Mother of four, food sales executive and self-made policy wonk Marilyn Kirkpatrick talks about the legislature, her family, and what she hopes to leave behind
In early April, TE editor Elizabeth Thompson sat down for an interview with Democrat Marilyn Kirkpatrick, former Speaker and current Assembly Minority Leader of the Nevada Legislature, in her home in North Las Vegas. Kirkpatrick was first elected in 2004 and has served in Senate District 1 in Southern Nevada for six regular and eight special sessions. The 2015 session will be her last.
Nevada Assembly Minority Leader Marilyn Kirkpatrick, D-North Las Vegas, works at the Legislative Building in Carson City, Nev., on Thursday, April 23, 2015.
Photo by Cathleen Allison
Thompson: You recently sent out letters to business owners around the state asking for their views on the various tax proposals on the table. How many letters went out and what is the goal?
Kirkpatrick: Senator Ford and I sent out 1,000 letters to small businesses in towns and cities across the state. They all had from one or two employees to 15 employees. Because they were the ones that we did not hear from.
Thompson: Hear from, when?
Kirkpatrick: In committee, when SB 252 was being discussed. They would be affected by the changes, and they are the ones that are really going to grow our state in the future, so I want to hear from them. You can’t forget about the smallest businesses because if a tax plan passes, their increase may be the hardest one, really.
Thompson: So you think those businesses were left out of the discussions when the various tax proposals were being put together?
Kirkpatrick: So, to be fair, with 330,000 businesses across the state, you can’t possibly talk to everyone or get a full sampling of what people think. I do think opinions from many industries were included, but I don’t know that people fully understood just exactly how it would impact them.
For example, one of the things I myself didn’t know before the session was that the first quarterly business fee payment under the Governor’s plan would be due November 15th of this year. So I’m wondering, now, if that goes through, how does that affect folks?
Thompson: There was some talk in committee about leniency in terms of enforcement for that first quarter and maybe even for that first year…
Kirkpatrick: That concerns me, though. We want to have something in place that people actually can pay right away, because don’t forget we have a budget shortfall this year. But the policy has to be right so folks can adjust quickly and so compliance is easy. And we need to consider that it may be much easier for some than others.
Thompson: The word “hybrid” keeps getting thrown around on the tax plan topic. Do you think that’s the likely outcome? A mix of elements from all the proposals?
Kirkpatrick: I do think that’s the case. I think that there has to be some type of hybrid to be as fair as possible to everybody.
Thompson: Including your desired changes on the Live Entertainment Tax structure?
Kirpatrick: Yes. I hope so.
ON MINIMUM WAGE
Thompson: Where do you stand on minimum wage? There have been proposals for raising it as high as $15 and as low as $9. Where should it be and what is do-able, politically?
Nevada Assembly Minority Leader Marilyn Kirkpatrick, D-North Las Vegas, talks with Supreme Court Chief Justice James Hardesty while signing her certificate of election during opening day ceremonies at the Legislative Building in Carson City, Nev., on Monday, Feb. 2, 2015. Photo by Cathleen Allison
Kirkpatrick: What the number will be at the end of the session, I don’t really know. The one thing we do know is that Nevada minimum wages are not enough and that a lot of people are actually working for less than they did in 2005. We have to ensure that folks have a fair shot at a living wage, right? Because otherwise they are on state services, and that costs money and doesn’t help us in the long run. We know that even some people making $10 an hour are getting food stamps, depending on their family size, so we have to figure out something better. And then there’s also the issue of how many hours they’re working and whether health care is included.
Thompson: And what about the small businesses you mentioned earlier, what if a minimum wage increase along with a higher business license fee makes their bottom line red rather than black?
Kirkpatrick: That’s why we need a reasonable number in both cases.
Thompson: Will there be some kind of an increase in minimum wage this session?
Kirkpatrick: I think so.
ON PREVAILING WAGE
Thompson: This issue of Territorial Enterprise is going to include an opinion column on prevailing wage law in Nevada and across the country. As you know, there is a lot of rhetoric that gets thrown around and emotions run pretty high on the issue. How do you see it?
Nevada Assembly Speaker Marilyn Kirkpatrick, D-North Las Vegas, and Assemblywoman Teresa Benitez-Thompson, D-Reno, work in committee at the Legislative Building in Carson City, Nev., on Wednesday, May 15, 2013.
