AINEWS
The Clark County Education Association says the carve out has cost K 12 schools more than $350 million since 2010, and could now raise $500 million a year.
Nevada's largest teachers' union is asking state lawmakers to end a 16-year-old sales-tax carve-out that lets data centers skip a school tax most other businesses and consumers already pay.
The Clark County Education Association unveiled an 8-point plan at a Wednesday press conference at union headquarters in east Las Vegas, calling on data centers to pay more toward K-12 public education. The plan's lead measure would end the Local School Support Tax exemption for data centers. The LSST is the 2.25-cent-on-the-dollar levy that consumers pay on most retail purchases in Nevada and that the state routes, in large part, to K-12 funding.
CCEA Executive Director John Vellardita said the minimum the state could capture is $500 million a year for K-12 if data centers paid the LSST the way retailers and consumers do. CCEA President Kristin Nigro said more than $350 million that could have gone to education was foregone over the 16 years the carve-out has been in effect. Both figures are the union's own estimates, not an audited state fiscal number; CCEA's framing should be read as the union's opening bid, not the legislature's baseline.
The carve-out dates to Senate Bill 170, passed in 2010 as Nevada was recruiting its first large data-center tenants. SB 170 put data centers inside a broader tax-abatement framework now codified at NRS 360.754, which offers up to a 75% personal property tax abatement and a reduced 2% sales-and-use tax rate for 10 or 20 years. The deal is conditioned on jobs (10 full-time equivalent employees for the 10-year tier, 50 for the 20-year tier, all Nevada residents), wages ($31.57 per hour for fiscal 2026), and at least $25 million in capital investment within the first five years, according to the Governor's Office of Economic Development's data center fact sheet.
That 2010 framework predates the current AI-driven buildout. Nevada's data-center capacity has expanded sharply since the large language model cycle began, and CCEA's proposal lands in the middle of that expansion. CCEA frames data centers as a trillion-dollar industry controlled by billionaires, subsidized by Nevada while classrooms go without, a political position rather than a fiscal finding. The union says it is neither calling for a moratorium on data centers nor backing the status quo, per the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The seven other points in CCEA's plan include local siting control, water-use conditions for data centers drawing Nevada water, and power and environmental measures. News3LV reports the press conference drew a unified message from Clark County's teacher bargaining unit, with the tax carve-out as the lead fight. CCEA's water and siting measures, if enacted, would also shift who decides where large loads land on the Nevada grid.
Changing the LSST exemption requires a new bill from the Nevada Legislature. CCEA has been meeting with tech companies, the governor's office, and state lawmakers on the proposal, KOLO Las Vegas reports. The legislative clock in Carson City sets the near-term watch item: whether any legislator carries a repeal bill in the next session, and how the industry's other concessions on water, siting, or power ride along.