Is Northern Nevada cheating Southern Nevada?

Southern Nevada lawmakers and leaders may disagree sharply along party lines, but there’s one point on which many of them are in lockstep.

The South, they say, gets robbed blind by state government officials in the North — year after year, dollar upon dollar.

Here’s their argument: Southern Nevada, home to about 70 percent of the state’s population, provides the majority of funding for state government, yet the North takes more of that money than it deserves. The result is the South doesn’t get its fair share of funding for many things, such as schools, roads and health care, to name a few.

UNLV political science professor David Damore has researched how Southern Nevada is at a disadvantage compared with Northern Nevada in education. He has found that the disparity is extensive.

“Pretty much any rock you look under, you’ll find it,” Damore said. “We’ve been collecting these data for years, and we’ve yet to see anything equal to us.”

Why the friction? The simple answer is growth.

Reno was more populous than Las Vegas as recently as 1950, and most of Nevada’s resources and people were in the North for a good part of the state’s history. That’s why the government is based in Carson City.

But Las Vegas’ expansion during the last half of the 20th century created needs for huge infrastructure improvements, and state institutions haven’t kept up.

“One of the key themes of growth in Nevada is that it comes very quickly, and you have to provide services — roads, schools, water,” said Eric Herzik, a political science professor at UNR. “But the tax structure isn’t really equipped for rapid growth. The revenue always lags.”

Southern lawmakers also have the challenge of representing a region that is more diverse politically, ethnically and economically. That makes it “harder to speak with a single voice from Clark County,” Herzik said.

Politics play a role, as well. Many of the most influential lawmakers hail from Northern Nevada — Gov. Brian Sandoval, for example, and former Sen. Bill Raggio, the longest-tenured member of the state Senate who represented part of Washoe County from 1972 until 2011. Raggio had unmatched influence and political capital, power Clark County representatives have yet to match.

How do Southern Nevada leaders feel the region is getting shortchanged? Here are some examples:

Higher Education

In terms of number of students served, UNLV is a significantly larger school than UNR. This fall, UNLV enrolled 27,848 students, while UNR enrolled 19,934. But bigger doesn’t always mean more dollars.

UNR and UNLV are funded equally per weighted student credit hour — a measure of how much money the state spends on its students — but inequities persist. Before, UNR received a larger share.

Providing UNLV with the same amount of physical teaching and research space as UNR, according to Damore, would require adding 2 million square feet at UNLV. That’s larger than the square footage of Downtown Summerlin.

Taking into consideration all of Nevada’s higher education institutions, colleges in the North on average this year received more than $11 extra per weighted student credit hour than schools in the South. Next year, northern colleges are expected to receive $10 extra, Damore found.

What does the North say? Herzik argues UNR is a more well-established research university with a reputation built over decades.

“That doesn’t mean UNLV shouldn’t be getting more funds to build up their capacity,” he said. “But by the same token, you can’t ignore the existing capacity that took decades to build.”

Roads

Southern Nevada officials resent that their northern counterparts have been able to make major road improvements with help from higher levels of government, while the Las Vegas area has had to undertake comparable work all on its own.

Nevada’s most expensive highway project, construction of a six-lane swath of Interstate 580 connecting Reno and Carson City, is a case in point. That project, completed in 2012, was funded mostly with federal and state tax dollars. It rubbed many

Southern Nevada officials the wrong way, considering that years earlier when Clark County built the beltway around Las Vegas, it did so mostly with local tax revenue.

Critics of the Northern Nevada road project derided it as unnecessary. Las Vegas City Councilman Bob Beers said at the time the road was “primarily a flex pose in the mirror, designed to celebrate the political might of a couple of Washoe County legislators.” Rob Lang, of Brookings Mountain West, called it a “six-lane superhighway in the sky.”

At the same time, Southern Nevada is struggling to get any federal funding for the much-discussed Interstate 11 project, which would connect Las Vegas and Phoenix. The cities are the largest in the United States without a major interstate directly linking them, but Congress has yet to come up with the money to build it.

Health

UNR has a medical school; UNLV doesn’t. Why is that a big deal?

For starters, medical schools provide a pipeline for trained doctors to enter the local workforce — something sorely needed in Las Vegas. A UNLV medical school also would generate millions of dollars in federal funding and increase the number of medical specialities practiced in the state.

As Clark County continues to grow, public officials have started to press the issue more. For now, it’s still just talk, but some have suggested that after the state gave electric car company Tesla Motors $1.3 billion in tax breaks to build a lithium-ion battery factory near Reno, Southern Nevada might have more leverage to get the medical school it wants.

Taxes

Most of the tax revenue the state collects from casinos and live entertainment comes from Clark County. Much of it goes into Nevada’s general fund, to bankroll state operations. That effectively means Southern Nevada dollars disproportionately finance public services hundreds of miles away.

Some in the South would like to see the tax revenue the state allocates to Clark County more proportionately reflect the extent to which it’s produced here.

Federal funding

Nevada lags behind the rest of the nation in securing federal money, and Southern Nevada lags behind Northern Nevada in receiving its share of that money, the Lincy Institute found. It’s an “uneven distribution that cannot be explained by population, procurement, or other variables,” the researchers said.

Washoe County’s federal grant expenditure was $1,664 per capita in 2010 while Clark County’s was just $772. Washoe, home to about 16 percent of the state population, received 19 percent of federal grant expenditure; Clark, home to about 70 percent of the population, received 40 percent.

“For Clark County to address any of the critical and failing quality-of-life indicators in the region, the distribution of federal funds must be improved,” Lincy researchers wrote. “Nevada’s political leadership should advocate for proportional allotment of federal funds across the state based on population.”

Nonprofits

Another Lincy Institute report noted “large regional differences” in the activity and local impact of state nonprofit groups. Researchers found that Washoe, Storey and Carson counties experienced a much larger impact from nonprofits than Clark County and other, more rural counties.

Specifically, the authors wrote that Northern Nevada nonprofits received more than twice the assets and revenue per capita than Southern Nevada nonprofits.