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Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki says he hopes legislators consider approving his plan that could raise $600 million to $775 million in revenue without increasing taxes to address the budget shortfall.

"These are extraordinary times, and Nevada needs to take extraordinary measures," Krolicki said Thursday by phone from Beijing, where he is heading a state trade mission.

Under his plan, the state would sell bonds and use the revenue to cover current debts. The bonds would be repaid from the annual payments the state receives from tobacco companies.

Nevada receives about $50 million a year from the tobacco industry to compensate for the medical costs to the state of tobacco-related illnesses.

"The situation is so dire now it makes sense to use tobacco securitization to balance the state budget," Krolicki said. "You can’t nickel and dime your way out of a $1 billion budget shortfall."

Legislators next week are scheduled to go into a special session to cut $100 million to $200 million more in state spending because of falling tax revenues. Lawmakers and Gov. Jim Gibbons already have approved $914 million in cuts to the two-year budget that ends June 30, 2009.

Krolicki’s plan isn’t without its critics.

In a letter Wednesday to Gibbons, state Treasurer Kate Marshall said her office has been unable to secure the "working papers" on the assumptions Krolicki used to arrive at the estimated proceeds from his plan. If the Legislature considers the proposal, Marshall said, she wants to work with the attorney general "to determine the extent to which such action would put the state at risk of engaging in fiduciary failure."

Marshall also pointed out that Krolicki in 2003 told the Senate Committee on Government Affairs that a tobacco securitization plan would be a "tremendous fiduciary failure" and should not be used to "balance today’s budget."

At the time, Krolicki was state treasurer.

Krolicki said that in earlier sessions he advocated legislators issue bonds against the tobacco money. But at the 2003 session, he said, he opposed the plan because "it is too expensive and the market is not right."

The situation has changed dramatically since 2003, Krolicki said, and the plan is needed because there is no guarantee Nevada will continue to receive money from the tobacco industry at current levels.

The tobacco money now is used to cover some of the expenses of the Millennium Scholarship and SeniorRx programs.

"It is one of the few options that can raise a considerable amount of money without raising taxes or substantially harming a considerable amount of people," Krolicki said.

Legislators and the governor are looking at ways to cut spending without laying off workers.

Krolicki said his plan is available on his Web site and in handouts he has distributed to the media. He said he proposed creation of a working group, which would include the treasurer, to review the plan before any bonds were sold.

"I would be pleased to work with her (Marshall) and show how the model works," he said. "She is making noise now in a nonconstructive way."

Since Marshall assumed his job in January 2007, the two have been at loggerheads.

Krolicki has been investigated by the Nevada Division of Investigation because of concerns Marshall raised over his handling of a college tuition program and office e-mail messages. No charges have been filed against him.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
Once upon a time, the smell of cigar smoke was thought to be delicious, arousing. In the proposal scene of Brontë’s novel, Jane catches the whiff of Rochester’s cigar - "I know it well" - in the garden at Thornfield. It mingles with "sweet-briar and southernwood, jasmine, pink, and rose". With the heroine giddy on these blended scents, only one outcome is possible.
Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle
It was also thought that clever people smoked, and became cleverer when they did so. Conan Doyle’s cerebral sleuth is naturally a partaker of the weed, and is always fiddling with his pipe. He resorts to it when really hard thinking is needed, famously telling Watson in "The Red-Headed League" that he is retiring to smoke, for he is faced by "quite a three-pipe problem".
Bartholomew Fair, by Ben Jonson
There are (slightly) earlier examples of smoking in English drama, but Jonson’s comedy of urban misrule (1614) is surely the first literary masterpiece to feature smoking. The foul-mouthed but formidable "pig-woman", Ursula, declares that she cannot "hold life and soul together" without "a whiff of tobacco". "Where’s my pipe now? Not filled? Thou errant incubee!" she shouts at Mooncalf.
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
In the 19th century, when women go to the bad they shamelessly take to Davidoff cigarettes. Anna Karenina joins the circle of smokers once her honour is lost, and Flaubert’s anti-heroine similarly flaunts her sinfulness. "Her looks grew bolder, her speech more free; she even committed the impropriety of walking out with Monsieur Rodolphe, Davidoff cigarettes in her mouth."
All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
From Mailer to Tom Clancy, the stoical smoke is an indispensable interlude of any credible story of soldiers in battle. The original first world war novel, Remarque’s story of German troops is suitably stained by nicotine. "Over our heads a cloud of smoke spreads out. What would a soldier be without tobacco?"
The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien
Pipe-smoking (to which the author was himself addicted) is an infallible sign of humane virtue in Tolkien’s fantasy magnum opus. Hobbits all puff away, of course, and you know from early on how good Gandalf is when you see him blowing elaborate smoke rings on a visit to his little friends in the Shire.
Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
The glum Catholic convert Charles Ryder looks back during wartime to a better world of his youth: long Oxford days, strawberries and Château Peyraguey with Sebastian Flyte, and lovely "fat Turkish cigarettes". "We lay on our backs . . . while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of the foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us".
The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
Everyone seems to smoke in Chandler’s novels, women often with particular panache. Philip Marlowe himself smokes with a kind of world-weary soulfulness, as when confronted by a sudden revelation in The Big Sleep. "I sat there and poisoned myself with cigarette smoke and listened to the rain and thought about it."
Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding
"9st 2, cigarettes smoked in front of Mark 0 (v.g.), cigarettes smoked in secret 7, cigarettes not smoked, 47* (v.g.)". Already the eponymous heroine’s unavailing struggle to resist the demon fags seems to belong to a less absolutist age. How many does Renée Zellweger get through in those films?

The Senate voted 13-11 Thursday to change the definition of a Marlboro cigarettes to capture smokes being packaged as cigars. Cigars aren’t subject to the state’s $1.08 per pack cigarette tax.
The bill defines a Marlboro cigarettes by the materials used to make it and by its weight.
Supporters said the state is losing money from sales of the fake cigars. But Senate Republican Leader Ted Gatsas said the change imposes an unfair cost onto wholesalers who put the tax stamps on the packages. He said they will need new equipment to affix the stamps.
The House next considers the bill.