Board of County Commissioners– Board of County Commission Meetings - Regular Meeting

Thank you.

All right, Serena, how are we doing? Yeah, no, we're good. That's all right, you've got time. He went to breakfast. All right. Welcome, everybody. Sorry for the three-minute delay. Not really. We're going to stand with me, if you like, for Deacon Rick Minch of Our Lady of the Valley Catholic Church for our invocation.

Deacon, D-E-A-C-O-N, Rick, R-I-C-K, Minch, M-I-N-C-H. Good morning, commissioners and staff. Thank you for having me.

Let's bow our heads in prayer.

Father in heaven, we thank you for this day. We give you thanks for the gift of 250 years of our nation, the United States of America. May we continue to be one nation under your care and wisdom. Assist with your spirit of counsel and fortitude, your servant President Trump. We pray for Governor Lombardo, our legislature, our county officials, especially those in our precious Nye County. May they be enabled by your powerful protection to discharge their duties with honesty and ability. We commend to your unbounded mercy we the people of our nation, state, county, and town of Pahrump. May we be blessed in knowledge, preserved in union, and granted the peace which the world cannot give. We ask this in all things in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Amen. Thank you, sir. Okay, we're going to call this joint meeting of the Nye County Board of Commissioners at all together. And Commissioner Jabbour, would you like to lead us, sir? Yes.

Thank you, Chair. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you, Commissioner. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. And manager, let's go to number three, please.

Two, please. Item two, presentation of certificates and or plaques to seven employees honored for their years of service. Thank you for that.

Oh, and we got... If I turn it on, you can hear me.

Thank you. Thank you and welcome today. Appreciate everybody being here. So we have some plaques to recognize some people. 10 years, 10 years with the Nye County Sheriff's Office, Richard Schreier. Richard, are you here today? Sheriff, did you put him on special assignment? Okay. But thank you, Richard. Thank you. and 15 years with Nye County Sheriff's Office, Jose Parra. Is Jose here? He's on that special assignment with Richard. Oh my gosh, look at this. 20 years with the town of Pahrump, buildings and grounds, tough job. Carlos Campa, Carlos. See, he wanted you to think he was Carlos. Come on up, Carlos. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Show all your colleagues. 20 years, 25 years. No, we have a few more 20-year recipients.

Can you believe this?

Well, we all know this gentleman, 20 years with Nye County Sheriff's Office. I'm surprised he's not on special assignment. Gregory Curtin.

Yay.

Thank you so much.

Get a good look at all these people here. You know, he's on the motorcycle, and if you're speeding, you know. Okay, so, wow, 20 years. I thought he was here longer. But 20 years with natural resources. John Klinke. John Klinke, are you here? You hiding in the audience here somewhere? So John, over the years, has helped us with our resources, with everything imaginable throughout the county.

Especially water. Especially water. Go, John. Thank you, John.

Okay, we have another 20 years. Amy Kruger. Amy, come on up. Nye County Sheriff's Office.

Wow.

I heard some whining in the background, but must have been her phone. Are you sure?

I'm sure. That's all I have. No. What do you have? I have one more. What?

I have one more.

You messing with us?

No. according to this 25-year recipient with Public Works, Joseph Maness. Joseph, are you here today? Joseph?

I don't know what that is.

We're going to give him a plaque. Joseph, yes, thank you. And thank you very much.

Okay. All right. Thank you, Commissioner Jabbour. And thank all the recipients. All right, Manager, let's hit number three, please.

Item three, general public comment, up to three-minute time limit per person. Public comment will be for all matters off the agenda. Public comment must be limited to matters that are within the jurisdiction and in control of the Board of County Commissioners. Action will not be taken on the matters considered during this period unless until specifically included on an agenda as an action item.

Come on up. Anthony Greco, G-R-E-C-O. I hold in my hand a federal subpoena, which was just served to Brett and Brian, and the deliberations will start questioning a lot of people in the community that work here on August 7th. Okay, so this is not a joke, but I do want to say that I'm going to mention three people that have nothing to do with this case and that would be commissioner one, two and three. They will not be deliberated. Uh, they have nothing to do with the case. I want to stop the rumors right now because rumors hurt people and there shouldn't be rumors. You have to have facts when you're talking about important stuff. So there's about 10 people that are in the county that will be getting subpoenas for deliberation. And this case will go forward. The federal judge, the lawyers for the county said that they wanted the case dismissed. The federal judge says the case has too much merit and it will go forward.

Thank you. Sam, do we have anybody on the phone, please?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Good morning, everybody. This is Beth Borasevich, B-O-R-Y-S-E-W-I-C-H. I'm calling about what almost the entire community that is on any kind of social media will call the yard, which is now supposed to be our splash pad. The splash pad that was constructed is nothing like the flyer that was sent around. It has three cinder block walls that are, they say two feet, but it looks more like three feet, that children could potentially slip, slide into, fall, or hit, and crack a head, crack a tooth, break a bone, get a heck of a scratch. anything could be happening in there on top of that they put a chain link sense with filtering in the link for what this is the most atrocious looking thing i've ever seen i would not allow my grandchild to go in there it's like they'll get in there and there could be somebody bullying the younger kids an 18 month old could be in there just you know toddling around a whammo hits the ground That place is unsafe. I have not seen a safety record. I've not seen a report of any kind of inspection. And I've already served you guys with a formal complaint that I hope that you take and you actually follow through with what should happen, which is an investigation. Let us know what's going on. And I would like you to stop the grand opening on Friday until we have the answers for safety for the children. That's all unsafe. i care about i want those walls taken down i want this thing to be built properly and the person i think there was somebody named honey as well as the buildings and ground departments buildings and grounds should not be involved in my opinion in building anything they're supposed to maintain stuff not build it where's the architectural plans engineering plans the water plans there's nothing You guys went and took $289,000 plus an additional amount of money for the walls and built something. And I don't think any of you commissioners have been out there and looked at it. I know John has, but the other commissioners. And you allowed this. I cannot believe it. I'm like, you guys have no taste first. Second of all, we need the safety information. Thank you.

Thanks. Go ahead, Tanya. All right, we can't have clapping and stuff like that. We gotta keep it chill so we can get through everybody.

Tina Dixon, representing the SASE trainer. In 2022, I applied for a grant through the commission and was awarded a grant and have spent the last two years trying to submit the proper documentation. And I'm doing it here because I haven't gotten any response back that anything that the last bid that I sent was received, so I wanted to deliver it, and if it needs to get put in the record or whatever, but I need to close this grant so I can move on. I've worked really hard with the teams that, and I guess I'll back up. What I got the grants for was to train service dogs for veterans in Nye County, which I have done, and I have submitted paperwork in various forms to close that grant. Um, and so that's what I'm doing today is submitting that paperwork. So I don't know who to give it to.

Thank you.

I have copies for thanks.

Sam. Anybody on the phone please?

Yes. Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Hello chair. Good morning. Bruce Johnson, J-O-H-N-S-O-N. As we honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I ask this Board to remember the foundation upon which every public office in Nevada rests. The Declaration begins with the laws of nature and of nature's God. It declares that all men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. nevada carried that same principle into its constitution in 1861 nevada adopted common law as its source of jurisprudence that was carried into our article 1 section 2 where it declares all political power is inherent in people government is instituted for the protection security and the benefits Maximum law, the main object of government is protection and preservation of personal rights, private property, public liberties, and upholding the law of God, American maximum. That means authority does not begin in Carson City or in Washington or in this room. It begins with the people. Our common law heritage teaches the same lesson. Nevada adopted common law. Bear with me one second here. Nevada adopted the common law upon entering the union, including the historical institution of the grand jury, a body designed to stand between the people and the abuses of public power. The United States Supreme Court has recently affirmed constitutional limits on modern surveillance through cases such as Katz, Jones, Carpenter, and Chatterjee, reminding us that advancing technology does not diminish protections guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. And just this year, Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing in Trump vs. Slaughter, issued a reminder that reaches far beyond Washington. We have tolerated adventurous theories long enough. It is time to return all the way to the Constitution. That message is not only for federal agency, but it's for you guys as well. It is a principle for every level of government, every ordinance, budget, code, enforcement action, policy, and should be measured against the Constitution And the authority actually delegated to government. One of the oldest maxims of law teaches the welfare of the people is supreme law. And another reminds us where there is a right, there must be a remedy. Finally, scripture tells us in Micah 6, 8, he has you deal, man, what is good and what does the Lord require thee, but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God. My hope is simple that Nye County will lead by returning in both word and and deed to the Constitution honoring the common law, respecting the rights. Thank you, sir. I appreciate that AI speech. Come on down, sir.

Good morning.

Joe Opatik, O-P-A-T-I-K. Bringing ingredients from Lakeview Golf Course. to provide a brief update of projects, fundraisers, community events held at Lakeview Golf Course during the past six months. In addition to our weekly golf leagues, our monthly tournaments, Lakeview has expanded the schedule of community programs and special events. We have Blood Drive on the 25th of this month from 8 a.m. till noon. This spring, we hosted another successful car show that brought residents and visitors together for increasing activity at the golf course and clubhouse. We've also supported several community fundraisers benefiting fraternal and religious organizations. These events have allowed Lakeview to serve not only the golf facility, but also a gathering place for the wider community. Our trivia nights continue every other Friday evenings and has become a popular and dependable clubhouse activity. This month, we're beginning an indoor battle golf tournament. Contestants can chip a lightweight golf ball into a 6x6 golf scoring mat. These points and awards are presented to the top participants. This provides a safe and entertaining activity for golfers and non-golfers. The monthly golf tournament will begin August 1st For our cornhole tournaments, they will continue in the fall as the weather temperatures become more comfortable. With continued warm weather, we are actively looking for additional indoor activities that will attract residents, increase clubhouse use, and provide affordable entertainment for the community. I want to thank also Arnold Knightley for posting to the town website on a weekly basis, and Janie Reeves for posting to the tourism site. With the continued warm weather, we'll keep, oh. Read that part already, sorry. Anyway, thank you for your continued support.

Thank you, Joe, and I just want to say that that golf course is actually making money now. That's the plan.

Because of you.

Come on down, sir.

Good morning, commissioners. So when we think about the concept of what a data center is and how it affects us, we have to weigh the pros and cons like we would with any other major life decision. We have to weigh what is claimed to be gained with what has the potential to be lost. If you played a sport, let's say football, and one of your offensive guards was injured, there would be no one to protect your quarterback. In this analogy, the guard is the guardrail against bringing a data center to Nye County. The quarterback is the citizens of our community. They're all the quarterback. Speaking of this analogy, there's been a lot of rhetoric regarding data centers. You have individuals that convey strong emotion for and against. On the floor, you hear key buzzwords designed to arouse rapid response like jobs and the economy and technology and state-of-the-art closed-loop systems. And that lends itself to speculation, not only about things like how many jobs and how does the technology add any value to PROM's residents, but also what about waste? And don't closed loop systems have the capability to leak? Let's avoid speculation and let's focus on what we know from previous data centers that have been built in our country. In Fayette County, Georgia, residents were promised modern infrastructure with minimal disruption. Instead, investigators found that a QTS data center had used more than 29 million gallons of water without proper billing because of utility oversight, resulting in a massive retroactive bill. In Cheyenne, Wyoming, a metadata center promised a closed-loop cooling system, yet during construction, wastewater from that cooling system entered the city's sewage system, causing bacterial contamination and disrupting treatment operations. Reclaimed water had already been distributed to parks, golf courses, and other public spaces before the problem was discovered. And even if the developers disclose peak water demand, source of water, wastewater, chemistry, discharge destination, how can we take anything they promised but with a grain of salt? What incentive, training, or ability do they have to protect the citizens of Nye County from illness? And can they reverse that if it occurs? Looking at two recent proposals, one from Mance, which claims to use less than 300 acre feet of water, which is 98 million gallons of water per year, and the other from Osprey, which, according to a VA presentation, would use 1,600 megawatts of peak electric load, increasing by 400 megawatts for each of the next four years. That's literally 1.6 gigawatts and exceeds the 1.21 gigawatts Doc Brown's DeLorean needed to power the flux capacitor to travel through time and back to the future. Water supply, the cost of electricity, and waste contamination does not only affect the people on this side of the room, it also affects your side as well. And I thank you for your time. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. Sam, do we have anybody on the phone, please?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Come on down and preempt, please. Sorry about that.

Good morning. My name is Laura Stewart, S-T-E-W-A-R-T. And I'm here to talk a little bit about the data centers also. I have many relatives in North Dakota who own small farms who are being affected with this. And in Racine, Wisconsin, I think it's Racine, Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, they are actually filing a lawsuit against Microsoft and their $7.3 billion fair water at the data center in Mount Pleasant. And the world's most powerful data center is now at the center of the class action lawsuit filed by the nearby residents over alleged excessive noise, construction disruption, and extreme light pollution. The lawsuit filed in the District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin on July 1st alleges that people living within a proximity of 1.5 miles of the facility have been subjected to continuous industrial noise from cooling systems, HVAC equipment, generators, and construction activity. The proposed class lawsuit would include more than 1,000 households in the Sturdivant and nearby Mount Pleasant. Plaintiffs also claim bright nighttime lighting has disrupted their quality of life. At least 48 lawsuits have been filed against the AI data centers. Microsoft has acknowledged that its high-speed cooling fans produced a humming sound that traveled further than expected. The company says it implemented mitigation measures and announced on June 18th that the measure had been resolved with additional sound reduction. However, residents argue that the disturbances continue and are seeking legal action. At least 48 lawsuits have been filed. Currently, at least 75 to 142 major AI and data centers are projected to have blocked or delayed counsel due to local disputes, community protests, and government moratoriums. Data centers reportedly caused $25 billion in environmental damages last year. It's like sexual predators. Mega corporations seek to prey on the most vulnerable cities.

Thank you for that. We don't have anything on the agenda for a data center. Come on down, please.

