State of Nevada

Nevada was admitted to the Union in 1864 — the only state ever admitted in the middle of a presidential election year, ratified to provide an additional electoral vote and an additional senator to the Lincoln administration during the closing months of the Civil War. The state has been governed from Carson City since territorial days, and from the 1871 capitol since the building was completed. Across the next century and a half Nevada became the seventh-largest American state by area and the thirty-first by population, with roughly three-quarters of its 3.2 million residents living in Clark County and the Las Vegas valley.

The state government operates the standard three branches — an executive branch headed by the governor and including a cabinet of constitutional officers; a bicameral legislature meeting biennially; and a judicial branch headed by the Nevada Supreme Court — together with the dozens of cabinet departments, divisions, and agencies through which the state delivers transportation, education, public safety, health and human services, regulatory functions, taxation, and the various other operations a state government is responsible for. Total state employment runs to approximately thirty thousand people across departments, divisions, boards, and commissions.

What distinguishes the State of Nevada as an operating government is the geographic and demographic asymmetry of the state itself: most of the population, most of the tax base, and most of the regulated commercial activity are concentrated in one metropolitan area five hundred kilometres from the capital, while the operational reach of the state government extends across an area larger than the United Kingdom. Most state-government operations therefore happen in a divided posture — policy and central administration in Carson City, large-scale service delivery in Las Vegas — and the operational discipline required to run a state across that geography is materially different from the discipline of a more concentrated state government.

The practice has worked with the State of Nevada in Carson City on Lean process implementation across operations.