I want to talk about unemployment insurance. First off, I hear you, and I promise I will continue to do everything I can to help solve these issues caused by the unprecedented pandemic that has been devastating for so many NV families.

To understand the full scope of what our State is experiencing re: unemployment claims, I want to share some context:
More than 300,000 of our fellow Nevadans have applied for unemployment benefits over the last 30 days. That’s one in every ten Nevadans.

In the weeks between March 14th and April 4th, Nevada saw the three highest numbers of initial weekly unemployment insurance claims on record for our state.

In the week ending on April 4th, over 79,000 Nevadans filed initial unemployment insurance claims. That is nearly nine times as many initial weekly claims as the highest week in the Great Recession, which was 8,900 in January 2009.

I say all this to demonstrate the magnitude of what we are facing right now. And we’re not alone. All across the country, states are facing record-breaking job losses and unemployment claims

I ask my staff to bring me your messages every night. Many have said they can’t get through on the phones, even after calling all day. Others have expressed frustration with password resets or that the website is too slow to file. These are real concerns and I hear them.

I know this is hard. I get your frustration, too. I remember when my Dad was laid off from his job and what that meant to our family. Every night, I think about this.

We’ve brought in some experts to look at our system, and the analysis showed what we expected to be true: the system was never set up to handle this volume of calls and claims. If I could wave a wand tomorrow and start this system over from scratch I would.

Unfortunately, that analysis also showed that a complete overhaul at this time would prohibit Nevadans from filing for an extended period of time, and would do more harm than good. But we are doing all we can -- and we have some updates.

Today I instructed DETR to backdate all unemployment claims to the earliest date of eligibility, back to 3/15/20. Whenever your application was submitted you will be paid retroactively & there’s no more action to take for this to go thru if youve already filed your initial claim