Not so open

Nevada does a poor job of disclosing the corporate welfare it hands out, according to a state-by-state comparison.

Good Jobs First (GJF), a D.C. organization that tracks subsidies given to business in various forms (tax credits, exemptions, incentives, etc.), released a study of their transparency on Jan. 29. It ranked Nevada in a tie for 45th place in the nation (Hawaii shared the slot).

“While Nevada readily responds to open records requests for subsidy recipient information and has scored well in our previous research on job quality standards and enforcement, the state's online disclosure barely qualifies for our study,” the GJR report said. “There exists a legislative report with company-specific disclosure information for some of the below-listed programs, but as this is not a regularly issued report it does not qualify for scoring.”

As if to make GJF's point, the Nevada report—“Report on tax abatements, tax exemptions, tax incentives for economic development and tax increment financing in Nevada” by the fiscal division of the Nevada Legislature—is stale. It was released in February 2009 and has not been updated since. So information on the past five years is unavailable in a single location.

The GJF is at www.goodjobsfirst.org/showusthesubsidizedjobs.

And Nevada's 2009 list of handouts can be found at http://tinyurl.com/mo64ylu.