Nevada lawmakers race toward deadline

CARSON CITY -- Nevada legislators voted Monday for about 80 measures, on subjects ranging from identity theft to sex traffickers, in efforts to meet another deadline and keep the bills from ending up on the 2009 session's scrap heap.

Bills approved in the Assembly included AB380, which would impose steep fines on sex traffickers who lure or force children into prostitution. Lawmakers had been told that Las Vegas was identified by the FBI as one of 14 cities around the country with high rates of child prostitution, and that police officers there handled 150 cases of child prostitution last year.

Also approved by the Assembly was AB521 which would expand health care treatment for firefighters exposed to carcinogens on the job.

Also endorsed on a 31-10 Assembly vote was AB307, to let officials in Nevada publish an annual list of property taxpayers and their property values on an Internet Web site rather than in local newspapers. If the measure wins final approval, it will cost newspapers in the state a lucrative revenue source.

Today marks the deadline for most Assembly bills having to cross over to the Senate and vice versa. Under the legislators' rules, measures that aren't exempt must move from the house where they originated to the other house.