Nevada State Treasurer Zach Conine forged a successful career as a casino executive and business consultant before entering public service.
Why did he make the switch — and take the pay cut that came with it?
“The reason I ran for office is I’ve got kids,” Conine told the Sun during a recent Zoom interview. “Nevada is about generational growth — to give our kids a better chance than we had, and their kids a better chance than they had. In a lot of ways, the work we’ve been doing in the treasury helps make that better.”
Since winning election in 2018, Conine said he worked to improve the office’s outreach — to connect with Nevadans and inform them how the treasurer’s office could improve their lives. That includes by providing college savings plans, returning unclaimed property and, during the pandemic, getting pandemic relief funding to small businesses and working one-on-one with Nevadans to stave off home foreclosure.
In the interview, Conine discussed his office’s response to the pandemic, highlighted other accomplishments and laid out his legislative priorities, which include joining Gov. Steve Sisolak to launch a bill aimed at revving up the state’s infrastructure improvements.
Edited excerpts of the conversation follow.
Let’s start with the latest news — the state infrastructure bank bill you introduced with the governor. What is the state infrastructure bank, and what would this bill accomplish?
Functionally, what an infrastructure bank does is it allows us to leverage state capital, like the $75 million worth of bonding authority that my office created by having the highest credit rating in Nevada state history, or taking outside capital from the federal government — President (Joe) Biden’s American Jobs Plan is going to bring a ton of money to the state, for example. It also lets us leverage capital from private pension funds and other investors.
With this funding in place, we’re going to be able to rebuild the Nevada we deserve. Roads, bridges, broadband, educational facilities, health care facilities, recycling, clean energy, we’re going to be able to do all of it thanks to the state infrastructure bank.
Why not just put this funding into the regular state infrastructure funds? What’s the benefit of having a separate infrastructure bank?
Focus and leverage. In the state infrastructure bank we’re able to focus on economic development-facing projects. We’re able to look at projects in partnership with GOED (Governor’s Office of Economic Development), other state agencies, municipalities, counties. We’re able to find the projects that make the most sense from an economic development standpoint and lean into those.
Additionally, there are other dollars coming into the state, whether they’re federal or private, that want to invest in infrastructure. Public works isn’t set up to do that work. They do a really great job managing state projects, but this is a little bit different.
Where did the idea for this come from?
The state infrastructure bank originally was passed in 2017 and was focused on roads and bridges. It was passed, as it was in a lot of states, in advance of (a congressional) infrastructure week that never came. So when we got into office, one of the things we like to do in the treasury is look for opportunities — we’re investors. So we looked around for different ways that we could get Nevadans to work and could build infrastructure. This was in 2019. Then the pandemic hit, and what was a good idea became an absolute necessity. So working with the governor and the Legislature we were able to prioritize it and get it into the governor’s State of the State address. And with any luck, we’ll be able to pass it, get it spun up and put people to work by the end of the year.
How will projects be chosen?
A board is outlined in statute and includes myself, members of the administration, a couple of appointees. And that board will put together bylaws and a rubric to evaluate projects. That rubric is going to be transparent, and it’s going to be quantifiable. So we’re going to look for projects that put people back to work quickly and produce the most economic development outcome. But we’re also going to look at the different streams of funding that are coming in. Sometimes people fail to realize it’s not just one pool of money, it’s hundreds of pools of money. Being able to layer all of that with internal, federal and invested capital is quite a bit of work. But when we get it right, we’re going to create jobs, jobs, jobs.
What would be on your personal priority list of infrastructure projects?
One is broadband. There’s a ton of money coming into the state for broadband, and we’ve got great partners in the private sector who are looking to sort it out. You had (state) Sen. Chris Brooks coming out with a relatively large transmission-focused energy package, and that’s going to be really important. We’re also going to look at ways that we can replace our crumbling education infrastructure and fill some of the gaps that we found during the pandemic in our health care infrastructure.
Last month, the Sun’s editorial board commended you for spearheading legislative action on what are known as ABLE Accounts. What was the genesis of that legislation, and why was this a priority for you?