Photo by Cathleen Allison
Kirkpatrick: So, here’s what I will tell you. About seventy percent of my district is made up of construction workers and their families. Everybody who lives on my street is a construction worker who benefits from prevailing wage rates. And they are just simple people who really just have the basics, as you can see when you look up and down the street. Twenty-four households. So, this issue is personal to me. These guys, they work for both union and non-union shops, so it’s a very mixed bag but construction is one of the biggest industries within my district and it’s fed my family for a very long time. And there are sacrifices that come with working in construction that don’t get talked about enough.
Thompson: Like what?
Kirkpatrick: You really live a life of feast or famine. There were many times that my husband travelled out of state, left me at home with four small kids, while he went to go work somewhere else because there was no work here in Nevada. There were times when a job opened and he worked a lot of overtime and was just exhausted and we hardly saw him. Some Christmas mornings my husband was not here because he was in the field with a deadline to meet. So, yes, there are sacrifices.
Thompson: You’re not just talking about money. You’re talking about time.
Kirkpatrick: Yes, I’m talking about time. On the one hand, when you’re in construction and you’re working, you have money coming in but not a lot of time to spend with your family. But you have to take that job at that time, because the next month or the next year, there may not be one. And also because you need to make money and catch up on bills from the last time you weren’t working. On the other hand, when you’re not working, you have plenty of time, but there’s also no paycheck coming in so you have no money to do anything. So it’s not always easy. It’s not this life I’ve heard described by some, where people are living the good life off construction wages or off the taxpayers. In my neighborhood, Louis, around the corner, he didn’t work for two and a half years and they almost lost their house. His wife was working two jobs. He was trying to get anything he could, but you just can’t quickly transition into another field when you’ve only ever been a construction worker.
RELATED: My Three Cents on Prevailing Wage Law
I also think the history needs to be looked at in an honest way. Prevailing wage in our state started in 1937, and in 1999 the first changes were made. And then since 2009, there have been about 20 attempts to change it. Nobody was really complaining until all the work slowed down, right? Until there were no more private sector construction jobs, and there were only government construction projects. That’s when it really became an issue. I’ve looked at the history, and I know the industry, and the truth is that union guys tend to want to stay in the private sector because they can go into a job, work, get it done fast, get paid, and get out. It’s the non-union guys tend to want to work the government sites because those jobs last. There is a lot of red tape so the jobs move slow, but the work and wages are also consistent. But then what happened with the recession, there were no private sector jobs so the union shops started bidding the government jobs. And they had healthy bank accounts so they could lowball the job and also get it done well and quickly. And that changed things, and that’s when we saw this sudden wish by some to change the law.
Thompson: Interesting take.
Kirkpatrick: But what I’ll tell you is many of the non-union guys are signatory with the union folks.
Thompson: What does that mean?
Kirkpatrick: So, that means that the non-union shops sign on to a job but also agree to use higher skilled, union labor on certain pieces of a job. One of the areas you see this is with electricians, because if your company is responsible for installing the electricity of a school or a government building, you don’t want liability or risk. You want to be sure the installers have gone to school, are journeymen, and are experienced.
Thompson: So you’re saying a non-union company will willingly contract for a portion of the labor with a union shop?
Kirkpatrick: Yes. It happens all the time. So with the prevailing wage bill that was signed this session, there’s a problem because by exempting school projects from prevailing wage, you don’t just hurt the higher paid union guys. You hurt the non-union guys, too, because they are already in contract on these jobs, or would be, but now union guys won’t work those jobs for the lower bid, so the non-union shop can’t fulfill the bid. So things will reset and new bids will come in, some from out of state companies that can undercut everyone here because they aren’t subject to Nevada guidelines and laws. So now some of those school construction jobs are going to go to guys from out of state at a time we’re trying to get the Nevada economy pumping and our workers back to work.
Thompson: On the low end of Nevada’s prevailing wage schedules, we see hourly wages from the high 30s to the 70s. Isn’t the mid to high end of that scale way a lot higher than actual market wages and prices?
Kirkpatrick: Well, you know there’s a process that goes into determining prevailing wage. And it’s done by region. The state sends out surveys to construction companies, but we get barely 50% of them back. And we’ve asked the question in the Legislature, why won’t they fill out the surveys? What is the problem? Why won’t you submit your data to the Labor Commissioner? But our data is only as good as those surveys. So we are all arguing only based on the data we have, not on the total data. And we’ve never given the Labor Commissioner any authority to go out and find these folks and get after them for not returning the surveys. I think if we would do that, then we could have a better conversation about prevailing wage.