Good morning commissioners. My name is Heather Marquez. M. A. R. Q. U. E. Z. I am a mother of six and one of three administrators for parent mother's corner. 3 years ago, our group stood before this board petitioning for a splash pad for the children and families of. When we were later told that the community would need to raise half the cost for the proposed shade structure, we accepted that challenge and organized a bake sale completely funded and staffed by local mothers. And thanks to the overwhelming support from this community, we raised the required $5,000 in a single day. This is proof that our community welcomes this project. Today, as we approach the ribbon cutting and grand opening of this project, we're left asking, what happened? And more importantly, where did the money go? As there is no shade to be seen anywhere near the splash pad or the park. The plans presented to the public showed a welcoming community space where families could gather and children could play safely. The project that is scheduled for its ribbon cutting this Friday looks dramatically different from what the public was shown, and many families feel blindsided by those changes. Beyond the appearance, many parents have legitimate questions about safety. The splash pad appears to utilize a painted concrete surface. While there may be coatings designed to improve slip resistance, parents are concerned about the lack of impact absorbing surfacing in an area designed specifically for young children, as falls are inevitable in any play environment, especially one involving water. In a rural community served solely by a critical access hospital with no dedicated pediatric unit and no dedicated trauma unit, I believe those concerns deserve careful consideration and a clear explanation from the county. I'd also like to know whether this facility has been independently reviewed for full ADA compliance, including accessible play opportunities, routes, seating, shade, and other amenities that ensure every child has the opportunity to enjoy this space. But perhaps the greatest disappointment isn't the design itself. It's the lack of communication. If budget constraints, engineering requirements, or circumstances required major changes to the original plans, the families who helped make this project possible deserved to be informed and have the ability to offer feedback. This community has repeatedly shown that it's willing to volunteer, donate, and work alongside the county. We deserve transparency when the vision presented to the public changes so significantly. So today, I respectfully ask this board to place this project on a future agenda for a public review of the design changes, an explanation of how those decisions were made, and a discussion of improvements that can still be implemented. and to please consider postponing the ribbon-cutting and grand opening of the splash pad until its safety can be verified and its construction completed to the specifications shown in the original plans. This isn't about assigning blame. It's about rebuilding trust and ensuring that the children of Pahrump receive the community space they were promised. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Sam, do we have anybody on the phone, please?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Yeah, I know. It's off.

no come on down sir tim doyle t-i-m-d-o-y-l-e uh good morning chairman commissioners and members of the public my name is tim doyle thank you for allowing me to speak several months ago i became aware of what i understood to be a recreational lake spring mountain raceway as part of my research i submit a public record request seeking information about the lake i was surprised to discover that the county approved an rv site an rv park site plan which does not identify it as a recreational lake at all it identifies it as a drainage basin A drainage basin is generally an engineered area designed to collect, temporarily store, and safely convey stormwater runoff to help reduce flooding and to protect surrounding properties. What made this discovery even more surprising is that I also located a 2014 development agreement recorded in 2021 discussing the construction of a six-acre recreational lake for public recreation and drainage control. The original lake was later removed, and the replacement water feature now appears on the approved site plan only as a drainage basin. Unlike the original lake described in the development agreement, the replacement water feature appears to be a private amenity within the RV park inside the raceway rather than a public recreational lake. However, the feature remains continuously filled, includes recreational improvements, and has been publicly depicted with a person paddle boarding. Based on the information available to me, I have not identified drainage, entering, or leaving it. I submitted three public record requests seeking permits, engineering and drainage studies, construction plans, inspections, reviews, water use records, and documentation explaining the basin's approval and classification. I included photographs identifying the feature and its recreational use. I have not received any of those records. I then submitted a county complaint concerning the apparent absence of responsive records. After receiving no response, I contacted town manager Brett Wagoneer, I did not receive a response from the town manager. A water comparison is important. Using a published Southern Nevada evaporation estimate, a six acre open water surface can lose approximately 34,800 gallons daily, or 12 million gallons annually. By comparison, the proposed Blackjack data center has been estimated, assuming dry cooling, to consume 15,000 to 55,000 gallons daily, or roughly 5 to 20 million gallons annually.

So they are equal in water usage, the data center and the lake.

These are estimates, but they illustrate why consistent public discussion of water use is appropriate. I also researched Nevada contractor licensing. For those unfamiliar with these classifications, a drainage basin is commonly associated with excavation and grading work, which may fall under A7, excavation and grading license. However, if a project is constructed as a recreational lake that impounds or stores water, Nevada also has a specific E3 classification for dams and reservoirs. Thank you, sir.

Sam, anybody on the phone, please?

Yes, Chair, the caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Good morning, commissioners. Gregory McMahon, MC, capital M-A-H-O-N. On June 5th, all of you, all five of you, voted for a moratorium on data centers. During this moratorium, you were going to come up with ordinances in the event that they would move forward, laws that would have to be in place. I'd like to know what you guys have come up with. What are you ready to present us? What I'm hoping is that we don't show up on August 4th and you have a bill to present that says, yeah, data centers can go forward if they do these rules. I'd like to have a two-way conversation or something, all of us would with you guys, to hear your thoughts and to be able to respond to your thoughts Some of the ordinance I think are important would be before changing any heavy industrial zoning or approving another data center, Nye County should formally adopt these following protections and then strengthen them. There should be no evaporative cooling. There should be 100% no chance of waste leaking. There should be full public disclosure of direct and power related water consumption. There should be mandatory water use efficiency reporting. independently verified every year. No potable water should be used. No infrastructure, power, or water costs should be shifted to existing residents. Authority for county utilities to deny service when supplies are inadequate should be in place. Full cumulative impact analysis across every proposed project should be in place. Meaningful separation from homes, schools, wells, and agricultural operations should be in place. What are the emissions restrictions? What are the noise restrictions? There should be no grandfathering of pending projects into weaker standards, and there should be no permit until the developer identifies the end user and proves the water power and public benefit. The burden of proof really needs to be with the developers, not with us property owners whose wells, rates, and homes and future are being placed at risk. I would also urge all five youth commissioners attend this next informal meeting on July 25th so that we can hear each of your thoughts on the ordinances and hear why you want to ban data centers or hear why you don't want to ban them and what the reasons are. Don't just bring it on us on August 4th. This is supposed to be full transparency. You're supposed to be representing us. So Let's be open about this. Let's talk about it. Thank you, Commissioners.

Thank you, and I will remind everybody on this coming Saturday, 10 a.m., Commissioner Bain and Commissioner Jabbour have got a meeting to discuss this, 10 a.m. forum, 10 a.m. in this location, so you'll be able to talk about that however you like. Come on down, please.

Hi, good morning, commissioners and public officials. My name is Katerina Sepulveda, K-A-T-A-R-I-N-A-S-E-P-U-L-V-E-D-A. I'm a member of Nevada Maternal Health Coalition, Prevent Child Abuse Nevada, and also a health care provider here in Pahrump. I'm a champion for maternal and child rights. I do see that the recent splash pad is a huge health to families and children. There are many problems with the splash pad. I am concerned that families may be injured and may cause some unnecessary hindrance to families through injuries. I do believe that we want to also have more information about the funding for the shade, I was able to participate in that fundraiser and we were able to raise $5,000 as a community because as moms and families of Pahrump, we believe in community. So I ask your help in this to reevaluate the splash pad and please reschedule the grand opening until safety measures are met and hopefully we can all enjoy a nice safe splash pad in the future, thank you.

Thank you. Come on down, ma'am.

Good morning. My name is Carol Jones, C-A-R-O-L-J-O-N-E-S. I have been reading quite a bit online and on the internet about data centers the burning of medical waste and I believe the community is very concerned about the lack of information, the misinformation and the lack of communication from sources that be. I would believe it would serve the commissioners and the community very well if there could be some facts given. Hopefully that will happen on Saturday. Hopefully that will happen on the 4th. But I believe the community is extremely concerned and upset with the lack of communication. And I don't know the answer to this other than I believe, personally, it would serve our community very well if all the commissioners would put together some facts for the community's understanding. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Sam, do we have anybody on the phone, please?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Yeah, my name is Matt Sadler, S-A-D-L-E-R. Good morning, commissioners. Hopefully, this is going to be a nice, productive meeting. I just wanted to point out something to the commissioners and to the people in the gallery there. Make no mistake about it. The commissioners in different ways have over time mentioned that we need to hear more input. We didn't really know. There's not enough people in here to voice opposition to data centers and this and that. But make no mistake. They know exactly how we feel. You commissioners know exactly how we feel about a litany of these issues. And I won't get into specifics, but Just know that your legacy, and I know I'm beating a dead horse here talking about legacy, but seriously, I think the buck's got to stop here with you guys. You guys have to start making better decisions. Be more transparent with us. Don't play games. Don't act like you don't know the temperature of the room. You know darn well. Keep that in mind. Have a great meeting.

Thanks. Come on down, Lorraine.

Good morning, Lorraine, G-I-L-B-E-R-T. Today I am going to start with something my sweet grandma taught me. We must take care of our own home before we can help anyone else with their home. The town of Pahrump, and we are a town, a desert, D-E-S-E-R-T, desert, desert community. Unlike other areas, we don't have dams, rivers, streams to reinvent our water until each and every single person. owner owner in this town has infrastructure roads streets water sewer electric we cannot give away what you all don't own because you don't own it the people own it they are in essence your boss they are the ones that elected you that you are the voice for data centers not until each and every taxpayer has those same things that these people want. That's all I'm going to say.

Thank you. Sam, do we have anybody on the phone, please?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Jody Reddington, R-E-D-D-I-N-G-T-O-N. And I just wanted received my tax bill for the property that I own up in Calvada Meadows that is one of the utility challenged lots and listening to everyone who has spoken before me regarding the issues with these data centers and the potential for the impact it will have on our town yet having sustainable and responsible solutions for those of us that have land we can't use. This is a huge inequity and I am really hoping that there is more progress on the horizon for changing and updating the current zoning to allow all of us that are paying taxes on land we can't use for us to be able to be able to build and live on that land. before you start paving a way for these data centers. It's just mind-boggling to me the lack of logic going on here. So you've heard me speak before. I'm still standing my ground on responsible, sustainable solutions that are real and available today, and it just requires updating that zoning allowing us to live and contribute to the town before you start destroying it with allowing a data center in. That's all I have to say.

Thank you. Come on down, sir.

I'm Joe Hughes, J-O-E-H-U-G-H-E-S. As you know, the existing water rights in Basin 162 exceed the recharge rate, more so probably with increasing drought. The only reason we've been doing OK so far is that not all the water rights have been used. Now there is a surge of new development demanding considerable water use, probably a lot more than they're stating, actually. But you're going to have thousands of new homes, solar field construction and operation, a spaceport, whatever that is, big secret apparently, it seems likely that the existing water rights will soon be fully utilized and our aquifer starting to deplete, which means that the water table will continuously drop. And it's not like there's a big lake beneath us. The aquifer is more like wet sand and gravel. There's only a little water per cubic foot. This means that to supply excess demand of a foot of water, the water table will have to drop by dozens of feet. So I believe that Trump is already facing a near future crisis of wells drying up. And it will happen very quickly and irreversibly. Then there's the plans for the data centers. In addition to all the other problems of data centers, and there's plenty, they are well known to be massive users of water, all of which is taken from the valuable aquifer and evaporated into the sky. Given that we are already facing a future water crisis, allowing data centers here is outrageous. The nearest other water source is Lake Mead. It's far away, and it's over the high Potosi Pass. And of course, Pahrump has no water rights there, so we'd have to buy the water from Arizona ranchers and farmers. Can we shut down the data centers when the crisis becomes more obvious? Probably not. Will Dana Centers pay for a pipeline after they have sucked the aquifer dry? Probably not. Pretend your well dries up. Either you drill deeper, that's going to cost a lot, and it might only last a few years because the water table is going to keep dropping. So what's the alternative? Well, bottled water at the store for drinking, cooking, and toothbrushing. No baths.

Thank you, sir. Thank you. Okay. Sam, anybody on the phone, please?

Yes, Chair, the caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Good morning, Chair and Commissioners. My name is Nathan Whitaker, W-H-I-T-T-A-C-R-E. I'm the CEO of Stabilis Technologies. And I'm here today talking about our $76 million broadband grant project. This is an opportunity to bring reliable high-speed fiber optic internet service to unserved or underserved residents and businesses throughout Nye County. And we're prepared to make this investment along with the state of Nevada and the federal government and to start construction soon. But we can't move forward without two critical pieces in place. First, we need a memorandum of understanding and a franchise agreement This has been in with the District Attorney's Office since May 22nd, and we do not have a date or time when this framework will be put in place. We can't, according to the Public Works Office, cannot start and receive permits or construction for the project without this MOU and franchise agreement. Second, we need a clear and timely permitting process through Public Works. This is a large, multi-phase construction project involving fiber placement, road crossings, restoration, inspections, and coordination with county staff. And we understand that the Public Works Department is extremely busy and must also protect county infrastructure and ensure that construction meets applicable standards. We are not asking the county to waive those requirements, but we are asking for a predictable process appropriate points of contact and the timely fashion in response to our permitting applications. We are ready to start construction on this project and all construction has to be completed by December 31st, 2026, or the money is revoked from the state and goes back to the federal government unspent. Again, this is a $76 million project investment in Nye County, and we are excited to be able to deploy this fiber optic infrastructure to bring high speed internet to residents that have not had this. And this is an investment from the state of Nevada into Nye County. We respectfully ask the commission and direct or to direct the county staff to accomplish these things. Get the MOU in place quickly and effectively. and then help expedite our permitting applications with Public Works. And if we do this, we can get this project done and completed to bring High Speed Internet to approximately 12,000 residents in Nye County by the end of the year. Thank you.

Thank you, Nathan. Come on down, sir.

Good morning. My name is Damien Coughlin, C-O-U-G-H-L-I-N. I'm here about the splash pad. My wife was a part of the group that raised the money. They were told to raise that money for the awning for the structure. before they would even consider starting it and they jumped on it right away. Uh, I agree that we need the safety information because that's not a splash pad. It literally, there's no pad there. So we have many splash pads in Vegas, so there's no excuse as to why it couldn't be done. It's our neighbor. We have the budgeting in Vegas. They could have sent that over, told us how to do it, how much it would cost, so that we would get the information right away. We would know, as a community, the community who wanted it, what it would cost, what it would take, and the time that it would take to do it. I agree with the design changes. I agree that it should stop the grand opening. And We're excited to live here. We moved here from Vegas. We love it here. The people here are awesome. The community is great. It's growing. My wife has found great friends, great families here. And the fact that everybody came together for the splash pad just shows how much this community wants to give to the children. And I believe it's great that we're all a part of it, that we're hearing about it today. Um, I look forward to seeing a great splash pad better than any other in Vegas. I think we can do that here. We can have something to brag about for the kids. And, uh, we felt so welcome and we're blessed to live here and I look forward to seeing great things in the future.

Thank you. Thank you, sir. And welcome, Sam. Do we have anybody on the phone please?

Yes, sir. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Commissioners, my name is Matthew Winterhawk, W-I-N-T-E-R-H-A-W-K. I'm speaking general public comment today because this matter is not listed as an action item today. That is precisely what item three permits. I'm asking one commissioner to place an emergency data center moratorium, full forensic review of proposed blackjack development on the next available agenda. Nye County residents are not ignorant, and they're beginning to understand what is actually happening. These interests are not simply betting on artificial intelligence. They are monetizing the entire build-outs. A person does not have to own a data center to profit from its arrival. The surrounding opportunities include land, water rights sales, real estate options, excavation, grading, roads, draining, concrete, steel, electrical transmission, gas pipelines, substations, battery facilities, environmental permitting, stormwater pollution prevention plans, Field inspection, engineering, equipment procurement, utility expansion, legal work, lobbying, consulting, political contributions, and nonprofit donations used to manufacture community legitimacy. That's why construction overlap matters. That is why every financial relationship, contract, client, option, contribution, and beneficial interest connected to these projects must be disclosed before any approval moves forward. Hundreds of acres associated with failed residential development visions are now being positioned for conversion to light industrial use for massive data center projects. Yet the public still does not know the actual developer, operator, beneficial owners, power demand, water source, water right numbers, cooling system, generator fleet, construction phases, or complete supporting infrastructure. This is Basin 162, by the way. Residents already live with the pressure on their wells and water supply. They should not be forced to prove an undisclosed industrial demand is safe while the applicants withhold the information required to evaluate it properly. I am requesting that an agenda item directing Nye County to suspend every unfinished discretionary approval connected to this project and its supporting infrastructure, require any claim of vested rights to be proven by the applicant, a noticed public hearing, not decided privately by staff, order a parcel-by-parcel audit of every claimed water right, including priority date, beneficial use, point of diversion, place of use, and annual duty and utility commitment. Prohibit the segmentation, the land conversion, wells, roads, easements, substations, transmission batteries, solar generation, and development agreements must be reviewed as one integrated project, not separate. And conduct a forensic review of every vote, permit, waiver, extension, and staff approval that allowed data center development and its infrastructure to proceed under warehouse, industrial, solar, utility, or temporary use or conditional use permitting. Residents who are working, raising children, elderly, are unable to travel, or simply unaware of this meeting have not consented through their absence of being there. Them not being there is not consent. Let me just say it clear like that. Silence created by inadequate notice is also not public support. Place this on the next agenda. Preserve every record now. Nye County does not owe this project momentum. The developer and every person that's positioned to profit from it owes Nye County. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Serena. Come on down, sir. Yeah.