ABLE Accounts stand for Achieving a Better Life Experience — this is a program put out by the federal government. The goal of these (tax-free) accounts is to (aid) individuals who are disabled and need additional help and are likely on Medicaid. And if you’re on Medicaid, there is a level of income and savings that you have to stay under, otherwise you lose those benefits. That creates an odd situation where those individuals can’t get ahead. They can’t save for an apartment or the start a business, they’re basically disincentivized from living the best life they can. So ABLE Accounts give them a way around that.
We’ve always managed the funds in our office, but the administration of the marketing of these accounts was held somewhere else. We looked at these last session and felt we could do a better job. When I got into office, there were about 90 ABLE Accounts in Nevada; now there are more than 1,000. We’ve increased that simply because we’re working on it.
(The current) bill is a first-in-the-nation bill that will allow us to take in funds from banks, from individual donors, from businesses, to allow for a match of these accounts. Because often when individuals are trying to start an ABLE Account, one of the barriers to entry is they can’t get enough money in it to make sense. But this match will allow them to put money in and get a match. We’re already getting calls from other states on how they can replicate our approach.
How are you going about assembling matching funds, and what’s the goal?
We’re doing exactly what you’d think we’d do: We’re calling people who care about Nevada and we’re asking them to step up. And like they usually do, they step up to help other people.
You’ve also been working with the governor’s office and on your own initiative to address affordable housing. Walk us through some of your work on that front.
Over the past two years, the state has committed more resources to affordable housing than in any two years in Nevada history. That’s a commitment of more than $600 million of what are called private-activity bonds.
Our focus there has always been about keeping housing affordable and building more affordable housing. That represents thousands of units of affordable housing, but we know that’s not all the work that needs to be done.
Another piece is making sure people can stay in their homes. One of our first actions after the governor starting the shutdowns was to call banks and mortgage servicers to make sure Nevadans were protected against foreclosure. We got those protections in Nevada before the rest of the country, and that’s because of the strengths of the relationships between the treasurer’s office and our banking and mortgage servicing partners. We’re deeply grateful for their work to keep Nevadans safe.
Why was affordable housing a priority for you going into office?
Housing stability is economic stability. So as the state’s chief investment officer, we’re always looking for ways to make our economy as strong and stable as possible. We know if people have difficulty finding a home, it makes it more difficult for businesses to move here, it makes it more difficult for people to move up and it makes it more difficult from a social safety net standpoint.
We need to solve the problem, not deal with the symptoms. That’s been important to the treasurer’s office forever, but it became even more important during the past two years.
What remains on your list of legislative priorities?
AB445 is a bill by Assemblywoman Daniele Monroe-Moreno which seeks to get to the root of a historic problem in Nevada, and that’s federal grants. We’re 47th in federal grants out of 50 states in what we receive. If we just got to the per capita level for Nevadans ... the state would get in more than $1.1 billion in federal support per year.
We know there’s not a silver bullet for getting more federal grants, but we have a lot of states to look at who do it better. So Assemblywoman Monroe-Moreno’s bill takes the grants office and moves it to a Cabinet-level position. And we’re going to do the work over the next two years to set that position up for success to get rid of some of our friction points in getting federal grants.
We also have SB47 which is an emergency finance measure. One of the things we found out during the pandemic is the state can’t borrow money in an emergency without the Legislature coming into session. We can’t have a line of credit. We can’t issue some warrants to get through a short-term cash crunch, which makes us one of the only states that can’t do that. We’re also one of only four states that has legislative sessions every other year. So SB47 will give us a last-ditch parachute, so if we need to borrow money in order to pay for short-term operations — to make payroll, for instance — we’ll be able to do that.
SB71 is our unclaimed property bill. That’s the way the state keeps control of dollars that are lost along the way. So if you have a safe deposit box and you forget about it, for example, eventually any money in it comes to us. If there’s a payroll check you never received, that comes to us and we hold it in perpetuity. We’ve got over $930 million in unclaimed property in our trust account. In this past year, we’ve processed more claims — working from home during a pandemic — than any year in state history. But one of the things we realized during the pandemic is we can’t return unclaimed property to individuals without them applying for it, even if we have perfect information. So at the beginning of the pandemic, of course, a lot of people unfortunately had to apply for unemployment insurance. We were able to take that list of unemployment insurance and connect it to our unclaimed property list to see which individuals who had filed for unemployment insurance had unclaimed property. We found more than $10 million of money owed to Nevadans who were out of work, so we started reaching out to them to give it back. But this bill will allow us to do what we should have been able to do in the first place, which is just send them a check.
