About 40 state administrators and financial officers had to cool their heels most of the afternoon Thursday after Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford rearranged the Interim Finance Committee agenda.
Normally, IFC reviews and votes on changes to state program budgets as one of the first agenda items. That allows busy administrators and their financial officers to get out of the meeting and back to work.
But Horsford changed the order of the agenda and put first the informational presentations on his interim study of how to fix structural problems in Nevada's tax system first.
The result was that those administrators and their fiscal staff had to sit through the presentation of Envisioning Nevada's Future by UNLV professor Robert Lang, a review of "Cyclical and Structural Deficits in Nevada" by Matthew Murray of the University of Tennessee, a report by Moody's Analytics on Nevada's economy and a report on the benefits of investing in early childhood education.
IFC didn't start the process of handling budgetary changes - the reason the committee was created - until 3:30 p.m., two and a half hours into the meeting. And most of those administrators are paid more than $40 an hour.
"I'm glad I rushed over at 1 p.m.," griped one administrator.
"I do have other things to do today," said another.
The final agency to appear before adjournment was the Gaming Control Board whose three representatives had to sit from 1 to 5:05 p.m. to make a three-minute report to the committee.
