Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley today made good on her promise to begin getting some grassroots attention on the state’s ever-shrinking budget. At a news conference at the Grant Sawyer state office building, Buckley announced a series of town hall meetings throughout Nevada to examine the state’s budget and get idea for funding it, as well as setting priorities for state spending and coming up with a realistic rainy day fund to avoid the boom-and-bust cycle of state budgeting.

“In our state, I think we’re lacking vision and leadership,” Buckley said. She aims to provide the same by asking regular folk what they think the state ought to be spending its money on, and where that money should come from. And while she did mention reviewing and perhaps eliminating some tax exemptions, she specifically said she wasn’t bringing new taxes to the table.

“I am not proposing new taxes through this process,” she said.

Damn it all. For a second, we thought it was taxing time!

The meetings — one set for Sept. 29 in Las Vegas and another Oct. 6 in Reno — are interesting inasmuch as its usually the governor who sets the tone for the state’s future. But since Nevada is saddled with Gov. Jim “No Tax McCuttington” Gibbons for as much as two long years, give or take a recall, others clearly are taking up the slack.

“I’d say we haven’t seen a lot of leadership or vision coming from the governor’s office,” Buckley said.

Now, the cynical among us might add things up thusly: A tour of Nevada + chatting about the future of the state + a term-limited, high-profile speaker + criticizing the Republican incumbent = Buckley for governor! But the speaker demurred on future political plans.

“This is about coming up with solutions before the next Legislative session,” she said. “I am speaker for the state of Nevada, not just for Clark County.” And while we tried, like, 40 times to get Buckley to admit some gubernatorial connection to her tour, we were unsuccessful.

Some might say that Buckley’s approach is simplistic: Getting community buy-in to a set of discrete goals that lead to prioritizing state spending and decisions that flow from that process is pretty much common sense, right? It’s what businesses do when they devise mission statements, or vision statements, or mantras, or whatever. But given that this is Nevada, where the spending seems to go where the most powerful lawmakers can tug it in the last 12 hours of a legislative session, the common-sense approach just might be worth a try.