Rural Nevada Fighting for Independence
Inside Liberty Watch Today - Jul. 22, 2005

With all the attention on Hawthorne Nevada you would think we are important, and to the residents of this rural area it is. The (BRAC) Base Realignment and Closure commission announcement on May 13 to close our base put the community into a tailspin. This wasn’t on anyone’s radar, perhaps it should have been, but little planning had taken place to address the what if scenario of base closure.

The challenges in rural Nevada begin with location and end with urban perceptions of rural Nevada. Politicians come when they need votes and then we never see them again, and let's not forget the "special interest groups" who have the audacity to act on our behalf to impose wilderness, nuclear waste dumps and water pipelines, yet never ask what the folks who will live the outcome feel about it.

Closing the base in Hawthorne, will mean a total loss 75% of all existing jobs by 2020. A report done by the Commission on Economic Development was the result of an input output model specifically designed to study rural economic impacts. We thought we were pushing the envelope by saying that we’d end up losing 50% of primary and secondary jobs, imagine facing loss of 75% of the jobs in a town of 3500.

Mineral County can thank our Congressional staff and many others for their efforts on our behalf, even the press except for a few side trips into the no man’s land of nuclear waste have lent a hand focusing the nation on our plight as a base dependant economy. It shouldn’t be that way in Nevada; we have a great economic development team, but for some reason the Legislature is hesitant to invest in rural Nevada. We need to get the economic development offices funded with real budgets for marketing and help with infrastructures holes. Every one of the counties is different, different challenges, different solutions, different goals but they have the same challenge – no money. Rural Governments are strapped. They have unfunded mandates handed down by state and federal government, and with the Federal Government owning 78% of all the land there's no way our small privately property tax base can support these unfunded demands. 

Rural Nevadans aren’t stupid; we know there are holes in the economic structure, but getting anyone to listen that’s a challenge. No one politician can help, no one lobbyist can make the point, and it has to be a banner carried by the leadership of this state. That leadership does not exist today, the leadership to say it’s time to look seriously at the whole state, visit rural Nevada and get names and faces attached to the counties, and then get a real idea of the challenges to growth and diversification. One can only hope that many of the hopefuls running for governor and the Legislature are truly Nevada minded and want a completely healthy rural economy. The effort is worth it for the entire state, no more counties going into receivership, no more runs to interim finance for economic band aids, no more dependence on grants and one industry…but it takes that first leader to tackle the challenges of this decade for rural government—rural Nevada.

Shelley Hartmann 
Executive Director 
Mineral County Development Authority 
P.O. Box 1635 
Hawthorne, Nevada 89415 
ph: 1-775-945-5896 fax: 1-775-945-1257