Father gave new legislator Dina Neal an early start

Editor's note: With more new legislators than ever before, Nevada will have some of its freshest political faces coping with the state's greatest problems. In an occasional series, the Review-Journal will introduce freshmen legislators who are about to take office in Carson City.

Dina Neal may be new to the Legislature, but in some ways she is an old hand at politics.

Neal is among the 18 new Assembly members who have never served in either chamber of the Legislature. But as the daughter of former state Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas, she has been soaked in politics since birth.

Her first trip to the Legislature came in 1973 when her dad, the first black person to serve in the state Senate, arrived for the first of his eight consecutive terms.

"I was just born when my dad was elected," said Neal, 38, of her early introduction to Nevada politics. "So I just started paying attention."

Neal is all business when it comes to policy. The mother of two children, Tuwaski, 9, and Alexandra, 14, says she reads audit reports and legislative counsel briefings in her spare time.

But she doesn't come off as a stick-in-the-mud. She punctuates her conversations with lots of laughter, even when the subject is tax policy or education bureaucracy.

"In all honesty, that is entertainment to me," Neal said of policy research.

She learned important values from her dad, an iconoclastic legislator who took on gambling, police and other entrenched interests while maintaining an amiable, open-minded reputation that helped keep him in office for 32 years.

He was known as a fiery speaker, often for lost causes, but also was co-sponsor of the bill that required hotels to place water sprinkler systems in all rooms and throughout the casinos following the fires at the MGM Grand in 1980 and the Las Vegas Hilton in 1981.

Neal's example taught his daughter to be strong enough to stand behind unpopular beliefs, but not at the expense of shutting out people with different opinions.

Neal, who will become the first black woman to serve in the Assembly, says in addition to her liberal dad, she gets advice from former University of Nevada football star and one-time Las Vegas City Councilman Frank Hawkins, now a Las Vegas businessman she describes as "very conservative."

And she lists both the left-leaning Bill Maher and conservative Bill O'Reilly among her favorite political commentators. "Merge those two together, they make for an interesting mix," she says of the pundits.

The disparate influences, she says, ensure she gets a full picture before making a decision. "I'm interested in how to relate to other people and legislative strategy," Neal says.

She also has some strong stances of her own. One that could prove controversial is her belief that it will take some new taxes to balance the state budget, which is forecast to have projected expenses that are as much as $3 billion higher than predicted revenue.

"There is no way that you can get out of this fix without getting some money from somebody," she said.

Contact reporter Benjamin Spillman at bspillman@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3861.