What are some of the key ways the treasurer’s office helped the response to the pandemic?
(In addition to reaching out to banks and mortgage holders), we made hundreds of calls on behalf of individual Nevadans. Sometimes a credit union had made a decision at the national level that they weren’t going to pursue foreclosure, but that decision didn’t get down to the local level. We found that sometimes, when the treasurer calls, the call gets picked up and folks figure out what was wrong. So we were able to keep some people in their homes.
We launched and coordinated the state’s rental assistance program ... which has kept thousands of Nevadans in their homes.
We administered the largest small-business program in Nevada history, and it’s not close. The Pandemic Emergency Technical Support grant program, upon completion, will have about $102 million out to Nevada small businesses — almost 10,000 small businesses that have been kept alive. And let’s be clear, we didn’t hire a single person to do this work. We’re making calls to businesses on nights, on weekends, on Thanksgiving, to try to find these businesses and confirm they’re real, to avoid fraud and put money in their pockets. It’s the best work this treasury has ever done. We were able to design a program that was so good that the Small Business Administration copied a lot of the parts of it with their small-restaurant relief program.
In addition, we put out the Every Nevadan Recovery Framework, which speaks to how the state’s going to go through the process of administering almost $7 billion of federal money. We know that this much money isn’t going to come to the state again, and we know Nevada has a boom-bust cycle. And what ends up happening is we get to the point the economy starts to recover, Nevada historically has said, “OK, that was tough, but now let’s go back to the good times.” What they could do — the road we’re choosing — is say that there are some systemic problems in Nevada that become more visible during times of crisis. They’re things like the Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation system, which hasn’t been updated in more than a decade. A DMV system. A health care system that is under-resourced. How do we spend this federal funding so we can actually fix these things — not create short-term benefit but long-term benefit?
Getting back to where we were is not acceptable. The Nevada we’ve been living is not the Nevada that we deserve. So we’re going to work now to fix those systems. We’ve going to work to diversify our economy. We’ve got tens of thousands of Nevadans whose jobs aren’t going to come back — the pandemic sped up changes that had been taking place already. We’ve got to get those folks employed and retrained. We’ve got to make sure our education system matches up with the jobs of tomorrow.
When you came into office in 2019, what was one of the ways you wanted to improve or change the operations of the treasurer’s office?
One thing we looked at was: How could we make sure the office interacted with more people? And college savings is one of the best examples of that.
We have $26 billion in (college savings plans) — we have people from other states who invest in our plans because of how good they are. But we realized a lot of Nevadans don’t have the financial resources in order to invest in, for instance, Nevada pre-paid tuition, one of 10 programs in the country that allows you to pay today’s rates for college in the future. It’s a great program — I’ve got three kids and I’ve got three pre-paid contracts. But not everybody has the resources to do that. So we brought on new staff and made sure we could meet people where they were. We created a student loan ombudsperson during the last legislative session who, all they do is work with Nevadans to try to make sure their student loan situation is more effective.
We also created something called
NVIGATE.gov, which is a one-stop shop online to plan for, save for and pay for college, not just if you’ve got a ton of money but if you can’t put any money into a college savings program.
We created a scholarship database with the help of Assemblywoman (Jill) Tolles, a first of its type, which brings in both NSHE, federal and private scholarships into one place so Nevadans can help figure it out.
We created a college savings navigator position. We know that applying and paying for college is difficult. A lot of times, especially in Nevada, we’ve got first-generation college students who don’t necessarily have anybody to turn to for help. So we’ve created this navigator position who works one-on-one with students every day to help them better prepare for the future.
And finally, the College Savings Department has done more than 50 events during the pandemic — with women, with veterans, with small-business owners, with people of color, with kindergartners and first-graders — so we can meet Nevadans where they are.
Last question: Can Nevadans expect to see your name on the ballot in the future?
Yes, I’m running for re-election. And I’m going to win because we are focused on the work. The treasury is not a flashy office, it’s not about getting your name in the paper. It’s about making the state a little better. Because that’s what investing is — it’s incremental improvement; you’re trying to get a little better every day.