTok clips giving them all the education that they need, that we are having to educate the new workforce on [the importance of planning long term]. [We have to tell them] to not just look at today or this week, but to think about what they want for their future and what that balance looks like. We have serious one-on-one conversations with staff when they put in notices, because most of the time they are putting in notices [due to wanting] instant gratification [such as] a higher paying job, working from home, and more flexibility [with scheduling]. We are really battling that with keeping our positions filled. Our vacancy rate is on average about 6 percent, which is pretty good considering that our technicians have to deal with face-to-face customers.
Are Nevada’s Systems Outdated?
Dr. Kristopher Sanchez: The reality of government is that both our structures and systems are extremely out of date. I look at [our government systems] through the lens of what a business would do and we are nowhere near that. Most folks do not realize that a lot of our backing systems in the state are from the ’90s. The biggest challenge right now is modernizing the agency.
Laney: Modernization is our number one priority right now. We know that, at least in my time with the agency, we are not going to be asking the legislature for any new brick and mortar buildings. We must move to an online service delivery model. We do not have a choice. Our customers expect that. They do not want to drive to the DMV, wait in a line and sit in a lobby. Those are the days past, but unfortunately, the technology [we have implemented] is not advancing as fast as the desires of our constituents. We are undergoing modernization to move as many of our transactions online right now as we can, knowing that we still have a population of individuals that are technologically challenged. We need to move as much of our business online for the customers that can help themselves, allowing us to still have face-to-face and one-on-one hand holding [interactions] for our customers that need it the most.
Robb: A typing test [is an example of an antiquated practice we have]. There are so many antiquated rules in our books that we are bound by law to follow until we change those laws, rules and business practices.
Aguilar: In 2021 the legislature passed a bill requiring the state to switch to top-down voter registration. Right now, all 17 counties manage voter registration so there are 17 different processes and 17 different systems. Some counties are using legacy systems that are 20 years old. They were built for the technology at the time. We are in an era now where cybersecurity is a major concern, and some of those systems cannot handle [that threat].
Robb: Antiquated processes, overregulation, and rules that were built for 1970 and 1980 business practices that are no longer in place [is a challenge]. We changed NRS 284 at the last [legislative] session to simplify those processes and take some of the regulations off the books. We are currently in the middle of a class and compensation study that will modernize our classifications of workforce to meet modern business practices.
Aguilar: The new systems [that are being implemented] are technology-driven, and sometimes [the rural counties of Nevada] do not have the technology to match the demand of the system. We are constantly working to give [rural Nevada] the support and resources [they require] to build that capacity and alleviate some of that pressure.
Robb: We have done a lot to modernize [Nevada’s systems], but we still have a long way to go. I tell people, it took us 150 years to get this many rules, and it is screwed up. It is going to take us a while to unwind. But we are working hard to unwind those processes, to simplify [systems] and put common sense back in the decisions.
Aguilar: We have worked hard in the Secretary of State’s office, especially in the commercial recording side, to reprocess everything that we have done. We have taken every process in the office, reevaluated, and changed it. It was hard to make those changes, but now we have eliminated a backlog that has existed for almost a decade. [Employees] now see the value and the purpose of their work. But it took us a while to be able to make those changes. [We need to] run and look at government as if we were in the private sector and [look for] those efficiencies.
Sanchez: It is not hyperbole to say that we have agencies that are circa 1994. That is real. That is when the software [they are using] was developed. In many cases, the folks that developed that software are no longer around. Even the contractors that were hired to develop the software no longer exist. We are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Aguilar: State employees are smart people. And when they look at the processes and systems [used by the government] and see they are extremely inefficient, they get frustrated. They want to work somewhere where they know they are valued, and the work they are doing is producing an algorithm.
Zach Conine: Administration’s change and people change and there is not institutional memory in government [of systems that need to be improved] in the way that maybe it would be in the broad sector. And so [the problem] does not get fixed. People do not want to think about government. They want it to work. They want to be like electricity. They should be able to not think about government. But because we don’t make those investments in systems, when we do have a problem [it is escalated]. Our job is to make sure that everybody keeps their eye on the ball and that we fix the systems in times of prosperity, even if we do not need them. The best time to repair your roof is not when it is raining, but that is when you notice it needs to [be repaired].