Thank you for allowing me to speak with you this morning. I'm Dr. Ray Kelly, R-A-E-K-E-L-L-Y. In addressing the issue of data centers in our valley, there are five areas of concern which you are already aware. Air pollution, light pollution, water depletion, noise pollution, and the drain on our power grid with increased costs. There are a number of governmental and private studies done that review issues in each of these areas of concern. Last week, I dropped off just three of those articles at the commission office here. I have them today if you'd like me to submit them for the record. From studies in the Library of Congress, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the Lincoln Institute of National Land Policy, and many others, they document that these data centers put severe, quote-unquote, drain, on local and regional resources, such as air pollution. Fossil fuels consumption generates nitrogen oxide, methane volatile organic compounds, fine particulate matter, which will greatly increase the high levels of particulate matter that we already have in the valley. This leads to increased severity and increased incidence of asthma, heart conditions, and cancer risks, according to these studies. If they are not going to be using fossil fuels to generate electricity, then they're utilizing one or a combination of two of these following resources. A Valley Electric power grid and that increased power demands from Valley Electric will require them to purchase more power from other sources. and create infrastructure that will handle the extra load demands. These studies show that those increased costs are passed on to residential consumers. I don't have the time to go into the solar generating fields and their negative impact on the environment and their tremendous water consumption demands. I don't have time to go into the light pollution issues either. Water depletion. Our current aquifer is being depleted at approximately two feet per year. A typical small center of 100 megawatts consumes approximately 500,000 gallons of water a day. That's equivalent to approximately 300 households. A mid-sized center consumes about 5 million gallons a day, equivalent to the whole town of Pahrump. Our valley aquifer cannot tolerate this kind of demand. The noise pollution issue. There are a number of studies and video news reports that document the audible and subsonic pollution generated by these facilities. They produce loud hums, buzzing, and at times screeching piercing sounds, and a pressure pulsing that is transmitted through the air and in the ground that can be felt miles away. People describe it as feeling it deep in their bones. These subsonic pulses produce physical symptoms similar to Havana syndrome. These data centers pose significant health risks that cannot be ignored. These studies go on to say that they cause symptoms such as hearing loss, stress, insomnia. Thank you. Thank you. Sam, anybody on the phone, please?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

I wanted to talk to us a little bit about the master plan. Interest 278.0284 gives us that any action the local government related to development, zoning, and subdivisions of land or capital improvements must conform to the master plan of the local government, period. in adopting any ordinance or regulation related to development zoning and subdivision land or capital improvements. The local government shall make a specific finding that the ordinance conforms to the master plan. Here's the point. The master plan is a very important tool. That plan does not include anything about data centers. It does surprisingly have content about solar, but it also enables the public and us to really discuss about what's going on with the development as a whole, the land use, transportation, and water conservation. The water conservation component did come up in the regional planning, and it does often. And one of the things that we know that the public should be allowed to speak, especially in general comment and also all the way through when they're permitted to. So making sure that we listen to the people is an important thing. Where we're at with the master plan ordinances, part of the big picture of getting the data centers right, A, if it's going to be there, which I'm not necessarily a proponent of, B, if it's not going to be there, that we have things that say, hey, here's why it's not, that it's all the way through, not just from a surface but also throughout the documentation in ordinances and master plans and the likes you know this is a big topic uh solar was a big big topic as well this is probably bigger right now uh but these are the kind of things that need attention throughout the organizations within that govern the components including water district and and things of that nature Uh, that's that's up to you people. It's up to us to say, hey, here's what our feelings are. Here's what we believe. But then it's also us up to us to listen to what. The facts are, we may have the facts we may have part of the facts. You know, there's an internal cooling system. And that is factual that's something we need to take into account. But if we refuse it, meaning having no data centers. that we have a fully informed and intelligent decision that we can make. Thank you.

Thanks, Tim. Come on down, Ms. Deborah.

Deborah Thomas, T-H-O-M-A-S. You know that, though. I want to remind each of the commissioners that they work for their constituents. That means you treat your constituents with respect and vote the way the majority of us tells you to vote you can also call us and share your ideas why you're not going to vote the way we want you to vote maybe we'd have it wrong it is very much the way an employee does things the way his very much the way an employee does things the way his or her boss tells them If you don't do that, you are not likely to get re-elected. Some of you are better employees than the others and I'm not going to name names. On each and every issue, you need to decide whether to vote the way you would like to vote or the way your boss tells you to vote. Just like Put stuff away. When you take it out to do something with it, you have to put it away just right. My dad taught me that. He was an electrical contractor. If you don't treat your constituents with the respect we deserve, we are not likely to elect you again at any time. Thank you.

Thank you. Sam, do we have anybody on the phone, please?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Good morning, honorable, my County Board of Commissioners. My name is Emma Valador, V-E-L-A-B-O-R. Can you hear me?

Yes, ma'am.

I'm Julie Robbins, 2026, while imparting my knowledge to the Alamogosa Valley Town Board Town Hall audience. My First Amendment rights were violated along with several enterprises by our Alamogosa Town Chairman, Carolyn Allen, and member and clerk, Mike Cottingham. Commissioner DeBoer and Commissioner Koenig were present and witnessed it. Commissioner DeBoer, what was the disciplinary action protocol for such board behaviors? The moment Chairman Allen heard the title of the article, which is Department of Justice documents confirm Center for Biological Diversity received millions and taxpayer funds from ESA-related lawsuits. It was very obvious she did not approve of it. She interrupted me and had the deputy escort me away from the podium while I was speaking. Then Mike Cottingham, the clerk, the member, slammed his fist and rebuttaled what I had said. This is totally, totally inappropriate, uncalled for. Our town should not be associated with the Amargosa Conservancy, who claim to be completely against solar, but yet took a $120,000 donation from Gemini Solar Company. This is beyond hypocritical. They say they're totally against all of your solar, and therefore all these little animals and all these plants But yet, they're taking money from solar. The Amargosa Conservancy vice president is Patrick Donnelly, and is also the director of the Center for Biological Diversity. Again, the Department of Justice documents confirm Center for Biological Diversity received millions of dollars. How much? 2,286,000. $686.91. Most of it going to attorney fees. And all of that was our tax payer money. And they obviously got all of the land, all the BLM land that they were demanding to get because supposedly they were out to save some creature. And I believe in all life, okay? also i believe that our book has been severely compromised there are members on our board who have stated that our town board chairman thank you thank you for that thank you ma'am come on down ma'am please good morning my name is tamelyn taylor t-a-y-l-o-r and i've been a resident of peru for past 10 years or so

And I work at Nye Communities Coalition. And I'm here today just to share a little bit about what I do there. And that's related to food security. As you well know, Nye County has one of the highest food insecurity rates in the state of Nevada. According to a study completed in 2024 by Feeding America, Nye County insecurity rates lie at 17.3%. Or this is also could be one in six residents have an uncertainty as to when their next meal will come. And unfortunately, children, it's even higher. One in five children live in food insecure homes. So to address some of these issues, Nye Communities Coalition has a monthly food security meeting. where we meet with area food pantry managers and other stakeholders. And in there, we brainstorm and strategize on how we can increase food access to many of our very vulnerable residents in the community. And I would also like to mention that we have some good news here. Over the past year, through donations and grant funds, Nye Communities Coalition has been able to donate or distribute 64,719 pounds of food in pantries in Nye, Esmeralda, and Lincoln counties. So we couldn't have done that without a lot of our wonderful partners. And one of the area I want to point out is that the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints They have done substantial food donations for this community. And then also there's a local farm, Green Life Produce, who donates produce on a weekly basis to the food pantry. So we're very grateful for them. I don't know if everybody knows that most of our food pantries here in Pahrump, there's nine of them, that the food pantry managers work for free. They're volunteers. And there's so many other residents, too, that help them out with this. But I'm really impressed about what they do here, their commitment and their dedication to the community. I wanted to point out that one way they go above and beyond is that several of these food pantries are also making home deliveries to folks that do not have transportation or any way to get to the food pantry. And everybody involved is doing it for free. getting money for gas or anything like that.

Thank you for that update. I appreciate it and I'm sorry. Sam, do we have anybody on the phone, please?

No, Chair.

Come on down, Frank.

Frank Caraboni, C-A-R-B-O-N-E. A little bit of a change here. I'm going to talk about Purple Heart Day. Usually, Colonel Waters comes up here and talks about Purple Heart Day. But he kind of told me it's time for me to start standing up here and talk about it. So Purple Heart Day, August 7th. Hope to see all you, not only you, the folks that are elected, but anybody in the town, anybody that's welcome or camera friendly. So if you want to come record and see what's going on, it's a great time to look at our citizens that actually have received the award of Purple Heart. And we also talk about some of the folks that are not around any longer to talk about Purple Hearts. We're also going to have two Purple Heart recipients actually as speakers. So I think you're going to get some good feedback from how they feel about how they got this award. So again, August 7th, 6 o'clock, Tacopa Cemetery. Hope to see you all there.

Thank you, Frank. Come on down, Diane.

Diane Southworth, S-O-U-T-H-W-O-R-T-H. I'll start out by saying I'm just as upset about the data centers as everybody else, and I don't want them, but that's not why I'm down here. I want to speak again about the Safety or Safe America Act that is trying to get through Congress and how it will affect this county. To start off with, that act is unconstitutional. Founders wanted states to handle the elections. They did not want a centralized federal government handling those things because they did not want it to be able to be disrupted very easily, and that's why they did that. Number two, as far as the county is concerned, was some of the regulations that they want to put in if someone makes a mistake and registers somebody who is not eligible to vote, They're saying they can give up to a 10-year sentence in jail for that. You know? And as far as that goes, there's so little fraud when it comes to non-citizens trying to vote. The Heritage Foundation did a report from 1999 to 2024 where they checked all the states, all the problems. You know how many they came up with? 77, all of whom were prosecuted. So that isn't an issue. It's one that they want to tell you is an issue, but it's not available. Two, I'm sick and tired of women having to give out more information to do things than men. And I think it's ridiculous. There's an easy solution. I got my Social Security card when I was 17. They've seen me through my marriages and divorces, et cetera. I don't want to spend $165 for a passport that I'll never use. And the Social Security Department has all that information. It could be easily verified. I have my birth certificate. I don't care. I'll sign it. I'll give them a copy of my birth certificate, my Social Security card, and my driver's license. But that's all. I'm sorry. My family's been here since the 1700s. I don't think I should have to prove anything else.

Thank you. Thank you. Sam, do we have anybody on the phone, please?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Yes, Amy Nelson, N-E-L-S-O-N. I want to start off with the 250th anniversary of this country. You know, maybe it's time that the powers that be in Nye County create a time capsule and create it so it's open to 50 years so we know what's been going on and we can look back on all this progress. The other thing I want to talk about that a lot of people can't relate to are the frequencies that are generated from any data center. It doesn't matter what size it is. The power that it has going further is the difference. Well, you know, when you put a cat in your lap and it purrs, that makes you very relaxed. Some people might even fall asleep. And everybody agrees with that. Even children are soothed by the purring of a cat. That megahertz sound that they generate is between 25 and and 150 hertz, and that could also promote healing. The megahertz with a data center is below 20 hertz, and that's where you have distress. You have diseases, you have illnesses, that science as it is right now won't relate to those megahertz sounds to failing health to people that live within a 50-mile radius of even one of these substations for the power companies. Back in the 90s, you had a whole street of doctors move when they had a substation put in their backyards. Maybe you can remember all that. I don't know how old some of you are. The other thing is the splash pad. I went online because there were some details given on the cost. I went online and priced everything, and there is absolutely no way that this costs $300,000. That is completely ludicrous. Somebody should have had more oversight to what was going on with this and had a better plan of what they were going to produce. Side by side with a prison shower. It looks identical. It looks completely identical. I don't know about the safety. There's a lot of people that know more than me. And another thing, the power company came by or sent some people to upgrade my meter. And I'd heard for the last year people talking about a lot.

Thanks, Amy. Come on down in front, please.

Thank you. My name is Ann Underdahl, U-N-D-E-R-D-A-H-L, and I have no idea what a prison shower looks like. Me neither. But I am here with a public service announcement. The Nye County Democrats have arranged for a speed dating event happening on August 4th, 6 p.m. at the Senior Center. People in Pahrump, this is open to the public, will have a chance to come meet, chat, maybe fall in love with a candidate, maybe not. All of the candidates up for election for District 4 and District 5 commissioner will be there. Tables will rotate. You get a chance to sweet talk all of them. Tell them what you want, what you don't want, and they can't get away from you. But you'll be moving on, understanding what they're really for as opposed to what other people tell you they're saying. So it's open to the public. I would recommend if you live in District 4 or District 5, You come by, have a good time. We'll probably have cookies and coffee as well. That's the Senior Center here in Pahrump, six o'clock on August 4th. Thank you.

Thank you, Ann. Sam, do we have anybody on the phone, please? No, Chair. Okay, come on down, Darrell.

Darrell Lackey, L-A-C-K-E-Y.

I was handed this visual aid. And it's so cool. I'm sure you'll be seeing it one way. But, you know, it's a polar bear in a snowstorm, I think, right? Or it's on. They see that I'm on now since I went vegan. I'm on. I'm on. I love it. You'll be seeing it a different way, I'm sure. But my friend was telling me about it because he reads the paper and he says, oh, you know, $700,000 for the well at the fairgrounds. I'm like, wow, is that going to have an elevator to the bottom? What's that going to have? A $700,000 well. What does that have that other wells don't have? It's got to have, oh, ouch. hands lots of hands in it i guess i don't know if it's going through the mormon church like you know in the old days with tim i don't know i don't know i i wish that people behind me would go ahead and dig in sometimes i say stuff and it gets other people riled too you know like about the uh about the about the gut uh you got a six-pack here you got parasites guess which one i got We were taught how to do everything wrong. And you follow the New World Order direction no matter what. People are almost on. People are waking up. People are waking up. And they see that you ain't loyal to them. You're not got a program to end homelessness and poverty for the whole country. And I want to start it here as an example in this place of badness or whatever you want to call it. Whatever you want to call it, it's just lies and corruption. I'm usually on. But here we are. And we're at the decision, at the point of bringing in these electronic centers. Y'all got 2.5 gigahertz routers in your houses. You know how dangerous 2.5 gigahertz is? And you leave them on all the time. You got 5G phones in your pockets. So do I. We're stuck to it. That's all they provide is danger and sickness. They don't want us getting our Social Security. You know, I shut off. They took $202.90 out for their serpent medication. The serpents, the AMA, the two serpents. I went down. No, they gave me that money back. I'm not having them take money out. I'm not going to ever use the hospitals and the medical system here. They have serpents that represent them. The serpents represent the ever-populating parasites that you have. from being on the wrong diet. Humans are herbivores. There's no such thing as omnivore. It's a word that was made up. And you are making decisions over other people's lives, and you're filled with parasites and parasite excrement. So how's that going to make you feel good?

