Nevada Chief Attorney’s Special Exemption Questioned; Fla. Prison Guards May See Pay Hike
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Also in our State and Local Weekend Digest: Puerto Rico’s fiscal lockbox; higher suicide rates for paramedics; and N.Y. community colleges not keen on governor’s free-tuition plan.
STATE JUDICIARY | Nevada’s solicitor general, the state’s chief attorney, has not taken the state bar exam and is practicing law despite the expiration of his two-year temporary license that was “given special and unprecedented dispensation by the state Bar of Nevada.” [The Nevada Independent]
CORRECTIONS | Florida Gov. Rick Scott wants to give prison guards in his state a pay raise after six years of not adjusting corrections salaries. Beyond the $38 million Scott has budgeted for the pay hike, the governor is also planning to offer signing bonuses for guards at understaffed prisons. [Orlando Sentinel]
In Lincoln, Nebraska, the Lancaster County jail, which opened four years ago, is already experiencing prisoner capacity issues and administrators are “considering buying portable beds, having female inmates sleep on the floor and sending prisoners elsewhere.” [Lincoln Journal Star]
FINANCE | Fiscally beleaguered Puerto Rico’s new governor signed a measure on Sunday that would allow him to designate essential government services and set aside money in a “lockbox” to pay for those services. The Puerto Rico Financial Emergency and Fiscal Responsibility Law, as it is called, replaces a moratorium on debt payments signed by the previous governor that bondholders had decried. [Reuters]
WORKFORCE | “First responders are considered to be at greater risk for Acute Stress Disorder than most other occupations” and of all first responders, paramedics are at the most risk for suicide and 22 percent of all paramedics will experience post-traumatic stress disorder. [Minot Daily News]
EDUCATION | Community colleges in New York state haven’t quite warmed up to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s free-tuition proposal fearing that students would sidestep two-year community colleges in favor of four-year public colleges, leading to decreased enrollment. [The Buffalo News]
PUBLIC HEALTH | In Washington state, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray and King County Executive Dow Constantine have given their stamp of approval for safe-consumption facilities where people can use heroin, cocaine and other drugs safely without fear of arrest, modeled after such facilities in Vancouver, British Columbia. It’s all part of a public health strategy to help manage drug abuse in their jurisdictions. “We don’t want to do the things that are easy … we want to do the things that will solve the problem,” Constantine said Friday. [Crosscut]
INFRASTRUCTURE | Connecticut state lawmakers who represent border communities are preparing to fight proposals that would authorize border tolls as a way to boost funding for transportation. “It’s the proposal that never goes away,” according to one state representative. [News Times]
WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT | Volunteers and personnel from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources are feeding mule deer in four of Utah’s northern counties where snow has buried food sources and animal mortality rates have increased. [The Salt Lake Tribune]
DISASTER PREPAREDNESS | In seismically active Oklahoma, stronger building codes have made new buildings and homes more resilient to earthquakes. “What science is telling me, considering what we’ve seen so far, is that new stuff I’m not concerned about at all,” according to one Tulsa-based engineer. “But with the old buildings, you just don’t know.” [Tulsa World]
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