TAX TRAIL: Benitez-Thompson’s Rural Nevada Bid Revives Votes for Payroll, Business and Mining Taxes

RENO, Nev. — Democrat congressional candidate Teresa Benitez-Thompson is asking voters across Northern and rural Nevada to send her to Washington, but her decade in Carson City left behind an extensive tax record that is receiving renewed scrutiny in communities where mining and other employers remain economic lifelines.

The pattern started during Benitez-Thompson’s first legislative session. In 2011, she voted for Assembly Bill 561, which prevented a scheduled reduction in Nevada’s Modified Business Tax and kept a 1.17 percent payroll tax rate on wages above the exemption threshold. The measure passed the Assembly 36-6. When the temporary structure was again scheduled to expire in 2013, Benitez-Thompson voted for Senate Bill 475, extending it for another two years. That bill passed 35-6.

Then came 2015.

Benitez-Thompson enthusiastically supported Senate Bill 483, the $1.4 billion package championed by Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval that created Nevada’s Commerce Tax, increased the Modified Business Tax, raised the cigarette tax and made several temporary taxes permanent. The Tax Foundation described the package as containing $1.4 billion in new and extended taxes over the biennium. Benitez-Thompson told colleagues she was “proud” to support the legislation, which passed with bipartisan support. 

Four years later, as Assembly Majority Leader, Benitez-Thompson helped advance Senate Bill 551, which canceled a scheduled payroll-tax reduction and was projected to generate another $98.2 million. On the Assembly floor, the Review-Journal reported that Benitez-Thompson personally read lawmakers the county-by-county education funding attached to the package before the Assembly passed it 28-13. 

But the tax provisions did not survive the courts.

In 2021, the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously ruled that portions of SB 551 were unconstitutional because the bill had passed the Senate 13-8, one vote short of the two-thirds majority required for legislation generating additional public revenue. The ruling forced Nevada to reduce the Modified Business Tax and refund excess taxes collected under the higher rate, plus interest. 

Benitez-Thompson’s record also reaches directly into an industry at the heart of the district she now wants to represent: mining.

In 2021, she supported Assembly Bill 495, creating a new gross-revenue excise tax on gold and silver mining companies. The Nevada Current reported that the levy would “effectively double” what gold and silver companies paid to the state. The final measure was a bipartisan compromise supported by some Republicans and the Nevada Mining Association, and was expected to steer roughly $300 million toward education over a biennium. 

Benitez-Thompson remains proud of that vote. During her 2026 campaign, she told The Nevada Independent that she backed the silver-and-gold mining tax even after the industry had “very effectively killed that same proposal” months earlier. She has also described her attitude toward politically risky tax increases bluntly: “Well, I could not be elected. That would be fine.”

Those fights were never abstract in rural Nevada. During an earlier 2020 battle over proposed mining-tax changes, Humboldt County Commission Chairman Ken Tipton warned that mining revenues were the county’s largest single revenue source and condemned the proposals as “a rape of the rural counties by the metropolitan areas.”

Now Benitez-Thompson is campaigning to represent those same rural counties in Congress. Her tax record is no longer buried in old Carson City journals. It is part of the choice facing voters in Nevada’s sprawling 2nd Congressional District.

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