By Pat Hickey, Reno Gazette Journal/Memo from the Middle, July 22, 2025
For the average person, the phrase “out of the frying pan and into the oven” means you’ve moved from one difficult situation to an even harder one. Not so for Jill Tolles. Jill is not your average person. Nor was she your average Nevada State legislator, or now, a typical leader of another nonprofit organization.
A former adjunct professor of Communication Studies at UNR, a faculty member of the National Judicial College, a three-term Reno Assemblywoman, and now executive director of the Guinn Center for Policy Priorities, Jill Tolles is accustomed to challenges. In fact, she welcomes them.
Leading a nonpartisan policy think tank named after popular Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn, Jill Tolles is well-suited to advance the Guinn Center’s evidenced-based solutions for Nevada — through research, public engagements and partnerships.
As a member of the Guinn Center Board myself, I had the opportunity to sit down with the former Assemblywoman and now public policy leader to assess the recent legislative session in Carson City and the role the Guinn Center played in parts of the final outcomes.
I asked Tolles about the two different roles she’s had: lawmaker and policymaker.Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.
“I am a lifelong learner,” she told me. “When you represent the state, you’re not just representing your district, and you are certainly not just representing the people that voted for you. You are making decisions that impact the whole state.”
Reflecting on her time in Carson City: “Lawmakers are bombarded with all these competing voices about what to do and what not to do. Oftentimes, those voices come from national agendas or from political partisan agendas, or from special interest groups. I felt while serving in the Legislature it’s really important to have a place you can go for factual information in order to make good decisions on behalf of everyone that you represent. While serving, I looked to the Guinn Center for unbiased information to help me formulate questions that I would ask in hearings and at times, how I would land on certain issues.”
Jill continued on the need for data-driven research and independent policy analysis, and why she agreed to lead the Guinn Center after retiring from the Legislature: “I jumped at the chance because I truly believe that in this increasingly divided environment where the polarizing ‘noise’ is so loud and where ‘interests’ pit you against each other, we need a place like the Guinn Center that helps bridge the gap.”
Hyper-partisanship has become an increasingly prickly problem both nationally and in Nevada. A recent story in Jon Ralston’s Nevada Independent highlighted an analysis of votes on hundreds of bills from the 2025 session showing that “moderate voting records were the exception, rather than the norm.”
Assemblywoman Tolles was known in Carson City for trying to erect bridges between Democrats and Republicans. She thinks bills not only have a better chance of passing with bipartisan support — they also end up being better bills.
“I think that we make better laws when we understand an issue from all the sides because it helps us to identify where you may have unintended consequences,” she said. “It helps to identify what the good and the bad outcomes potentially are of any legislation.”
The latest legislative session in Carson City saw the usual bickering and last-minute negotiations that resulted in a lack of progress on a number of crucial statewide issues.
Still, Jill Tolles was pleased with the role the Guinn Center played in many of the final policies that survived and made it into law.
“In three of the top five biggest bills that passed this session, the Guinn Center had research that was informative to that process,” she said. “And that’s our goal. We’re not advocates or lobbyists, so we don’t show up in support or opposition to bills. I’m thrilled with the fact that in some of the major pieces of legislation around housing affordability, around education, and around health care — the Guinn Center’s research was at the center of a lot of those discussions.”
The lesson from the current professor and Nevada policymaker is that “research was at the center” of those important discussions. So too, are relationships, or lack thereof. According to a soon-to-be-published Guinn Center report on effective lawmaking, the most productive session in the past fifteen years was back in 2013. Their research is correct. I know because I was the Republican Assembly leader at the time. The Democrat speaker of the Assembly, Marilyn Kirkpatrick, opened the door for cooperation with her Republican colleagues, including the governor at the time, Brian Sandoval.
According to Guinn, the 2013 session produced “the highest number of bills with bipartisan co-sponsorship, the lowest percentage of bills passed on party line votes, and the largest (97%) percentage of bills that passed with bipartisan support.” Randy Kirner, a Reno Assemblyman at the time, said about that period: “To work successfully across the aisle requires trust. With trust comes the ability to discuss and work through different perspectives. I believe when this occurs, the end result is a bill that helps and supports all Nevadans.”
Jill Tolles agrees, and she said the Guinn Center’s work has the same vision.
“We have a vested interest in good governance, and our research is only as good as those who will come together and listen and care about factual information and base their decisions on that,” she said. “We try to break down communication barriers and make sure lawmakers are encouraged to work together for better solutions for the state of Nevada.”
While the two major political parties control virtually all statewide elected offices in Nevada, the influence of nonpartisan voters interested in greater bipartisan cooperation is being felt at the ballot box.
Jill Tolles concludes by telling me she’s happy to be working with an organization without a political agenda.
“I get to focus solely on process and policy while working with incredibly intelligent people who do the actual research on a regular basis,” she said. “I’m happy to be in role for a statewide independent nonpartisan policy research center with the broad array of topics that we cover.”
Finally, I asked Jill to comment on what she thought of the quote popularized by Mark Twain who once said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” She laughed and said the Guinn Center “cross-checks itself for bias and to make sure we stay nonpartisan.”
The Reno woman who heads Nevada’s unique policy research center is comfortable taking whatever heat is given off while working in the kitchen. After all, she’s gone from the frying pan of politics to the oven baking of public policy. Such a finished product should be nourishing to us all in Nevada.
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“Memo from the Middle” is an opinion column written by RGJ columnist Pat Hickey, a member of the Nevada Legislature from 1996 to 2016.Have your say: How to submit an opinion column or letter to the editor