Thanks, Daryl. Thanks, Daryl. Always a pleasure and a joy. Sam, you got anybody for us? No, Chair. Come on up.

How do you follow that?

You don't.

I'm sorry. He's giving me snot.

We're not sure what he's on.

OK. My name is Jean Alexander Booth. A-L-E-X-A-N-D-E-R hyphen B-O-O-T-H. Good morning. I had no intentions of speaking today, but I couldn't after that wonderful prayer we had this morning, the prayer that asked God to protect our precious Pahrump. I'm going to extend it to our precious Nye County as well. Data centers and medical waste is a threat to our precious town. Ash Meadow is at risk, our homes are at risk, the people are at risk. And I ask the commission to fight with the people of our precious town to ban data centers and to take whatever steps necessary to stop medical waste. As I stated before at the hearing, I'm a Marine Corps veteran. My MOS was power plants. I worked on fighter jets, engines, and I tested them in test cells. There was tons and tons of manuals on protocols on how to keep people safe, how to make these machines work, but every single one of them failed. And that was my job, was to help fix them. But I knew what to do when they did fail. I don't think the medic waste people have a clue what they're getting into. They've never built this thing before. They are not even building it. Somebody else is. And even the people who designed it said it is highly untested. Yet everything is put at risk. So I'm asking our commissioners to stand with the people of our precious town, our precious county, and fight with us to ban these threats and to protect us. If you don't, God help us.

Thank you, Sam. Anybody on the phone, please?

No, Chair.

Come on down in the room, please.

Peggy Miller, P-E-G-G-Y-M-I-L-L-E-R. I am a Knight County resident. I live in Crystal. They have already come out, your data centers. We've watched them dig a hole to see how much water Crystal has. There are rumors around Crystal that they want to buy the whole Bloomin' town and close us out. I've been there three years. We moved out of Las Vegas after 40 years. Couldn't stand the nonsense. Love the quiet. My dogs are happy. My family's happy. We look outside and see gorgeous sunsets. We don't need our water gone, and that's what they're gonna do. I've got all kinds of things. I was a librarian, so I did a whole lot of research on this stuff. In 2023, which is a long time ago, John Clank or Clanky did some NCWD meeting where they talked about water levels in Southern Nye County. And I looked at their website also and they haven't done any updates since that 2023, at least anything published. Maybe they're still looking at it. But according to them, water levels are falling. And every time, and I have another one that I have that talks about, let me get to it.

Oh, it's on the bottom.

This one is from 2015. It's Pahrump Valley Times. The author of it is Lillian Brown. And the heading says, Test Site Contamination creeping toward area drinking groundwater. Now it says in here that it isn't heading really all that much toward Pahrump, but it also says that if it continues to fall, it will. And that was 2015. So who knows if anybody's still keeping up with that. All I can say is please, please, please, please don't let these data centers go in here. We are the lowest rainfall in the United States. America has the lowest rainfall in the state of Nevada. We get less than, across the state, less than 10 inches a year. And that includes all of your rain that happens in the north and all of your snow and everything. So we don't need it. This is not a place to come in to get millions and millions and millions of gallons of water. This is not it.

Thank you. Thank you. Perfect timing. Don't we only get like four inches? Come on up, Linda.

Linda Clark, CLARK. First of all, I want to welcome everybody here.

It's so wonderful to see all of you here. Please keep coming. It's so important.

Second thing, I hear a lot of stuff here. It's hard to know what to believe anymore, but one thing I want to ask real quick, Clyde. If Bruce and Ian are going to get together to talk about all this stuff, why aren't the other three of you? Is it not interesting to you? Do we not matter? I don't understand. Yes, Debra, you too. We are going to be there. Okay. It's a forum.

Okay.

That's not what we heard. I don't know. Go ahead. I rattled the cage. Excuse me, Chair.

Go ahead. Thank you.

Okay. My question, after we went through all of that, is... We've been listening to this stuff for several years now, and you know that I've been coming with a lot of other wonderful people here, and we really do care. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that our boards care. We sat in a board last week for the RPC, and what a joke. We ended up walking out. It was disgusting. I don't know why the community is invited to come to these things when you guys don't even listen to us. Oh, yeah, you listen, but I think you have your earplugs in. So we get all this stuff back from you, but we don't get any positive answers that you even heard what we said.

And I know there are a lot of people here that go to these meetings.

And they come away looking at, why did we come? The other thing that's interesting is our complaint about that is you have all the important things at the end of the meeting. A lot of people want to talk, but they have to go home. And I've said this before. The mom with the child. Someone has to go pick someone from school. They can't stay till 5 or 6 or 7 o'clock at night, hoping that you guys are going to cover something that they wanted to hear at 10, because maybe it was on the agenda. But you kept postponing it.

Isn't that what happened? Yeah.

OK. Why does that happen? Why can't we listen to something that's put on the board, on the meeting, that we want to listen to? At the time, you say it's possibly going to be on there, and that I don't have to make other arrangements. and stay till 10 or 11 o'clock at night to listen to something that probably isn't going to pass and you don't listen to us anyway. So just a cute little thing to stir in your eardrums, take your earplugs out and listen to us, please.

Sam, do we have anybody on the phone, please?

No, Chair.

Come on up, Marianne.

Marianne Hollis, H-O-L-L-I-S, the splash pad. I was at the groundbreaking, and the moms and their babes were standing in the blistering sun, and all the dignitaries were under a tent. And I thought, wow, I hope there'll be some sort of shade structure for the moms and their kids. So I ended up going under a tree because it was too much for me, and I was sort of talking out loud to myself, And I said, where's the shade? Where's the shade? And a gentleman who was standing next to me said, well, if they get hot, they can just go in the water and get cooled off. And I said to myself, thank God he's not in charge of this. Lo and behold, he is. And I said, what's going to keep the kids from, excited kids running around from running in the street and or a car coming down the street, maybe jumping the curb, losing their sight, line of sight, and jumping the curb and hitting a few kids? Well, we're going to put up ballards everywhere. I said, well, a kid will still run through a ballard. Well, then we'll put up a fence behind the ballards. I'm like, oh, my God. Ka-ching, ka-ching. What I see now is there are ballards, but they extend way further down, and there's no protective gate that I could see. The moms did raise $5,000, and repeatedly I asked Mr. Martinez... What's happening with that? And at a meeting that he had with myself and a few other citizens, he said, there's just not money to put in one that's worthwhile. Well, is nothing worthwhile? I don't know. And I said to myself, why would you wait to sink a shade structure when you've already poured the cement floor? And a mom who wants to bring their child to the bathroom, you have to come out, go all the way down, and then take a left, and then go into the bathroom. Your line of sight, should you have more than one child, is gone. There's no line of sight. And I do know what a prison shower looks like. And I think this is an insult to a prison shower, to tell you the truth. I asked for the scope of work that would be followed because the scope of work that was in the bid opportunity might have changed. And I was told it's the same scope of work. And it has not been.

Thanks, Marianne. You're done. Sam, anybody on the phone, please?

No, Chair.

Come on up, Dwight.

Good morning, commissioners. Dwight Lilly, L-I-L-L-Y. Well, every now and then in your life, you see an item come up that unifies almost 100% of a population. You can have young, old, educated, uneducated, people on the left, people on the right, people that are rich, people that are poor. But every now and then, there's something that comes up that unifies. Well, we've had several of them. We've had meta waste. We've had 5,160 new homes in a water-starved area. Now we've got data centers. And we're going to have a meeting coming up to discuss data centers. How about a poll? Just raise your hands if you go against data center. Wow. There's your poll right there.

There's your poll right there.

I've never seen an issue come up in all the time I've come to meetings that has unified people. And Ian Bain is right about having an item to just say no. How would you like to buy a house in Mountain Falls or a new development, and as you come out the gate, And enter Highway 160. In front of you is this monstrous building. But that's not even a data center. That's the administration center of this massive data center in a town that prides itself with being the gateway to Death Valley and a rural Nevada town. I've been negative about this, you commissioners, because I thought, you know what? I figure it's probably going to be a three to two vote in favor of data centers here. But if I've ever seen a unifying situation that has brought all the people of PRUMP together, it's this one. So let's see how this goes. But if I was you, I would reach way down for my good angels when you think about this. That what is best for PRUMP? Is it best to change the entire nature of PRUMP over data centers, or is it best to try to get back to where we are, rural Nevada town? Thank you. Thanks. Come on down to PRUMP, please.

Greg Dankowski, D-A-N-K-O-W-S-K-I. In 1984, I moved to Nye County at Mercury, Nevada. I established a P.O. box and a bank account in Mercury and moved into an old army barracks left over from the early days of the Camp Desert Rock. A year later in 1985, I moved to Pahrump and got another P.O. box because U.S. mail service did not exist to my location because I had no address, just a legal description. I lived in an old 12-foot travel trailer with no utilities until I could save enough money for utilities. As I lived my life in Pahrump, I began to notice that the quality of my life and others was diminishing. My first observation was that the government was becoming tyrannical, specifically the sheriff's judicial and planning departments. My second observation was that the BOCC was not listening to the people. My third observation was the roads were becoming worse. In many cases, the bar ditch is smoother than the asphalt. My fourth observation is that the mantra of Nye County is retaliation. And my last observation is that common sense is not common. I am disgusted that the civility and peace are equated with the toleration of evil. The toleration of evil does not define good. There are 40 churches here and not one leader comes forth and speaks up for morality. The only exception was when Victor from the Patch of Heavens spoke about his church, church's water being confiscated years ago. And specific to planning and code compliance, there needs to be cognitive testing by a neurologist and visual testing by an ophthalmologist before employment. We live in the most contaminated county in the U.S., maybe even the world. There have been 828 underground nuclear bombs detonated in Nye County. There have been 100 above-ground nuclear bombs detonated in Nye County. We have U.S. Ecology burying waste near Beatty. We have the Nevada Test Site burying waste in Area 5 in Nye County. And most of all, Here we have active infiltration basins draining treated non-potable water into our sole source aquifer, which by the way is illegal in our neighboring state to the east called Utah. Thank you Mormons, you got it right. Now the leadership of Nye County wants to bring more waste to Nye County. Haven't we done enough to contaminate Nye County? Nye County must be HQ for toxicity. Yes, we have mental midgets and misfits and morons that live here, but not everyone fits that definition. Some are listening, watching, and waking up. Here in the land of Lucifer, there is a revival going on.

Lastly, development is not our friend. Thank you, sir. Sam, do we have anybody on the phone, please?

No, chair.

Come on up. Annette. Annette.

Annette Fuentes, F-U-E-N-T-E-S. I have some little pamphlets here that I put together for you guys on this subject. Commissioners, I would like to go on record and have this information entered in the minutes. I would like to bring to your attention a problem in Ash Meadows that will affect private inholders in surrounding small towns such as Amargosa and Crystal. Are you aware of two reservoirs in Ash Meadows being drained? Enclosed are the before and after pictures of Peterson Reservoir and Crystal. Those reservoirs have been there since before the refuge was established, and now Fish and Wildlife has drained them. Tell me what fire suppression are they going to use if this refuge catches on fire? I had a church camp in the refuge, and I have to supply fire suppression at my camp because I'm open to the public. One of the issues no one is addressing with these solar farms is fire issues. People are concentrating on water and noise. What about fires? This will bring fires, believe it or not. Amargosa has a small volunteer fire department who do their very absolute best with what they have to deal with fighting fires. But having these solar farms out here will bring a bigger risk to the fires. Do you all remember the Palisades fires in California? All the reservoirs were drained and there was nowhere to get water. I have enclosed a copy of an agreement about fire support provided by Ash Meadows between the Department of Interior, Fish and Wildlife, and the town of Amargosa Valley, which was done in June of 1988. I have sent emails to Department of Interior, EPA, Department of Agriculture to have this matter investigated. Fish and wildlife are responsible for protecting Ash Meadows. I want to know how they intend on protecting the refuge and the stakeholders inside, which I am one of them. The reservoirs are drained. Where do they expect to get the water? What will happen to all the endangered plants and animals found nowhere else in the world? By the way, show me the person who walked the whole world and knows this. This is why I will never agree to handing over more of the public lands to Fish and Wildlife and BLM. They are not good stewards of our land. Ash Meadows is a disaster. No one is watching over Fish and Wildlife. They have destroyed established wetlands, illegally diverted water, and draining the reservoirs. BLM has sold off leased land. to solar and data. Unfortunately, the good people of Amargosa are believing that the National Conservation Area will save their water. I definitely understand their concerns, but they don't understand there's a bigger problem. All the water right holders, the big ones, have sold off or leased their water rights to solar and a private data center coming in. They have the legal right to do that, unfortunately, and we just like it or not.

Thanks, Annette.

Come on down in front, please. Right now. Oh, shit. Hold on.

Excuse me, Chair. Yes, go ahead. And excuse me, folks. All the water talk, very important. I really have to take a comfort break.

And this is why things drag on and take long because we spend two hours on both of them. Thank you. Which we want everybody to speak, but my God, it takes a long time. Comfort break, 10 minutes. Go ahead, Nancy, speak.

My name is Nancy Yanda, Y-A-N-D-A. And I'm just saying... We don't want this here. And whoever lives in that area, if Deborah Strickland lives near the data center and that comes in, is she planning on up and getting paid enough money from those lawyers for her to just high hell out of here? She don't want to live in this town anymore because it'll become a ghost town if those data centers get in here.

Brian, do we have to sit here and listen to being accused of committing crimes? Brian? Come on down. No, I'm going to drag this on as long as I want. Go, Bruce. Please go.

No, no. I listen to everybody that comes in, and I write notes. So go ahead. My clothing attire may change color. Don't try to make it quick. Don't try to make it quick.

It's okay.

Good morning, Knight County!

Oh, my God. Another yeller.

So I bet you wish you were still in Africa, huh?

Anyway.