Thompson: During committee testimony on the bill to exempt school projects from prevailing wage, there were a wide range of numbers stated regarding the percentage of total cost of a construction project that is labor costs. I heard a number as low as four percent and a number as high as 50 percent. Do you know?
Kirkpatrick: I don’t. But I know it does vary pretty widely.
ON PUBLIC EDUCATION
Thompson: I want to ask you about a cynical statement I often hear said about Nevada. It’s this: from gaming on down, we are mostly a blue-collar, service worker state. And the white-collar guys working on the top floors in the big executive offices really don’t care that much about K-12 or higher education because the majority of their employees don’t really need to be all that well-educated. What do you have to say about that?
Nevada Assembly Minority Leader Marilyn Kirkpatrick, D-North Las Vegas, speaks at a press conference on the steps of the Legislative Building in Carson City, Nev., on Monday, Feb. 23, 2015.
Photo by Cathleen Allison
Kirkpatrick: Yes, that is what a lot of people say. And I actually think that is a fair criticism, because in reality we are largely a service-based state, right? Service workers don’t need bachelor’s degrees. But then, education today comes in a lot of different forms. Vocational education is very important to blue-collar industries, and I think those white-collar folks do realize that. For example, technology has changed how we do things. Now in restaurants, people have point of sale machines and you have to know how to work one. And in a factory in advanced manufacturing, people do not just walk a worker up to a $23 million machine and say, “Hey, make it work.” You have to learn how to operate it. I’m a big believer that not every kid needs to be college bound. But there should be an educational track for everyone.
Thompson: So, that brings us around to the Read by Three initiative Governor Sandoval is behind, a strong focus on reading and literacy by third grade and beyond. Do you support Read by Three?
Kirkpatrick: I’m a big believer. In my district, I have sponsored Nevada Reading League every single year at every single school because. Reading is a big… maybe the biggest component of how and why you succeed in life. And no matter where you are going later in your education or your work life, reading is just so basic to what you will do.
Thompson: Did you like to read when you were growing up?
Kirkpatrick: Well, I didn’t, you know… I guess I did sometimes read the Cliff’s Notes (laughs), but if I found things that I liked, yes, I would read. I liked history. I liked government. I did very well at those. And actually, there’s a funny story about my sister related to that. I had to write a report in fifth grade on Ben Franklin. And there I was at home, copying everything right out of the encyclopedia, and my sister – I thought she was the meanest person at the time – she took my report and she says, “You’re cheating” and she ripped it up. And then she got all my books out, and she said, “OK, now read them all, and when you’re done, then you write your report.” And that was really the first time someone instilled in me that you’ve got to know the facts, first, before you can tell someone else the story.
Thompson: So we have your sister to thank for the Marilyn Kirkpatrick we all know and love?
Kirkpatrick: I will never forget it because my teacher Mr. Highland said, “This is a good piece of work.” And my sister said, “Only because I made her do it five times.” And so, I did come to love history and civics. I read Frederick Douglas on slavery, things like that. That’s what made me want to read, to learn more. And now, ironically, I have a daughter who really is not much of a reader. She loves art. So when she was in second grade, after a time, I begged her teacher, “Can we just think outside the box and let her do book reports on Diego Rivera and some of these artists she likes?” and her teacher said, “It’s not in the curriculum.” And I’m like, “Come on.” So on my own, at home, I did it myself and that’s how I actually got her interested in reading. Focusing on things that were important and interesting to her. And so I think we’ve gotten away from letting teachers teach, including letting them figure out how to work with each student and finding ways to get kids motivated and excited.
Thompson: Did you ever think about going into teaching?
Kirkpatrick: No. I don’t know what I thought I wanted to be when I grew up. All I can say is that my favorite cartoon was Schoolhouse Rock “I’m Just a Bill” and “How a Bill Becomes a Law.” I still like it.
Thompson: Well, you may not have known then that you wanted to be a lawmaker, but the connection seems obvious, now.
Kirkpatrick: Yeah, right?
ON PUBLIC SERVICE
Thompson: As I’ve watched the committee hearings this session, I’ve noted your frequent references to the fact that this is your last session. What has been the most satisfying part of serving as a state lawmaker?
