Quid Pro Quo, Gorelow?

Democratic Nevada Assemblywoman Michelle Gorelow (AD-35) is refusing to comment after the Las Vegas Review Journal published an exposé highlighting Gorelow’s immediate hiring by a national nonprofit after Nevada lawmakers earmarked and approved $250,000 to the organization in Assembly Bill 525.

As reported by the Review Journal:

A state lawmaker was hired as the director of a nonprofit just a month after legislators voted to appropriate hundreds of thousands of state funds to the organization.

Earlier this summer, Assemblywoman Michelle Gorelow, a Democratic lawmaker representing the southwest valley, announced that she had been hired as Arc of Nevada’s executive director. Just weeks earlier, lawmakers voted to appropriate $250,000 to the organization.

Arc of Nevada, an advocacy group for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, was included in a last-minute amendment to Assembly Bill 525 — a bill earmarking state funds for more than 50 nonprofit organizations — which passed in June.

It’s the first time the group has received an appropriation from the Legislature, according to the Legislative Counsel Bureau.

In a statement, Better Nevada spokesman John Burke said the proximity of Gorelow’s employment to the passage of AB 525 raises questions about the assemblywoman’s ethical conduct.

“The people of our state deserve to know whether or not she is using her office to profit personally from taxpayer-funded appropriations,” Burke said in a statement.

As the legislative branch is exempt from the state’s public records law, attempts by Governor Lombardo’s Better Nevada PAC to secure communications between Gorelow and the nonprofit were unsuccessful.

Assm. Gorelow only secured her 2022 reelection by 382 votes making her seat is a prime target for the NVGOP to flip the district and chip away at the Democratic supermajority in the Assembly. According to Nevada’s Secretary of State, Democrats hold a slight advantage over Republicans in registered voters but nonpartisans hold the majority in the southwest district outside of Las Vegas.