Lawmakers in Carson City could vote to seal non-payment eviction records during the COVID state of emergency.
AB141, which is sponsored by Assemblyman Howard Watts of Las Vegas, would automatically seal court records for cases where a tenant was unable to pay rent due to the pandemic.
"People that, for whatever reason, haven’t been able to make their rent and have faced eviction, as a result, shouldn’t have that prevent them from being able to access housing in the future," Watts said. "Unfortunately, eviction records can do just that."
Watts is the only sponsor of the bill. Some bills have dozens of sponsors and co-sponsors, which, generally, means a bill has wider reception among lawmakers.
With that said, housing attorneys from the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada agree with Assemblyman Watts' reasoning. They spoke in support of the bill during a committee hearing last week.
They said they’re already seeing people who were evicted despite eviction moratoriums at the state and federal level and are now struggling to find something new to move into
This bill would also require landlords to give more notice to people who are leasing month-to-month without a formal lease. For some people, that would require up to 90-day notice before eviction for no cause for long-term tenants who have been in a property for a while.
Advocates say many people who fall into that category are seniors and people with disabilities who have a good relationship with their landlord, but in some cases, the landlord either sells the property or wants to inhabit the property themselves and that’s when this no-cause eviction comes into play.
Landlord groups are opposed. They claim the part about giving more notice would put a burden on ‘mom-and-pop’ landlords.
They also fear that the bill would allow renters who don’t want to pay to be able to stay and still have their eviction records sealed.
That’s not really the case. The record-sealing component will only apply for the period of the pandemic, and it’s already a process tenants can request anyway. If you go through an eviction proceeding, you can apply with the court to have that record sealed.
Another bill addressing housing is Assembly Bill 161. It would eliminate summary evictions. This was introduced by Assemblywoman Selena Torres.
These happen when someone gets the seven-day notice for non-payment and doesn’t do anything. It gets automatically granted as an eviction, and they’re locked out.
The way it works under existing law is tenants technically have to file their own eviction order in court to mount a defense within the seven-day notice.
Advocates say that’s basically like forcing someone to sue themselves.
Besides bills to address housing, there are also bills about voting rights.
Obviously, this is a very partisan issue right now.
Republicans, for instance, are still mad about Assembly Bill 4, which was passed over the summer during one of the special sessions. It was a voting reform that sent mail-in ballots for all active, registered voters in the state during a state of emergency, which in this case was COVID-19.
One of the issues they have with that is the ballot collection component. Republicans call this “ballot harvesting.”
They say it’s a way to help rig votes, but Native American vote advocates say it helps people vote if they live far away from the nearest voting site, which is pretty common for tribal voters.
That way you can have one person in a family, who has access to a car, essentially turn in ballots for the rest of their family or other folks in their community, instead of individual people driving 100 miles or more to drop off a ballot.
Assemblyman Andy Matthews introduced Assembly Bill 134 that would repeal AB4.
The Democrats on the other hand have introduced legislation to make AB4 permanent.
Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson has said that is one of his goals. He is teasing a bill to do that, but it hasn’t been formally introduced yet.
It’s interesting that Democrats are trying to expand voter access, make it apply in situations that aren’t an emergency. They’re getting a lot of pushback from the GOP, but what’s really interesting is that 2020 wasn’t a perfect year for Democrats. Republicans picked up three seats in the Assembly, including Assemblyman Matthews, who is proposing legislation to undue AB4.
The Republican argument is not about who won the election but about the potential for fraud. Here in Nevada, Republicans are making a slight pivot in how they talk about this in the statehouse.
They’re starting to say they want to “restore trust” in the electoral system. The Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, who herself is a Republican, has said there is no evidence of widespread fraud at all in the last election in Nevada.
So what Republicans are saying now is essentially voting by mail, allowing people to collect ballots for others, all these other measures are eroding trust in the electoral system.
But it is important to remember that the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol was promoted by rhetoric like that from former President Donald Trump. This is what people are calling Trump’s ‘big lie’ because he is continuing to say that the election was rigged and stolen from him, which is not true.
And it is very important to remember that a lot of the mistrust that Republican voters feel in the electoral system is a direct result of Donald Trump’s rhetoric around the last election.
The bill to end AB4 is just one of a long list of election reform bills that Republicans are pushing in Carson City.
The party is pushing two bills that would require a photo ID for in-person voting. This is something that has been tried in Nevada before. It didn’t work then. Because Republicans are not in control at the statehouse, it’s really the Democratic Party that has a say in what bills get introduced and brought forward and considered, these bills are unlikely to get a hearing.
But it is also important to keep in mind that there is a lot of criticism around voter ID laws. Specifically, critics are saying voter ID laws really target Black voters, Latinx voters and other people of color disproportionately because they’re more likely to not have a photo ID in the first place.
Both of these bills would require the DMV to offer a form of identification for free, but to get a photo ID from the state you have to present records like your birth certificate and those cost money to obtain.
Critics of these types of bills are saying this is another form of excluding people from the vote who don’t have the means to either get to the DMV office, if they live far away or if public transit isn’t a good option for them. That really impacts people with disabilities, the elderly and low-income families.
Bert Johnson, legislative reporter, KNPR