Anyway. I went to a very interesting meeting on Saturday. Facts, getting more facts. I've been studying the data centers for months now. There was a gentleman there, he was a Navy man, was in the Navy for 30 years, and he worked in a nuclear program, 30 years. He's worked with the closed-loop systems, and he says, don't fall for it. He says, this closed-loop system, it's a lie. He says, the only thing that the closed-loop treats is the GPU and CPUs only. And these facilities, this hyperscale data center they want to put, the Mance hyperscale, the humidity has to be maintained at 30% for static electricity not to occur. And if it does, kaboom. Also, the temperature inside these places need to be 67, 68 degrees max. And it needs constant clean water. These closed-loop systems, the water has to be drained, has to be new water put in, and the water that they drain out of there will have forever chemicals. Once it goes into our water supply, we're dead. We're done. Can't get it out. And he says the fact that anybody wanted to put a data center in the desert is retarded. So... I just want to make that point. The other thing is I stood here back in May and brought up the topic of data center. And at that time, I don't know if anybody ever had. And I did make a point that a lot of municipalities were – officials were assigning NDAs to not speak about this subject to – the citizens, and I asked if any of you had been approached. And it would be nice if you all could go on record if you were approached by Ativan or Green League or any of these people, corporations, not to say anything to the public. That would be nice. I think to put rumors to rest, we would all like to hear that. And let me see. Oh, yeah, and at that time, I think Commissioner Strickland said she hadn't even heard anything about a data center at that point yet. So help me out here. I'm having a hard time. How did we get from not knowing about data centers to two months later when we got plans for possibly two of them? When it's your time to speak, you can respond to that. It's just, you know, I'm confused. So anyway, other than that, welcome back from Africa. I hope you had a good time. So have a good meeting, everybody.

Thanks. No, her time is running. She's got props.

Sorry.

No, you're up.

You're on time right now.

You're using up your time. Can you spell your last name for us or write it down somewhere?

I'm going to make it really easy for you guys.

Tony, T-O-N-I-H-O-V-E-R-M-A-N. Come on, people.

Come on, show them. Stand up for Pahrump. I don't want my town ruined. I don't care about any of your personal... things that you have going on, your own personal agendas. I don't want, I don't want it in my town. I moved here six years ago for a better life. I got out of that cesspool called California and I moved here. I moved here, I bought a piece of land, bought a trailer, had a well drilled, huh Deborah? And I don't want my town ruined. You guys will be gone. All of you will be gone. And I'll be here. A lot of us will be here. And we're going to reap the consequences of your decisions. And it's not fair to us. You guys will all be gone. You will have moved on. There's over 500 properties in this town right now that are for sale. Jeez, someone here knows something. I don't want this in my town. These people don't want this in our town. And I don't think my fate and my future and my health should be in the hands of the five of you. And there's a commissioner that did show up at the rally on Saturday, and I thank him. There are some people in this town that are in government that are for the fight for no data centers. There are some people on this panel right now that don't give a damn, that won't be around much longer, that have their own agendas of the legacy they're going to leave on us poor people out here. They really don't give a damn about us. I just want to say that I'm going to use the last breath of air I have in my body to fight this. Because this is not what I signed up for six years ago. This is not what I agreed to buy into. And this is not the cancer I'm going to end up with later down the road because you guys all have it on your own agendas. To get whatever you're going to get from these... companies that are going to back and finance these shell companies and these investors that want to put this data center out here. This is your land.

This is my land. Sam, do we have anybody on the phone, please?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Michael David Garcia, GARCIA. Can you hear me? My volume okay?

Perfectly good, sir.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I just wanted to, you know, thank everybody in the audience that showed up today. Your voice matters. I want to thank everybody that spoke. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. And thank you for everybody for holding up those signs. Everything came across loud and clear. Michael David Garcia, G-A-R-C-I-A, for the record. And once again, Chair, I'd like to address some of your etiquette issues when it comes to serving the people.

If you don't like it, file a complaint. Move on with your time, please.

I'm sorry. Are you engaging me? Is that an open meeting violation? Whatever you like, sir. Just keep going.

You're wasting your time.

I did not yield my time. Are you addressing a challenge, or are you just communicating with me unconstitutionally? Are you interrupting my time? Once again, I come to you for natural rights. To all the speakers that had their First Amendment rights violated, you see how the sheriff stood up? You see how the DA stood up for you? You see how these commissioners want to ask questions about protecting God's trust? God's trust. I remind you about Luke. 17-2, better a millstone when it comes to our children. Every county, every state, they are participating in fraud, extortion, and official oppression. They will all pay the price. Executive Order 13818 in 2017 said it clearly by Trump. This is treasonous wagers. It qualifies as a state award when you put your rules, policies, and discretionary opinions above an inalienable right. Article 1, Section 1 of Nevada Constitution.

Have you all read the contract? Do you really think you can supersede that? In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. Okay? Let's bring the spiritual torch up. Who's holding the light? Why don't you start, Chair, with Ezekiel 37, 38. You might be able to find your research when it comes to laying down the sins of the flesh. Don't you dare preach to me. Who's the servant? Who's the master? I represent the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords. What are you standing for? I stand for the children. Let me ask you something, DA and Sheriff. If Captain Berkowitz was on the Brady list and also was unbonded, How does his arrest of me in the violation of my First and Fourteenth Amendment at the school board is lawful? Y'all conspired. Subsection 241 and 242. May y'all... Go ahead, sir.

We're extending your time because I interrupted you.

Oh, thank you. Thank you. Appreciate the courtesy reach around. Mr. Jabbour, BOTC 7.52, written after Chevron, the administrative rule of law that hijacked common law. Now you're done.

Thank you. Sam, do we have anybody on the phone? Actually, let's do Tonopah. That'll be fun. Go ahead, Tonopah.

Me too.

Thank you. Go ahead. Sorry.

No, it's okay. Good morning. I'm Misha Allen, A-L-L-E-N. I'm with UNR Extension. I'm the extension educator up here in northern Nye County. And my job is to develop educational programs based off of the needs of our Nye County communities and what they identify. And so my work is very much community driven. And our Nye County public has been very clear in their opposition to large scale land use projects like solar and data centers. And I've learned to categorize their opposition in two ways. One, which is due to a lack of land stewardship, and I include natural resources and environmental issues in that. And then two, also due to lack of community host or host community benefits. And so in response, I developed two educational programs to specifically address these. So I provide education on one, alternatives to conventional solar, and these are things like agrovoltaics, which is farming and ranching under solar, and ecovoltaics, which is conservation, and ecosystem benefits under solar. And both of which, by the way, they're ideally sited in semi-arid and arid regions like ours because of their water savings characteristics. And then two community benefit agreements, which are incredibly important, I think, to counties like ours, where 97% of our county is public lands that are not captured within the traditional tax generating mechanisms mechanisms that are necessary to fund local government operations and services. And without these revenue sources, industry development can unintentionally become a burden rather than a benefit to host communities. And so my current work includes supporting Nye County Solar Consortium, in partnership with the nine county natural resources director, Megan Labadee, where we have an interdisciplinary group of local community leaders and NGOs working to identify a pathway for industry development that aligns with our community values and needs. And they're really clear in wanting industry to develop community benefit agreements with host communities prior to county permitting. And since I'm funded by a mixture of county, state, and federal funding, you might be hearing about some of my statewide work, particularly with the Nevada Association of Counties, where energy, data centers, and community benefit agreements are issues that they're working on. And I've provided education and technical assistance to NACO and multiple counties on how to address data center impacts on natural resources, water, energy, emergency management, and jurisdictional capacity. And I'm really proud to have cultivated a network of in-state and out-of-state experts that have offered to support and inform our work here in Knight County. So we actually have people willing to rally around us and to help, which I hope as county commissioners and administrators is really great news. Because it means that we're not alone in this. You're not alone in this. And that you're welcome to leverage me and my network. Thank you, Misha. Good work, Misha. Thank you.

Come on down, Susie. Actually, Bruce.

We're going to die here. This is two hours in.

Yep, break time. Sorry. Bruce is going to pee himself.

We don't go.

Ten minutes. All right, Serena, we ready up north?

Thank you for that.

I thought it would end.

Yeah.

Um... Okay, thank you for your patience, Susie. Everybody was about to have a problem.

It'll be way easier to pay attention now. Go right ahead. Thank you, Susie.

Once again, good morning, commissioners. Susie Hertz, HERTZ. I attended the most recent RPC meeting last week, I guess it was, and I just wanted to report to you what I observed and what I experienced. I understand some other people have made comments already, but I wasn't here. The then chairperson of RPC, the RPC mistakenly, seriously mistakenly, cut off the public from their comments. Cut a speaker off mid, within their three minutes, and then proceeded to, just short of shouting at the rest of the audience and any other public speakers, that the the board was not going to hear any more of those such comments. And it was a blatant attack against speaking rights of the attendees, the public, and I think that you need to know that. I think that the behavior of the board was really inappropriate, very unprofessional, And across the board, many of the people who sit and are now seated recently on that board are not appropriate for what they're doing. For the brevity and the depth and the gravity of what is being discussed in the RPC, those people should be educated and informed. And many of them are not. And I am bringing this to you because you appoint them. And I would really request that you look and observe and evaluate who's been recently appointed to those boards because they're just not the right people. And our town is at stake. They're making bad decisions on what the zonings, the ordinances are and how to apply those to people who apply for the ability to do business or have homes or whatever, and they're totally inappropriate. They took an enormous amount of time with one particular applicant, and they could not give that person a succinct answer to how to fix the problem so that that person and that business could go forward. And it was shameful. And it was very solvable, but the people who were there were incompetent to deal with it.

Thanks, Susie. But do you mind me asking what item caused the big...

Yes.

The what?

It was a gentleman who had a tow truck business right in the center of town, and they just could not deal with what he was doing... to make his application work, and there was a minor component missing, and nobody would answer him as to how to fix it. And it was a shambles, and shame on them.

Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Come on up, please.

Hello. My name is Mary Rose Parkman. Last name is spelled P-A-R-K-M-A-N, and I'm here as a resident. I'm asking you, when it comes to data centers, are you asking yourselves at what cost? With the Mance Data Center facility, the developers are planning 15 to 16 data center blocks. Each of those are requiring 100 megawatts. That actually, again, you should ask yourself at what cost, because the electricity demand and the grid reliability will be greatly impacted, the amount of energy that this facility is proposing to use is enough to power over 80,000 homes, nearly four times the homes that we have here in Pahrump. Water usage and aquifer sustainability. I'm glad you had your break to bring up more water. But again, ask yourself, at what cost is this data center The fact that the plans are advancing before the release of a crucial Basin 162 groundwater study that highlights the lack of precaution that is being taken in this approval process. That report will not be available until 2027, is what I've been told. Yet this data center will be voted on August 4th. Again, a very big concern. The number three, air quality and noise pollution. They claim that this facility will be 1,000 plus feet away from any homes. That's less than three football fields. But the noise pollution that has been reported from other data centers has been staggering. And this distance is not going to cover up the decibels that are likely to be created by a facility of this size. I can go on. There's heat, efficiency, environmental burden. My biggest concern is risks of public cost and insufficient oversight. I think it's perhaps the most concerning prospect that the environmental and infrastructural costs of the Mance Data Center could be passed on to the public. Local tax rate payers will be facing facing increasing utility costs, diminished water security, degraded air quality, and all of this is without adequate transparency or individual feasibility studies. No amount of progress or tax dollars, which by the way will not be realized until up to five years after this is built, none of that is worth the literal lives of the people that live here. And lastly, I'd like to make sure that.

Thank you very much for that. Thank you. I'm sorry to cut you. Come on in, Mr. Fender.

Hi there. Mike Fender, F-E-N-D-E-R. I sat here till the end and you wanted to extend this because I wanted to hear what everybody had to say. And I agree with a good portion of it. And I think you all understand why I'm saying that because you actually believe a lot of things that I do. and report back to you because I do a lot of research. Bottom line is we're at a point, a juncture, where the county is going to have to set up a restriction and then literally set aside an area for this type of project, not necessarily here in the valley either. We are now going to have more land available up by Tonopah because the I'm going to use this as a suggestion because that solar farm up there just went belly up. It's now owned by the Sons of Liberty. They're located out of Texas, and they spent $7 million on it. So are they going to tear it down? What are they going to do? So now we've got an area up there they could actually put, since it's already been irradiated, so to speak, you could put a data center there. Another reason is there's also a new substation going in outside of Tonopah, and these data centers need substations. How many are they going to have around here? Probably four. Four transformers came in. So you don't need to have this data center at the entrance to our town, which somebody stated recently, this is the entrance to Death Valley. You just don't need that. You're putting a junkyard, so to speak, now at the entrance gateway right into our town. It just doesn't make any sense. Now, the water issue is another thing. I mean, nobody knows how much water we have. Now, I listened to Mr. Meads recently, and he's got a good hold on what the water issue here is in this valley. He's lived here a long time. I have also been reading there was a report put out by a group of individuals and corporations this past February, they had a giant meeting on these data issues. Now, a report was put out, and I forwarded to Dan Weeks here about four months ago. But anyway, you may have heard about it. You might not have, but I'm pretty sure you could have. Bottom line is these data centers do not belong here. More people now are pissed off about this than solar farms. And solar farms are another big issue we're going to be dealing with. I don't even want to go there right now. You understand what I'm getting at. But I would recommend that the county look at the idea of literally setting aside an area, not close by residents, not in a large area or a semi-area, outside town where you can actually build things if you have to. I'm not saying you have to. It's just like approving solar farms. Thank you, Mike. Okay, thanks.

Sam, do we have anybody on the phone, please?

No, Chair.

Come on down, Patricia. Patricia?

Good afternoon. Patricia Robb, R-O-B-B. You know why I'm here. And everyone did a good job behind me talking about the data center, so I will move on with the mission I'm on. And that is the utility challenged lots. I know that the planning department is working on an overlay ordinance, which is good. I'm looking forward to that actually being ready soon. because these owners have not been able to use their land for almost five decades. They pay taxes on it. The tax bills just went out. And of course, they're paying just for a piece of paper right now. They're not paying to use their land. so i just kind of want to reiterate some of the benefits although i've mentioned these before i want to go a little bit more further into some details besides them being able to actually use their land that they pay taxes on they're also going to be less likely to walk away from paying those taxes land values will rise once they can start using them. It does stop squatters from using those lots, as well as complaints against code violations out there. There's no infrastructure needed. These owners are taking everything on themselves. This is just a reminder of everything. It encourages conservation-minded living. So I like what Misha in Tonopah had to say about UNR's extension. We need education on alternative utilities, not just solar. People are not familiar with how alternative utilities work. But when it's going to be your responsibility, you're going to learn how to do it. But everybody should know that. And as far as permitting tiny homes, container homes, it does give people the opportunity to enter into the market and actually enjoy their land. sustainable housing creates pride of ownership it also creates real neighborhoods instead of rows of unused tax draining parcels it reduces the homelessness risk we all know that sewer water and power will never be extended to most of these VR zoned lots so alternative utilities are a realistic solution. This does avoid potential lawsuits also over regulatory takings and property rights violations once the ordinance is accepted. It also aligns with state and national trends such as SB 150. Now, legal dwellings with permitted off-grid setups can be registered, mapped, and planned for emergency response as well. So I know you've heard all this before. I know you've got a lot on your plate you're dealing with, but this is probably one of the easiest fixes of all. So I thank you for your time.

Thank you. Sam, anybody else on the phone, please?

No, Chair.

Closing public comment. Manager number four, please.

Item four, commissioner manager comments. This item is limited to announcements, brief discussions of public comments, correction of factual inaccuracies, direction to staff, or topics proposed for future board meetings. Lengthy deliberation of topics not on the agenda is prohibited by the Nevada open meeting law.

Thank you for that. Commissioner Bain.

