Heather Goulding, a longtime energy research and evaluation senior project manager and volunteer in Northern Nevada, is feeling energized on a Monday morning in Carson City, halfway through her first legislative session, as the new District 27 assembly representative for northwest Reno and parts of Sun Valley and Golden Valley.
“I am thoroughly enjoying it,” she says, with several of her proposed bills getting good initial movement, from helping bicyclists to pregnant women, domestic violence victims and school parents, to dealing with abandoned vehicles.
Goulding says going in she tried to identify problems, very clearly and precisely.
“So that process of more clearly identifying a problem and then uncovering what all of the unknowns are and making sure that to the best of my ability that I'm creating an effective solution instead of creating unintended consequences that would either not solve the problem or create a different problem. And that's where all of the stakeholder engagement really comes in. So that whole process I find very energizing,” she said before a busy week of more committee hearings up ahead.
“There will be language that needs to be cleaned up. Stakeholders will engage in additional conversation. And so the bills then that come to work session may be modified from that original presentation,” she explained looking at her calendar for her three committees: government affairs, health and human services and revenue.
One of her own bills has already moved out of committee, AB 168, to improve cyclist safety, which has gotten Goulding, an avid bicyclist, welcome attention. If passed, it could allow bicyclists to treat a stop sign as a yield sign and a red light as a stop sign. Intersections are dangerous for cyclists, and red lights sometimes never go to green for them, and this would recognize “that giving cyclists the ability to mitigate their own risk is a good thing. It makes bicyclists safer.”
She said it’s ironic in a way this bill is getting so much media traction as her other bills have more of a potential overall impact.
“The bike bill is a fun bill, and … I think it will make our communities more bike friendly. My personal opinion is that though I love that bill, I think that it's less substantial. So it's interesting to me that has received so much attention.”
During the first week of session, she said law enforcement lobbyists marched into her office saying they were opposed. After removing ebikes and escooters from the bill though, she says they moved to a neutral stance.
For another bill, AB 250, to provide relief for victims of coercive debt, Goulding just sent a revised amendment to committee members.
On Instagram last week, accompanying a video before the Commerce and Labor Committee, she wrote: “I’m proud to have introduced AB250, legislation that protects domestic violence survivors from coercive debt by shifting financial responsibility back to their abusers… By passing this bill, Nevada would join the national movement advancing economic justice for survivors of domestic violence.”
In our phone call, Goulding explained nearly all victims of domestic violence are also victims of economic abuse, “which is when an abuser uses coercion to put debt in the victim's name and then racks up debt.”
Another bill for which she is the primary sponsor, AB360, addresses congenital syphilis testing and treatment for pregnant women who don’t have health insurance or primary care providers.
It’s fine-tuning a bill that was passed a few sessions ago to make sure testing for such a vulnerable group takes place.
“Even though the bill had been passed, emergency rooms were not testing pregnant folks that came into the emergency rooms because if they came in for some other reason, they had a broken ankle or they had stitches or something, if the cause of there being in the emergency room was not pregnancy, the insurance wasn't covering that testing. So emergency rooms weren't testing. So what we've done is these tweaks on this bill is to make sure that Medicaid will cover the testing and treatment. We're making sure that because this is a really tricky population, it doesn't make sense to test them in the emergency room and then require them to come back two or three days later when the test results come in. So this bill requires a rapid test when they arrive at the emergency room,” she explained.
If the test is positive, with her proposed bill, treatment would begin immediately.
Meanwhile, AB205 would reverse the required opting in of human health and sexual education for school kids, with 90% of parents who opt in no longer having to do so, giving the paperwork instead to the small minority who wants to opt out.
“It would just flip since there's a very small percentage of the parents who don't want their children to participate, it would put the burden on that small percentage instead of on the overwhelming percentage of parents who want to opt their children in,” she said of yet another common sense initiative she is driving.
Another school related bill AB386 related to assessments administered for reading proficiency is no longer needed, as the test she was seeking is now being adopted.
“So we're counting that as a win, but we don't need legislative change on that one,” she said.
An abandoned car by UNR has gone through increasingly deteriorating conditions in recent months.
Finally, a bill which has several other primary sponsors along with Goulding is AB415, to streamline the process of getting rid of abandoned junk vehicles.
“It’s expensive for tow companies. It's expensive for local governments,” Goulding explained.
The solution in the bill has three parts, process, carrot and stick.
“Instead of having to go track down who the owner is of an abandoned junk vehicle, put a lien hold on it, put the car in an impoundment lot … it gives tow truck companies and municipalities the ability to say, we all agree that this is a junk vehicle. We all know that this is garbage. The owner's never coming back. This is garbage. We're going to treat it like garbage,” she explained. “We're going to have the tow companies pick it up and drive it straight to either the pick and pull if there's that much left on it or it can go straight to the scrap heap. And what it does is it eliminates the bureaucratic hassle that folks have to go through in a current law. And, it's just makes it more efficient.”
Halfway through this session, Goulding says she’s learned the importance of finding a broad base of stakeholder engagement.
“The best bills are the bills that reflect input from as many stakeholders as possible,” she concluded during our interview. “I have worked hard even before those first presentations to make sure that I've built a broad base of input from stakeholders. But after the presentation, that process really continues. And it's in dialogue with people that will be impacted by a bill that is so important to continue listening to folks, responding to their concerns, digging in deeply to the issues and existing statutes, existing regulations so that we can make sure that we're really identifying the problem accurately and finding effective solutions. “
