LAS VEGAS (KLAS) – Nevada’s republican governor Joe Lombardo expressed his frustration over the contract negotiations between the state’s largest school district and teachers’ union.

The governor called the impasse the Clark County School District announced last week a disappointment.

“It’s frustrating, and the frustrating piece on that is the unknown. So you have the instructors that have the unknown. You have the administrators that have the unknown,” Lombardo said on Tuesday.

He made those comments in Las Vegas during a Nevada Teacher of the Year award ceremony at Southwest Career and Technical Academy.

Lombardo took the stage on Tuesday to start the event and restated a position he campaigned on to the audience.

“When I ran for governor, I promised to fix the education system and that’s exactly what we’re trying to achieve today,” Lombardo said.

The governor helped pass historic funding into public education this latest legislative session as lawmakers injected $12 billion into schools.

Some of that money is to boost teacher salaries.

“Part of the reason why there are vacancies within the education environment, it’s because they don’t feel they are properly compensated. And I agree,” Lombardo said.

Before the impasse announcement, CCSD and the Clark County Education Association had been in negotiations since March for a new teacher contract.

The governor went on to say that arbitration is a long process.

“Hopefully, we’ll get an answer to that issue sooner than later. So that we can all move forward, right? The teachers get compensated appropriately and the administration has an idea of how they’re going to fund the budget,” Lombardo said.

CCSD Superintendent Dr. Jesus Jara did not speak to the media at the award ceremony.

Both sides don’t have a timeline yet on arbitration, they first have to pick an arbitrator.

Gov. Lombardo also told 8 News Now’s John Langeler that he had several meetings with CCSD and CCEA individually before they declared the impasse.

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