Thank you. I'll be very brief. I just wanted to touch on, sort of frame the debate that's going to happen here with the obvious, both up here and both in the community. And, you know, an interesting thing that you watch to explain how Donald Trump won this election, it's because of a disagreement and a protest over things that government has purported to be facts. We've accumulated all these facts and this information. This is safe, this isn't safe. This is right, this isn't right. You're wrong, they're right. And over years and years, it kind of came to this big rejection that happened, I believe, in 2024 and probably in 2016. I think it happened in 1972 with McGovern with some socialist ideas that are now embraced pretty openly. I think it happened in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. probably happened in history that I didn't trace or watch. But the reality is that in the future, in the very near future, there's going to be accumulation of what the administration is going to call facts. And these facts are going to be contrary to what a lot of people believe. This is not a debate over facts. Data centers are not a debate over facts. There are debate over whether or not people believe what they're being told. And that's something that I think that Hillary Clinton didn't understand when she was running against Donald Trump. And not to frame it any other way, but just that this is what's going to happen. And I've quoted, I don't know if I've done it up here, but there's a commissioner that was with the Obama administration in Cook County in Chicago, in Forest Claypool. He used to say, when you're explaining, you're losing. And it's because when people don't believe and there's no trust in what they're being told, it doesn't matter what you say. And I've said it up here before. You had a doctor with 50 and I'm 52 years old and we had a doctor with 52 years experience Fauci and he had a specific set belief on what was dangerous and how to take care of that danger and that harm. And within one year that changed. Now was he a bad doctor for 52 years? and the government was right? Or was the government wrong and that's why he changed his position so that he could accommodate the government? So the debate is not gonna be over how many facts that are in air quotes or information that is designed to get you to believe something that's been going on since the beginning of time. probably beginning of, definitely beginning of this country. I was born into Dan Rostenkowski's district in Chicago, and I was raised in Tip O'Neill's, so I know a little bit about manipulation of what you'd call facts, which is why I'm a Republican growing up in Democrat places. So I'll leave with that, but I just want to remind the public that you're going to be inundated, or if you want, indoctrinated with what I would call Information that's designed to get you to believe something that goes contrary to what you believe in your heart and thank God for this system of government Where we we don't need to engage it in debate if we don't believe in something we just vote no Thank You mr. Chairman Thank You chair good afternoon everybody

So I just wanna touch base on a couple of things. Data center is at the top of our minds, our brains, our tongues, and yes, Commissioner Bain and I and county manager helped schedule to facilitate a forum, not a meeting, it's not a dialogue. It will be a monologue this Saturday at 10 o'clock here in Chambers. Okay, and we will do and have the format much like we did with the wild horse and burrow Issue at the time where we had where we had all sides All sides to come and speak and have have some time to educate All of us all of us. We're all in on this and so again I this Saturday the 25th, 10 o'clock here in Chambers, please, because a lot of you came forward today, many of you came forward and had some pertinent information, whether pro or con, you had pertinent information regarding these data centers, right? They're not all the same. Yes, I was at a meeting in Amargosa. I was asked and summoned to come down on the liaison for the Amargosa town board and I want you to know that Carolyn Allen who was mentioned earlier. She's the chair of the Amargosa town board. She works very very hard very hard day well day and night sometimes she Sends me messages at 3 o'clock in the morning and I'm like, oh her alarm clock must be broken. I She works very hard for the people of Amargosa and the community. And that includes Crystal. Crystal doesn't have an advisory board or a town board. So it does encompass Crystal because of the Basin 230. That flows into Basin 162, by the way. And so... I would like to speak on splash pads because I was here when when the original Proposal came before us and I know that it's going to be addressed during manager comments And I'd like to jump back in at that time Because I don't want to misspeak, but I do want to hear I do want to hear the information from the director as to why and certain things have happened and why certain things have not happened and then i'd like to uh... jump back in chair for you know what so thank you know yield at this time thank you commissioner clinton thank you for your comments commissioner jabor i have nothing to add thank you commissioner koenig i don't want to prolong this anymore we have to so i have nothing i have a couple comments so

There's a bunch of people here that are holding up their on signs and are very upset and angry about data centers that we have not approved, that we have not approved, that we know none of the facts on yet, that we know none of the information on. But it's like an angry mob carrying their pitchforks, and I just don't understand how you can scream and demand that we be respectful to you when you can be asses to us? Hell no. That's not how that works. Secondly, here's a perfect example. There was a screenshot on the data center forum where somebody responds and says, aptly named Karen, I don't want to know about them. I don't want to learn anything about them. I just don't want them. What the hell is that? If there was a shoe store that wanted to come here, I would need to know the positives and the negatives of that shoe store before I voted for it. That is what we're supposed to do here. So I apologize to the normal people in this audience and on the phone listening to have to watch that BS and listen to that garbage from the angry mob. And if that mob thinks they're gonna change my mind in one way or another, Good luck on that one. Any managers, please?

Thank you, Chair. Thank you very much.

If I could, sir? Go ahead. Just quickly. I wanted to comment first about the public comment that was made regarding the laying of the fiber. Oh, yeah. Okay. He's completely misinformed, lying, shall I say? No. He actually met with my office yesterday. Yes. So we had a meeting with him, and this is much more complicated because they want to put this fiber into our right of way. And then we have issues of making sure that there's not any risks to anything else. And obviously some issues to work out with regards to that. So this is not just as easy and simple as he wants it to be. And understand that we're not... We're not getting anything out of his grant. This is his grant that he received. And so we just have to be careful with that. But again, we did meet yesterday in my office. I did want to comment also on the question that came up with regards to what was happening in Amargosa. I just want the board to understand that I'm actually in the process of completing in response to an open meeting law complaint that was filed by this individual. My investigation is pretty clear that what happened was they were given a certain amount of time, and I don't remember exactly, I think it was like six minutes, that they were allowed to talk during this open forum. She refused to give up the mic, kept being belligerent and angry, and ultimately had to be escorted out of there. So, again, that's a matter that I am dealing with, and we'll have a response back to the Attorney General's office on that open meeting law complaint.

Chair, may I add one thing to DA? On August 6th at 6 p.m., that fiber internet groundbreaking will be at the Rood Center if you want to learn more about that, too. Thank you, Chair.

Thank you. I also want to add one quick thing. The 30 people or 20 people or 10 people who show up to these things or go all over Nextdoor and the social media apps and things like that, griping and complaining about everything under the sun, they don't represent the 50,000 people here. Most of us are normal thinking forward folks who have spent three decades here, raised a kid here, centered through college here, Those of you who show up from California 10 minutes ago and tell us what we're doing wrong, screw that. Come on up.

Christy Sigmund, S-I-E-G-M-U-N-D, Manager Animal Services. I just want to start by actually saying thank you, a public thank you to two groups of people. First, our volunteers at the shelter. Their work does not go unnoticed. It changes the lives of these animals in the shelter every single day. They help make these dogs socialized, adoptable. It really, really matters and makes a difference. So I just want to thank them publicly. I also want to thank the community publicly. Our return to owner rate in this first 21 days of this month has increased almost 20%. So thank you guys so much for coming to the shelter, picking up your dogs when they get out. It makes a huge difference to our space in the shelter as well as to the life of that animal. We're also seeing an increase of donations. Those donations, words can't even quite describe the impact that those donations of food, litter, beds, blankets, sheets, towels, it really truly changes the lives of those animals in the shelter. So I wanted to start by saying thank you to those people. This month, We are still in the Bissell Empty the Shelter event. We have seen 35 adoptions, which is wonderful so far in the first 21 days. We still have over 80% of our shelter is available for adoption. Kittens, cats, adults, seniors, you name it. We even have a rooster and a pig. and a bunny. And fun fact, so the rooster and the pig came in together, and so they are very appropriately named Heihei and Pua from Moana, because they are together. We like to have fun. But they are available for adoption, so someone who says, oh, we only have the same kinds of animals in the shelter, I say come and see our shelter, because we have all different kinds, breeds, sizes, ages, you name it. $20 adoption fee for the whole rest of the month And then on this Saturday, the 25th, I believe, of July, we are having our Adopt and Shop event, which we have every single year, but this one is special. This is our Christmas in July, where fees will be waived for the entire day. So if that $20 still poses a financial strain on you, come down this Saturday. Fees will be waived. We literally have over 100 animals in that shelter available for adoption. So come and check them out. And then we are gonna roll into August and continue the fun because we have been accepted and will be participating in the NBC Clear the Shelter event all through the month of August. So you will continue to see those $20 adoption fees all the way through September 1st. So pretty exciting stuff. Come and see us.

Thank you.

Chair?

Yeah.

Koenig, you guys want to say anything about the donkeys and the case on the donkeys?

Yes, I can... do a quick little thing on the donkeys.

We had donkeys, didn't we?

We had donkeys, a couple hundred donkeys.

A couple hundred donkeys.

160. Seems to be an echo in here.

160. 160, okay. And they were farmed out to various people who took them, and we had to pay the fee, and it came to $140,000, something like that. $132,548. Close enough. Ask me how I know that exactly. Court was finally the other day, and I had to testify briefly because I kept telling them all I did was go up there to look at 160 donkeys, see what they looked like. They didn't believe me, but that was all right. And then their lawyer asked me while you were there, did the donkeys look healthy? And I told them that I am not a veterinarian. So anyways, we won. They owe us 130 some odd thousand dollars in change. So it was a good thing that happened. And the donkeys that have been farmed out, I guess the people that have them can keep them if they want. And if the ones that they don't keep will be up for adoption.

Yes. So most of the fosters are keeping the animals that they have. We will have some that will be available for adoption. This win was a huge win, not only for the animal or for the county, but for the animals as well. They have changed so dramatically and drastically in the last year that they've been with these fosters. So I am very, very happy with the outcome.

Those hundred and some odd donkeys were on, what, one acre of land?

They're a hoarder.

It's kind of squishy, let's put it that way. They weren't happy.

Thank you for the fosters.

Could I add to that, too? Thank you. We are initiating collection actions because we actually got a judgment against her for that amount. So we are initiating collection actions to collect that amount so that we can reimburse ourselves for the costs that went. And so, again, we're moving forward now with the next stage of making sure that we get everything collected.

Good job, DA.

Yeah, because all that money came out of the shelter's budget, so she essentially has no budget left. We'll fix it.

And to your senior deputy, Brad Richardson, well done.

You go, Brad.

Good job, Brad. Thank you, Christy. All right, Jimmy. Are you ready?

Jimmy.

Hello.

Jimmy. Yes. You're on.

Thank you. Jimmy Martinez, M-A-R-T-N-E-Z, tried to address as much as I can with the splash pad. It's not as beautiful as Las Vegas, of course, but we don't have their money. So we try to make as best as we can with the money that we have. It is secure. It is safe. We blocked it off so we don't have kids running all over the place. We did look into Las Vegas. Las Vegas has issues with kids running around all over, and I've seen parents chase their kids. So to help this out, So they're not running, we close it off, and also a second benefit of having what we have as a brick structure is to prevent our investment. Of course, when during construction we had a dust storm and we had to go clean everything, the dust out of the lines and out of everything, if that would have happened and we didn't have that brick structure as of now, we would have been spending a large amount of money to replace all this stuff. Once we started, everybody didn't want the splash pad because it was fresh water. We went to reclaim water like everybody wanted. That is a big cost because we're recirculating the water, chem leaky treating it, everything like that. So that is lot, pumps, power, all that stuff that needs to be done. It is slip resistant. It's not paint. Well, I mean, it is paint, but it has slip resistant texture on there. So if you go on there, it is slip resistant. It is ADA compliant at all level. It only drains to the drains. And there is a ramp where people with wheelchair access can walk, come up from the street to the curb and walk on, or sorry, roll on if they need to. There is benches. Yes, there is no shade as of right now. It is on order. I just got told a few minutes ago the PO is in my emails and I'll be moving forward with the company. The town is installing them to save costs because we only have $5,000 for the shade and it's more money than $5,000. The rest of the money is coming out of my budget as in parks departments to cover the difference to get shade. So that is coming in. Buildings and Grounds is installing it. It's all engineered. We will put that through permitting and everything. For the splash pad, the company does it all day long. They come out, they just did one in Northern Nevada before they did ours. It came out great. I think this came out great. Yeah, it's not as beautiful, like I said, as Las Vegas, but it's our first one. We know we need a lot more money for the next one. What else do I got here? It's not just one feature. There's multiple features. They're just in the ground. You only see one. It's not a prison shower. Actually, ours is nicer than a prison shower. I don't know if you've been to prison, unless you're with Martha Stewart. I mean, come on. We are, we do everything we can with the money we have. Reason why it takes so long is because we got to do a lot of bidding process. Once we go through the bidding process, it tricks prevailing wage. So that's where a lot of our money comes from. Prevailing wage to provide a service that get a contractor to come out here and do the work.

So you didn't steal the money, you didn't do any of the stuff that these, some of these people. Oh, I didn't know I spent money.

I mean, they can see my wallet.

You spent what you were supposed to spend, and you did what you were supposed to spend.

Every penny went into that splash pad, if not more.

Exactly my point.

Go ahead.

Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Jimmy, for coming and giving us some clarification and explanation. As I mentioned, I was seated commissioner when this first was proposed and most recently I've been to the Simpkins Park to review and monitor and one of the commenters mentioned that Commissioner Koenig has been there and I'm not sure how they know if we're there or not there. They asked us to take cameras down and we did. There's no camera over there. None. No. So I have some concerns. And I understand that there is budget issues, and you had to make some modifications due to the water issue, the reclamation and the pump. That's not inexpensive. I get it. But I just want to bring a few things to your attention to see if we can find some money because it has to be done right before we even move on to think of another splash pad. Let me talk about the benches for a moment. There's two benches that can fit probably four people comfortably. There were a couple of families here earlier today that said, I'm a mother of six. My mother had five. and taking us to the beach, the ocean, to the pool, to the lake, et cetera, with the big beach bag, okay, that's not even adequate for one family, the bench. You have two benches, okay, so we're only going to welcome and accommodate two families in reality, or they have to bring their own beach chairs and umbrellas, et cetera. And then if they bring their own umbrellas because there's no shade, which is very important, right? Yeah. The answer is not go into the water and get cooled off. There's no refuge from the sun when you're in the water. It makes it worse and it's magnified to get a sunburn. And these are children that we're talking about, right? And so... Umbrellas, personal umbrellas are not safe. We're talking about safety. We're always talking about safety because the wind will pick up and take the umbrella and maybe impale somebody or poke somebody in the eye, what have you. Worst case scenario, right? And so my main issue that I'm going to address are the ballards.

Commissioner, I'm sorry. This is getting into lengthy discussion. Yes, yes it is. I think we need to put this on an agenda item. I don't think it's appropriate to do this during.

We can put it on an agenda, but if you don't mind, Mr. DA, let me finish with this as my last. I'm advising you not to.

This is getting off of what is appropriate for manager's comments. This should be put on an agenda item publicly.

Okay, manager, if we could put this on the next agenda item, okay? And Mr. DA, one of the issues that was mentioned was to postpone the ribbon cutting, which really is going to be humorous if we allow that to go on. Would you mind me addressing that, to postpone that, be able to postpone that before the agenda?