Kirkpatrick: You actually might be surprised when I tell you. So, it’s really weird, but for me I went into this not knowing much. I wasn’t the chosen candidate. And I wasn’t someone that had always been involved in politics, so…
Thompson: You’re saying you weren’t asked to run and that you were not an anointed candidate by the proverbial powers that be?
Kirkpatrick: Right. I was just the every day girl next door who had been busy in her district – which I didn’t even know at the time was my district – but as I went about my business, I started to learn a little bit about policy. I came to understand it. And it changed my view of things. So, that’s been very satisfying for me on this journey. Also, I’ve really enjoyed the chance to bring new people along. I am truly excited for the next generation of leaders, because I think that at least on the Democratic side, there are some who are ready to lead. They have learned so much, and they are polished. It’s been great for me to be able to bring other women alongside me and watch them grow and begin to move up.
Thompson: Are you willing to name names? Who are the bright stars of the Nevada Democratic party?
Kirkpatrick: Well, you have Teresa Benitez-Thompson. And you have Olivia Diaz, who is also doing an amazing job this time around. And Maggie Carlton has excelled in Ways and Means and has really become well rounded. And Irene Bustamante does a really great job. And when you put all of them together, they make a great team of women because they all have different strengths. I think they will each go far.
Thompson: What has been your biggest disappointment over the years?
Kirkpatrick: Well, I think it was losing civility in the 2011 session. It became very partisan. For me that was the hardest one.
Thompson: To what did you attribute that loss of civility? Who did you blame?
Kirkpatrick: I blamed the process. And I blamed term limits, you know, for encouraging good and decent people to leave the Legislature and run for other things and move on. And I also blame people for not being really engaged in the Legislature and the policy.
Marilyn Kirkpatrick Photo by Cathleen Allison
Thompson: What people do you mean?
Kirkpatrick: I mean lawmakers who are obviously not really that engaged with policy and issues. And I’m referring to having so many freshmen. I think that year, 2011, we had 13 freshmen, which was really tough. We had to come in to session and immediately we were facing a budget deficit and cuts along with other important issues. And I was struck more than ever, how you’ve really got to be engaged all year long and be on to top of things to really do a good job.
Thompson: How has being in office changed you? Has it made you more optimistic or more cynical? Or has it changed you at all?
Kirkpatrick: Well, I came in pretty balanced and wanting to work with everybody, and I don’t think that has changed. And really, I have had a great time. There were bad times, too, but I learned from it. I do sometimes ask my friends, and I asked my husband, too, am I the same person I was in 2005? And he said, “Yes, except for you’ve grown. You’ve grown in your knowledge of policy.” So, I’m the same person. And I’m comfortable with leaving.
Thompson: You are?
Kirkpatrick: Yes. There are lots of opportunities, but I don’t have to pursue them and I don’t know if I will. I feel very fulfilled.
THE FUTURE
Nevada Assembly Minority Leader Marilyn Kirkpatrick, D-North Las Vegas, holds her granddaugher Emma Krumme, 2, while talking with Majority Leader Paul Anderson, R-Las Vegas, on the floor before opening day ceremonies at the Legislative Building in Carson City, Nev., on Monday, Feb. 2, 2015. Photo by Cathleen Allison
Thompson: Are you going to take some time off after this session to regroup or do you have some kind of game plan?
Kirkpatrick: Well, I go right back to work, because I do have that day job (laughs).
Thompson: Right. But I mean in terms of politics, do you think you’ll take a break or is there something on the back burner that you’re already thinking about? Running for Clark County Commission has been thrown out there with your name a time or two. Do you see yourself at some point sitting in one of those chairs?
Kirkpatrick: Here’s what I’ll say. I’m going to look at all opportunities and if one opportunity can actually allow me to grow with my day job more than another, that would be something to consider because in my job, due to serving in the Legislature, I have been sort of stagnant for awhile. So nothing is off the table, but I’m going to be methodical. Because whatever it is has to fit with where I am in my life, and I’m in a very good spot right now. I have my kids in the house and my grandkids, and it would be fun just to spend some time with them and my husband.
Thompson: Before we wrap, anything else you’d like to say?
Kirkpatrick: That the Legislature has been amazing, and I have had a great time. And that I’m really… I’m sad to leave because I truly love the institution, and I truly love this state.