During the 2009 Legislative Session, only 11 of Nevada’s 63 lawmakers compiled voting records that were generally friendly to Silver State taxpayers, a new report from the Nevada Policy Research Institute finds.

Geoffrey Lawrence, a fiscal policy analyst with the NPRI and the report’s author, based his analysis on the ranking system that the National Taxpayers Union uses to rate members of Congress. His report, titled “The 2009 Nevada Legislative Session: Review and Report Card,” also includes a detailed review of the session, documenting the events that culminated in the largest single-session tax increase in state history.

The rankings were based on a scale of 0 through 100, with the high end of the scale indicating a greater commitment to keeping taxes low and limiting the growth of government. Assemblyman Ed Goedhart, a Republican, earned the distinction of “taxpayer’s best friend” with a score of 95.54 percent, while Sen. Bob Coffin, a Democrat, posted the lowest score at 16.43 percent. Fifty-two of the 63 legislators from both legislative houses accumulated scores below 50 percent.

The full report is available at www.npri.org/docLib/20090924_2009LedgeReportCard-Web.pdf.

Underlying documentation for the rankings of lawmakers is available at www.npri.org/docLib/20090924_Fiscal_report_card_spreadsheets.xls.