All I can do is give you advice. I've given you my advice. Again, this is getting into lengthy discussions of an item that's not on the agenda for the public to understand this is going to be discussed. Again, there's nothing that says that you can't discuss things with the county manager outside the meeting. And if you have concerns, my suggestion is that you deal with him outside the meeting.

I understand. Manager, if we can get this on the next agenda, please. Splashpad and Jimmy, I hope you'll be available for that too, and I'll resume at that time. Okay. Thank you, sir.

Do you think I know your answer to what you're talking about?

No, we have to stop it.

Okay.

We have to stop it.

Okay. Okay.

Okay, thank you, Mr. DA. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, folks. We'll get this on the next agenda. Thank you, Jimmy. Thank you, Jimmy.

Sam, do we have any managers or directors on the phone, please?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Good afternoon, Commissioners. Braylon Powers, POW ERS, the President for Nye County. I just wanted to share... that the real property tax bills have been mailed. My department processed these in-house. This is our third year now. The last batch was taken to the post office yesterday. I would be amiss if I did not give a shout out to our IT department and to our assessors. We had mechanical failure with our Xerox. Our IT department came to our rescue and orchestrated the same day fix. and our assessors provided a temporary printing solution for our tax bills, as well allowed us to utilize their mail folding inserting machine here in Pahrump. I also want to give a huge shout out to the deputies in my department. This is a huge project for us and they knocked it out of the ballpark once again. And to the deputies up north, thank you so much for taking care of our daily operations while we administered mailing 60,000 tax bills. So thank you everybody for a great job. And definitely thank you IT and assessors. The first due date is August 17th. It does fall on the third Monday in August every year. That is by NRS standards. The NRS also allows for an automatic 10-day grace period, pushing that official due date out to August 27th. And that is all I wanted to share on that note, commissioners.

Thank you. Ray Lynn, Sam, anybody, uh, come on up chief.

Good afternoon. Commissioner Scott Lewis, director of emergency management. On a Friday evening, not too long ago, there was a serious fire that occurred in Beatty that ultimately took down three structures. Our volunteers did an outstanding job protecting the nearby exposures and worked tirelessly throughout the evening and overnight hours. Unfortunately, a person lost their life in that fire. The fire is under investigation by the Deputy State Fire Marshal. And emergency management responded to support the command staff that had been established. And one firefighter was transported to our local hospital for evaluation over at night. Sad news, but I thought you should know.

Thank you. Thank you for that. That was a bad one. Sam, do we have any other managers?

There's a hand raised, but I'm not sure.

Let's check it out. We're adventurous today.

Caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

I apologize. We're on item eight? No, no. No, that would be lovely if we were. That'd be after lunch.

Count on after lunch.

All right, so that's it then, right? That's it. Okay, closing that out. Number whatever the next one is.

Item five, approval of the agenda for January 21st, 2026. There are no changes that I've been made aware of. No, you do have an emergency item.

Okay, so six then, please.

Item six for possible action, emergency items. I just wanted to bring back to you guys last meeting. On the 7th, we had a bunch of the liquor licensing that was on the agenda. Okay. There were a couple of licenses that didn't get renewed. One of them, particularly, was Breakthrough Beverage. Since then, we have kind of learned...

Excuse me, Chair.

Yes, sir.

Excuse me, Manager. Mr. DA, this is in regards to an emergency item, and we're going to be discussing liquor licensing. I think it would be appropriate that we call the Sheriff the Chair of the Liquor Licensing Board at this time.

Thank you. Absolutely. Handing it to you, Joe.

So to continue, we learned some information that kind of gave some explanation as to why We had not received the renewal fees and stuff from the applicant that we just learned here recently, so I had asked the DA about doing this emergency item to, if nothing else, temporarily reinstate the license until we can conduct the show cause, which is how the code actually requires a full-on reinstatement, just because I have heard from several of the businesses in town that this is hurting their business because they have not been able to get restocked. Breakthrough Beverages, if not the only distributor that is being used in town, they are definitely the main distributor being used in town. And there is a representative in the audience if you guys have any questions. But our intentions are to bring back an item on August 4th to the Liquor and Licensing Board for a show cause, and they can provide a more detailed explanation. Breakthrough beverage.

So how would chair handle this item specifically?

Like any other, I mean, I believe you could have discussion on it. You can do public comment on it. Are we looking for a motion? Well, I think you'd have to do public comment.

Well, I know that, but ultimately you're looking for a motion.

Yeah, looking for a motion to temporarily reinstate the show cause on August 4th. August 4th? Yes.

So do we need to formally open the meeting of the licensing and liquor board? OK, so done. OK, so is there any comments from the board before we go to public comment? I have none, Chair.

I have none.

Do we want to hear from the applicant?

Oh, yes. Yeah, you said somebody was here? OK, yes. So that you're aware, we can't take any testimony as far as reasoning behind the non-payment, if I'm not mistaken, would be the right way to go with it. Yeah, that would be for the Shrokotsky. Yeah, this would just be a general statement.

If any of us had questions for him.

Mm-hmm.

That's fine. I don't. Oh.

Good afternoon, commissioners and city management. My name is Kevin Wilkerson. I am an employee of Breakthrough Beverage Nevada, VP of Trade Development. And I wanted to come down and apologize for what you're referring to. There was some administrative errors that happened. There was three sets of checks sent out. We certainly were not trying. Sorry.

I'll save that for the show.

Yeah, so anyways, we wanted to come down in person, state our apology. Payment has been made, and now we're just trying to find a resolution so we don't have to wait until August 4th. It's impacting our customers. It's impacting our citizens. So we're looking for a resolution. Ask any questions you would like.

Chair, I'd like to request that you spell your name for the record.

Kevin Wilkerson, W-I-L-K-E-R-S-O-N.

Thank you.

Want to do public?

Yeah, public comment. Thank you. Any public comment? Don't see anybody. Nobody in Tonopah. Do we have anybody on the phone?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Hello, commissioners. Hello, Sheriff Michael David Garcia, G-A-R-C-I-A. I didn't hear anybody define that this qualifies for an emergency item. You're basically bypassing original process, due process and protocol, you know, unless you're willing to admit on the record that you did in fact cause these folks harm and loss. An emergency item. Sheriff, what's it called when you borrow without a state of emergency? Thank you. Let's stick to the constitutionality of this. Come on now. Thank you all.

Thank you. Anybody else?

No, Chair.

Chair?

With that, we'll close public comment.

I'd like to make a motion.

Okay.

Motion is to issue a temporary license until August 4th for breakthrough beverages.

Second. I ask for one correction, a reinstatement, a temporary reinstatement.

Temporary reinstatement of their license, good until August 4th. So amended, second.

Okay, we have a motion and a second. Any further discussion? If not, take a vote.

Or a show cause.

Or a show cause.

Or a show cause, thank you.

Yeah, so we need to get that on the agenda for a show cause for August 4th. Aye. Aye. Aye.

Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye.

Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye.

Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye 10 a.m. timed item for possible action, discussion and deliberation regarding the monthly statement of county treasurer pursuant to NRS 354.280, including receipts, balances and funds, money on deposit, outstanding checks and cash on hand.

Thanks for that. Hey, do we have Ray Lynn on the phone, please, Sam? Yes, sir. Hello.

Good afternoon again, commissioners. Hello. Raelynn Powers, POWERS, Treasurer for Nye County. Today's presentation is our bank reconciliation and treasurer's report for the month of May. Everything looks to be in order and moving along just fine with our bank reconciliation and treasurer's report. We are gearing up for the close of fiscal year 26. We are working hand in hand with our finance department. Nothing really.

outstanding to report this month commissioners do we have any questions thank you any questions for ray lynn before i open public comment yes sir nada okay sam let's open public comment please thank you chair the caller is unmuted please speak and spell your name for the record amy nelson n-e-l-s-o-n i'd like to ask the treasurer if this reconciliation includes the late fees or fines from the businesses in District 1 that didn't pay their taxes on time. Has that all been reconciled? Around $89,000. Thank you.

Thank you, Sam. Do we have anybody else? Let's do public, Raelynn, please. Sam, do we have anybody else?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Seth Borisovich, B-O-R-Y-S-E-W-I-C-H. I was wondering why we took $920,000 out of an interest-bearing account in Wells Fargo and where did that money go and would it have been better just to leave it back in that account to get some interest? And then I have like three or four other questions. I don't know if you want me to just read them or not, but why was the Flint scholarship account reduced to zero? Is it because we went and gave all of the scholarship money out? What caused the 1.13 million increase in deposits in transit in May? Are there any outstanding vendor checks older than 180 days? Which capital project funds are significantly behind schedule? And how much of the general fund balance is unrestricted versus legally committed? And those are my questions.

Thanks, Beth. Sam, do we have anybody else, please?

Yes, Chair, the caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Hello, Commissioners. Michael Daly at GARCIA. And once again, I thank you all to consider preserving these records for state and federal violations. Thank you all.

How about now, Sam?

No, Chair.

We're going to close public comment. And Raelynn, if anybody has questions for you, they can email you. You don't have to go through it here. Thank you, though. If there's nothing else, we're going to close that item.

CHRISTIE WOODARD- Thank you.

TODD BANDUCCI- Eight, please. CHRISTIE WOODARD- Uh-uh. TODD BANDUCCI- Nope. CHRISTIE WOODARD- Nope. TODD BANDUCCI- Sorry. Hold, please. OK, we're taking lunch. CHRISTIE WOODARD- Easy one? TODD BANDUCCI- Yeah, let's do some easy ones. Which one would those be, Bruce?

CHRISTIE WOODARD- Please tell me an easy one. TODD BANDUCCI- Let's do 15.

Let's do consent.

Item 15, consent agenda items. These are items that staff recommends for approval. The board reserves the right to move any consent agenda item to the regular segment of the agenda should issues arise that need to be addressed. Discussion of any item from the consent agenda items that needs review before a decision is made. This is item 15.1, 15.2, 15.3, 15.4, 15.5, 15.6,

Thank you on that. Uh, let's open public comment on any of these items, please.

Hi, Marianne.

Go ahead, please.

Thank you. Marianne Hollis, H O L L I S. You caught me off guard. You didn't get me, give me enough time to pull all my backup comments. However, Let me talk about 15.2 and 15.4. Should I do one at, obviously one at a time? Okay, 15.2. I'm looking at the number of cannabis licenses, 22. The last time that I knew that there was a number to be acceptable was 14. And then someone came forward, I think it was Green Life Productions that wanted up to four of them. So I thought, what else do we have 22 of here in this town? Gas stations, fast food, whatever. And then I thought, I looked at some of the license types and its medical production, and I thought, what do we have for medical here besides this? Barely anything. 22 licenses, we have 24 beds in our hospital. That's all I'm comparing that on. So I don't know what the actual number is allowed now. Is it up to 22? And as far as the 15.4, I'm not gonna have enough time. The Lombardo's office go-ed set aside $75,000. to assist with an update to the environmental review for the Pahrump Fairgrounds, which will include tying in the two wells. Now, the last time that I was able to track down an environmental study was 2012, so I And that came in at a lot of money, like $700,000 in 2012. So I don't know the extent of this study. Is it just in that area? Or is it from where that first study ended and it will continue all the way over? And I just think that $75,000, of course, is needed, but we'll soon be hearing about the additional costs for this, I'm sure. Thank you.

Thank you. Sam, do we have anybody on the phone, please?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

F4 Savage, B-O-R-Y-S-E-W-I-C-H. This is regarding 15.4. First of all, I would like Nye County to ensure that any kind of documentation or anything that's written up about the fairgrounds indicates Pahrump Fairgrounds because this land does not belong to Nye County. It belongs to the town of Pahrump. And I just want to make sure that it's perfectly clear because there's documentation saying that Nye County is requesting funds for the fairgrounds. I wouldn't know why Nye County would do that. It would be Pahrump. Why are the Nye County staff authorized to expense project-related wages to Pahrump Fairgrounds room tax? What explicit project-related wages go to 25414? How much will be billed and where does these billings show up on the town of Pahrump's financial statement? Nye County was issued $75,000 for the purpose of procuring engineering services to connect the two wells at the Pahrump Fairgrounds. I just heard something weird is that there was going to be one well at one end and one well at the other. include a long-ass pipe out there to connect the two of them. And I just don't understand that. And hire environmental consultants to update the existing environmental assessment to be used for all future projects at the fairgrounds. Is $75,000 going to be enough for that? Those environmental studies are really expensive. engineers, you know. I worked with a bunch of engineers and they say that their stuff don't stink and that's why they charge so much. But anyway. Has there been a hearing from the town for Nye County to provide funds at the fairground? Is it even authorized in any of the documentation? The town of Pahrump should be requesting funds for its own project at the fairground belonging to the town and not the county. So it's just kind of weird that, you know, some of the money from Nye County is flowing over to the fairgrounds, and it doesn't make sense why that's happening. I mean, all the funds should be requested from the town of Pahrump. All core spending should go back to the town of Pahrump. And then I'd like to know who's handling that other than your commissioners. I mean, is there some manager that we don't know about that's in the background that's handling that? Is Brett doing that? That could be because he's our town manager. So anyway, those are just some of my questions, and hopefully I can get an answer somehow.

Thanks.

Thank you, Beth. Sam, do we have anybody else, please?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Hi, my name is Ron Richardson, R-I-C-H-A-R-D-S-O-N. I don't have an agenda, so I don't know the agenda item, but I'm calling in with respect to... ETSU-26-1. It's an appeal to I'm sorry, sir.

It's not this one. I'm trying to figure out which one it is for you. Is it 8? It's the next item, sir. Anybody else, Sam?

No, Chair. But we did get a request from the treasurer to hear her item while we have her before people start calling in about their tax bills.

OK. I thought we just did that.

CHRISTIE WOODARD- Item 20.

TODD BANDUCCI- OK. Well, first of all, closing public comment.

CHRISTIE WOODARD- May I comment to something? TODD BANDUCCI- Yes. CHRISTIE WOODARD- So as far as 15.2 and your concerns, there are nine businesses with several licenses. So that may help this question of why we have so many licenses. they are doing business with nine businesses and maybe they have cultivation and they have production. So just to clarify that, as far as the CBDG and the question from Beth, Nye County's been putting in for CBDG this whole entire time. GoEd is always given the money directly from the governor to Nye County through our different townships. So I don't understand that question from Beth either. So thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you. I'm ready for a motion.

Motion to approve.

Second. Motion and a second. All those in favor?

Aye.

Aye. Aye. Oscoch, aye. That carries 5-0. Thank you. 20, please. And then we're doing 8.

OK.

Item 20, and we're going to lunch. Sure we are. I had to make the solar item? Yeah, that's what I wanted to say.

Yeah.

Perfect. Item 20 for possible action, discussion and deliberation to adopt, amend, and adopt or reject my county resolution number 2027-16, a resolution directing the levy of the tax rate required for fiscal year 2026 and 2027. Thank you for that.

Chair, I do need to state on the record and request the commission if they make a motion to adopt this. The resolution number is actually 2026-12. Oh, 12. On the next page.

Yeah, just the agenda item. No big deal.

Yeah, so the backup is correct. It's just an administrative error. It's 2026-12. and we do have the treasurer on the line.