Sanchez: [AI] will be [a tool we use eventually]. But we must first modernize our website. If you go to the business industry website, it is circa probably 2004. We can’t just layer AI on top of these antiquated systems. We have a lot of foundational work that we have to do. There is a lot of analysis being done on how to use AI for better governance, but we are not there yet. [It is] going to take some investment in resources.
Does Nevada Need More Funding?
Aguilar: When it comes to resources in the private sector, you can go out and raise capital or go to a bank and get debt financing. In government, we have to wait every two years to go to the legislature to make a case, and then wait to see if it is going to happen. Nevadans deserves better. We should be more responsive, especially when you are a pay for service agency and people are paying you fees. They want to see the innovation [in government] that they see in the rest of their life.
Laney: As far as the legislature, you need a crystal ball [to know what funding you will need] three years in advance. And by the time you are at that third year, the technology has advanced so far that your original plan for modernizing is out the window. Now we are looking at different tools that we were not looking at three years ago because they either did not advance or they were still so premature that we could not take the risk as a state to bring them on. It is hard to see three years in advance when you are working on a legislative schedule like we have in Nevada. It is very challenging.
Conine: [The Nevada] governor’s office is the smallest governor’s office by number of people working in it of any state regardless of size. We have a small government because we have a small tax base. There are positives to that and there are negatives to that. One of the negatives to that is that we often do not have the resources necessary to invest in technology. Broadly, technology is the thing that people do not think about investing in until it breaks.
Sanchez: We have to make investments in modernizing [Nevada’s outdated] systems. We are going to have to spend some state resources to do that, and we can’t wait until everything breaks and folks do not get the services they need, to understand that there is a challenge that needs to be addressed.
Robb: We have taken great strides to not need more money and be more efficient with the money we have. There are things that we have done to save money and put more funds into the core function of state business by taking care of citizens and the state of Nevada.
J.J. Goicoechea: It is difficult to be almost 100 percent fee-based. We are trying to be business friendly. We are doing more with less. But there are investments that we are going to have to make. Our agency is trying to figure out where we can raise fees and where we can make cost savings adjustments. We can’t just go to the legislature and say that we need money.
Laney: The state of Nevada and [its] public servants have gotten good at doing more with less. Our employees are doing the jobs of realistically two or three people with staffing models that are very old and technology that is not keeping pace. We have phenomenally supportive leadership with the governor and his team that want customer efficiencies and are fully supportive of moving forward [with what Nevada needs]. Now [we need] legislative support to put an investment in three years down the road.
Is There a Lack of Government Transparency?
Robb: It is not a lack of transparency. It is a lack of available data and that is because of the antiquated [state] systems. We fell behind in wages and technology [during the] 2007 through 2015 time period and had wage freezes and furloughs. We were not investing in technology. We missed out on some vital years that growth needed to occur.
Goicoechea: Ninety-percent of who I deal with [are people living in rural Nevada]. Communication [is the issue], not transparency. We try to drive everything to our website and everything to social media. We put [news on] X, Facebook and Instagram [but] over 50 percent of the people I serve do not have [those social media platforms]. They do not want them and they are not going to be looking [there for information]. It is not a transparency [issue].
Robb: The implementation of modern technology [now] is catch-up. We inherited something that we did not build. It is not the [fault of the] people that were before us, it was what they were dealt at the time and [they made] the right decisions at that time. Now, it is our job to modernize and bring common practice into the state government. We are private industry people trying to bring a private industry mindset to state government.
Aguilar: It is hard for elected [officials] to take on the risk [of some necessary changes]. Thinking about doing two massive system implementations at one time is a huge political risk, because if either one of them goes south, [we will have to answer to the] voter.
Goicoechea: We had a massive workshop two weeks ago on animal disease regulation that we have been working on since I was a state vet in 2016. We had people say that their neighbors did not know about it. [They want us to] send certified letters because they are not getting their email, or they are not looking at social media. [It was viewed as] a lack of transparency, [but] it wasn’t. We were pushing [news about the workshop] with every tool we had.