Thank you, Sam. Go ahead, Raelynn.

Raelynn Powers, POWERS Treasurer for Nye County. Thank you, commissioners, for squeezing me in. The item before you today is the current tax rates for all of the districts throughout Nye County. The overall tax rate has not changed. We're at the direction of our comptroller and the approval of the Board of County Commissioners. We have removed the prompt museum tax rate of 0.0039, and that has been moved into the Nye County General Fund, which is our taxing entity as COGEN. There is a tax rate comparison report included in the backup that provides a very clear and concise identification with the current rate is, what the year before us was at, and where that rate has been moved from. This is also based off of our budget, the approval of Department of Detaxation, as well as the red book that Detax publishes. There's no questions. We simply ask that the Board of County Commissioners approve and certify these tax rates, and we're good to go.

Thank you, Ray Lynn. Let's see if we have any public comment. Let's open up public.

Yes, Chair, the caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Of course, it had to be me, Beth Borasevich, B-O-R-Y-S-E-W-I-C-H. I just want clear and concise language. There is no tax hike, right? That's all I want to know, if I'm right or wrong. That's all I want. Thanks.

Thanks, Beth. Sam, do you have anybody else for us?

There's a comparison between last year and this year, and they're both exactly the same if you look at the backup.

There's no further comment on the phone.

Closing public comment. Commissioners.

Thank you for that comment, Koenig. I'd like to make a motion to adopt Nye County Resolution 2027-12. No. 2026-12. 2026-12. Second.

Motion and a second. All those in favor? Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. I didn't stutter. Ready? 23, please. Thank you, sir.

You're fine.

Me too. I'm ready to get the heck out of here.

For possible action, presented by Mike Jackson with Southern Nevada Transit Coalition regarding public transportation updates and discussion and deliberation to approve to fund an estimated $140,000 for fiscal year 2027 for a local match required needed to contribute public... continue public transportation services in public under the Federal Transit Administration Section 5311 Rural Public Transportation Program.

Thank you for that. Good afternoon, sir. They promised me you only needed three minutes.

Yeah, well, I'll cut to the chase. I love that. That's for sure. My name is Michael Jackson, and I know how to moonwalk. I'm the Executive Director of Southern Nevada Transit Coalition. Brand name, Silver Rider. We operate all the rural transit in Southern Nevada. We've been running service in Laughlin, Mesquite, Boulder City since 2002. We've won the Rural Transit of the Year for the nation in 2013. So we do what we do, and we do it well. We were asked by NDOT to come to Pahrump to help with the situation to continue transit operating, in which we did. NDOT was good enough to work it out with FTA to fund it 100% while we tried to work through this transition. 100% funding is running out. We need match. And to understand a little bit how it works, if you're not familiar with public transit, is the federal funds require a match. At our other sites, Laughlin, Mesquite, and Boulder City, we operate off of separate grants, and we get a commitment from the RTC of Southern Nevada for the matching funds for those federal funds. So I'm here today to ask for Nye County to support this in matching federal funds to continue to operate public transit in Pahrump. Without that, we will have to shut transit down July 31st. So I need action now. I need a commitment. Otherwise, we will either have to pause public transit or close it down completely.

What were the other jurisdictions you do this?

Where we operate? Yeah. Laughlin, Boulder City, and Mesquite, and basically all the areas in between.

Gotcha. How do their meetings go compared to these?

Mesquite's pretty lively.

Yeah?

Yeah.

Nice. Do they give you a match?

The City of Mesquite does not, the RTC does. The RTC is the MPO of that area, and all of our match is provided by the RTC of Southern Nevada.

How did this work here before?

How did it work here before? I believe that the transit person before received different funds from different areas, but I'm not exactly sure. I was not privy to the financials of the president.

I am the president and chairman of the board of Front Valley Public Transportation. It still is a company that we don't operate because NDOT shut us down because we didn't have enough money in the bank. We didn't have money in the bank because NDOT didn't pay us. So a lot of this is a bunch of lies and things. But wait, wait. They funded us 100%. So I don't know why they can't fund you 100% when they called you to go take over from what we were doing. And now we don't have it. And you don't do veterans, which we were doing, which takes veterans anywhere they want to go for free. So we're going to start that up again in September. It'd be up to the board on this, and we don't have that kind of money.

Well, when it comes to Pahrump Valley, I don't know their circumstances. I wasn't privy to that, and that wasn't my business. But I do know from the beginning of Pahrump Valley Transit and their formation, I assisted them in every way I could. I donated vehicles to them. I provided all of my programs, procedures, and policies to help them be compliant. So I was a good neighbor.

I'm not picking on you. I'm just telling you what NDOT did, because what they say happened didn't happen. All right.

Any other questions?

Yes. Go ahead, sir. Thank you, Mike Jackson, for... Michael. Michael? Whoo!

Yeah. One glove.

Thank you for stepping up. at the sensitive time that NDOT asked you to. And so I'm not speaking for Commissioner Koenig when he says that this is all lies. You stepped up, your organization stepped up, and have been facilitating the transportation for all of the folks in Pahrump for whatever appointments that they need, but only in Pahrump. Is that right?

You know, quite honestly, when I agreed to come out and help, my thought pattern at that time was to come help, get the transition taken care of, and then hand it off to find somebody else to take it over. Once we came out here and seen what great employees there was there and truly the need of public transit in the Pahrump area, it made us want to stay. And so we're in it to stay. We're in it to continue. We've been at our other sites for many years, 23 years. We're here to stay. And it's funny, Pahrump was part of our mission statement when SNTC was formed. We actually had a board member, Pablo, that was out of Pahrump. The lawyer Pablo, he was our board member. So we're kind of going back to where we had originally started, and Pahrump was part of our vision. So we're here.

Okay, so... So you're saying that any funding that was left over, because you've taken over all of the assets here in Pahrump.

Well.

Most of the building, the vehicles.

Anything that had FTA interest in it.

Yes. So you answered one of the questions, is you're only good until July 31st. And then what happens you shut the operation down if we're not because if you've done research on Knight County, we're in a deficit We're trying to get out of the deficit trying to figure things out So what are our options? To continue to have you and your operation to continue to provide transportation For whether it's the seniors whether it's good getting Medicine, whatever the case may be what we're looking at is

for our next budget, which starts in October. FTA, I believe, will release more funding to put us through until we start into the next grant, which we need to apply for and we need to have a commitment for that grant that starts in October. Without any knowledge or any commitment, FTA will not release any more funding.

So with this request, the estimated to me is up to $140,000, up to. And so would that carry, I don't know where we're going to find that money. We need time to find that money. I can ask the question, I'll ask the question. Do we have $140,000 comptroller for this great entity that's doing a great thing, service for our folks here in Pahrump?

So on the county side, no. We are still in a budget situation that we're trying to work our way out of. But we do not have a budget for transportation, but we do have a fund balance that we can draw upon and do a budget augment in the town of Pahrump if it's just to get us through. this short time period to give us time to figure out what we can do on, is it just the town is the question, or is it going to be county-wide?

Well, currently the demand response is within Pahrump, and we do a service to . There is also the service that was canceled before we had taken over that goes to Vegas that does need to come back because there's medical services that the residents of Pahrump need there too.

How many times a week are you going to Beatty?

It needs to be evaluated.

How many times a week are you going to Beatty? Because you said you have a service for Beatty.

Oh, Beatty is just once.

One day a week? Yes. Okay. And four days, five days a week for Pahrump?

Perum six.

Six days a week for Perum? You're not on record, ma'am. Sorry. Thank you. I can hear you, but you're not on record.

Six in Perum, one for Beatty. Okay. And Vegas needs to be evaluated. Okay. We basically came in with no changes other than we stopped the two-week in advance reservations and changed it to 24.

Okay. So let me ask you a question, sir. We obviously don't have the money now. If the operation shuts down on July 31st and then we are somehow able to find funding for this, funding source for this transportation for the people of Pahrump and once a week to Beatty, would you be able to resume immediately? Yes.

The longer it goes, the longer it may be for us to lose the great employees that we have here. That is a big concern.

Comptroller wants to jump in through the chair.

I have a question for you. You said that it expires at the end of July. The end of July? Is that correct?

July 31st, we're out of money.

Okay. So the federal funding that you're talking about, is this the – can you give us a little more information about the federal funding?

The federal funding that we're operating off of right now, I believe, is still left over COVID money, which was 100%. I'm not exactly sure. That's not my deal. When we were asked to take over and stated that they had – 100% funding to carry us through. When we first started rolling into it and coming up with an agreement, the agreement was about $250,000, and not all the money got approved, and it ended up being only $106,000, because the $250,000 wouldn't last until November. And that's why this urgency has come up. It was only $106,000 that FTA approved.

So we don't, do we know that the FTA would definitely approve it come October?

I have emails that say.

And what kind of funding from the FTA is this?

Just over 100% funding. Does that make sense? From now until, basically what I've been told is the FTA does not want to release any more 100% funding unless there is a commitment. And it's not a commitment for now, it's a commitment for 2027.

A commitment from the transportation company or backing from?

From Knight County for matching funds.

Just like when we apply for a grant on our other sites, our grant includes a letter of commitment from the RTC for that grant to get approved. Does that make sense?

Mr. Jackson, excuse me, Comptroller, Chair. Could you tell me approximately how much your monthly operating costs are?

It is costing anywhere, because we had a three-week payroll, so that was three payroll a month, but it's ranging between 40 and 60,000 a month. That's no expansion, running what they had. No Vegas, no nothing. I see such potential here too, such potential. And one of the things important to know, because I know the way things may have gone in the past, we don't ask for that 140,000 a check at the beginning. We draw off that every month. We get reimbursed for our expenses.

Approximately, it's like four months of operating costs, approximately. Yeah.

so every month we bill endot and then we bill knight county for the match chair or the cost of that yeah uh mr jackson you mentioned laughlin and mesquite you said mesquite doesn't have to come up with any money the city of mesquite doesn't because it's in clark county and rtc is responsible for the how much money does laughlin come up with laughlin None of the other, RTC is our match provider for all three sites.

What's the third site?

Boulder City and Laughlin.

Didn't get that.

And they're all in Clark County. Clark. Therefore, RTC of Southern Nevada is responsible.

And we don't have such a thing with our RTC here for Nye County, Commissioner, sitting on that board? No. Thank you, Chair.

That's something that you guys do need to think about with the next census when Pahrump goes over 50,000 in MPO.

We're already there. Think about what?

You'll become an MPO.

What's an MPO? Long discussion?

Long discussion.

What does it stand for?

Metropolitan Planning Organization. receive federal funds.

I'd like to see the RTC have an item in regards to that so you guys can inform us.

Yeah, you need to dig into that.

Chair.

Chair? Thank you, sir. Chair of our, excuse me. Mr. DeBoer is the chair of RTC.

This is the first I've heard of the MPO. Thank you, sir.

I'll designate the area with a UZA, and then you have to form an MPO, and then you're able to receive federal funds.

Now we're talking.

straight to you.

But that's not until the next census, which is another four or five years from now.

It'll be here before you know it.

Well, we're trying to figure out this solution for transportation for our people in Pahrump right now.

So I need action. I need to know something quickly. Otherwise, 31st, it won't happen.

Yep. Basically, right, basically. So sir, I've said this before and I'm not speaking for the rest of the board. Because I believe in this, I know what you're doing, I know what you've done, I know what you're going to do, and it is for the people and the transportation, but I can't give you what we don't have. And according to the comptroller right now, we don't have it. We'll look for it. And if it's in time, the 31st is next week. But the good thing is is that if we're able to find it, a funding source, we'll be able to resume. And then the risk, yes, and apologies in advance for your staff that... that need to survive, they need that paycheck. Again, we can't give you what we don't have, and I'm not speaking for the rest of the board, just for myself at this time. Thank you, sir. Thank you.

Let's open public comment. Sam, do we have anybody on the phone, please?

Yes, Chair, the caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Hello, my name is Ron Richardson, R-O-N-R-I-T-H-A-R-D-S-O-N. I was speaking in respect to, I guess, it's agenda item number eight, ETSU 26 . CHRIS RODGERS.

Well, sir, we're on 23 right now. Can you guys keep it down, please? Or we can take another break and stay here all night. Jesus. Anybody else, Sam?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Hi. This is Tim Bohannon, B-O-H-A-N-N-O-N. Part of transportation in this kind of setting is important for those who need to be able to get medical care. So from a public safety standpoint, That is a factor that has to be considered. Now let's get down to the real fun. From a finance standpoint, we're in tough water. But if I heard correctly, that there may be some room in the current budget to be able to do something short term, get us through the immediate concern, reevaluate,

and then go forward from there.

The other aspect during the MPO, I'm not sure how quickly that MPO would be able to turn around and be able to do something from a federal funding. I'm sure it takes time. And that will have to be evaluated. And the timeframe from 7-31 to whatever that date is, would have to be calculated at the background. I don't think it's part of today's docket. So in the interest of public safety, think about it. In the interest of finance, you got to do what you can do.

Thanks, Tim. Sam, anybody else, please?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Commissioners Herman Lewis, L-E-W-I-S, excellent decision. You can't spend what you don't have. While the gentleman seems very nice, he's very short on specifics. I'd recommend that he present paperwork on the other matching grants so you have stuff that you can look at that's in writing. Excellent job. Denied. CHRIS RODGERS.

Thank you for that. Come on up, Susie.

Susie Hertz, HERTZ. I'm not sure about this money that's in the town of Pahrump, but if I heard correctly, we're talking about from August 1st to October. August, September? Two months, maybe three. That's not a long time for a temporary use of town funds for town transportation. Just a thought. Thank you.

Thank you.

Come on up, sir.

Anthony Greco, GRECO. It's a real good idea to have public transportation here, but for a short-term thing, it's not any good. You get people used to using something, and then the rug gets pulled out from under them. You've got to make sure that there's enough money for a few years where this could do something for us. know anything to make the town better is good but when you start something you can't finish is good and just please please be careful with our money 50 years in business I heard the checks in the mail for a very long time thank you Sam yes sure the caller is unmuted please speak and spell your name for the record Amy Nelson if I'm not mistaken

I might be confused, but don't we have that trans transportation that works out of the senior center that's available to everybody? If you call them up and make a reservation, they can take you just about anywhere and they charge gas money just about 20 bucks to go to Vegas one way. So I'm not quite sure. where this company comes in, but if we don't have the money, we don't have the money. We can't afford to help them and not help what we have. Thank you.

Thank you. Sam? Oh, come on up, Linda.

Sorry. Linda Clark, CLARK. Seems like since I've been here, we've had money for transportation for our seniors and our people that need it. Why all of a sudden don't we? Did we cut it out of our original budget? Or did somebody else spend it for something else? Which is more likely what happened. I find it very interesting that you guys always have the money for what you want. But where is the money for what we need and we want? Thank you.

Sam, anybody on the phone, please?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.

Yeah, hello, Commissioners. Bruce Johnson, JIP, HNSON. I'm trying to wrap my head around this $40,000 to $60,000 a month. Can anybody help me out there? Thank you.

How about now, Sam? Got anybody?

Yes, Chair. The caller is unmuted. Please speak and spell your name for the record.