Town’s boom refuels Nye County rift

Martin Kuz

Sunday, Jan. 31, 1999 | 9:48 a.m.

The official, bland, Rand McNally name for the road that cuts north to south through Pahrump is Highway 160. Among locals it's known more colorfully -- or darkly, perhaps -- as Widow Maker Highway, a nod to all the luckless drivers whose last words were some variation on "Oh, it's only two lanes?"

Get past the maps and gallows humor, however, and a small segment of the road deserves still another moniker: Real Estate Row.

Here, along a six- to eight-block stretch tucked inside the town's southern border, Realtor after Realtor beckons to passers-by. Each sign offers bigger homes, better lots and sweeter deals than the last, a fact advertised in fatter, brighter letters than on the sign that came before it. Pahrump may boast legal brothels, but it's real estate agencies that offer the most seductive come-on.

Yep, the gettin' is good in this rural suburb of Las Vegas, and herds of folks are gettin' theirs. The population has surged to between 25,000 and 30,000, a fourfold increase since 1994, and the number of Pahrumpians could more than double in the next decade. As it stands, the town 65 miles west of Las Vegas already holds three-fourths of Nye County's residents.

Other recent signposts of progress include a McDonald's and a Taco Bell, a Lucky's and a Smith's, video stores, an urgent-care medical facility and the town's first traffic light. A $5 million satellite county government center is shooting up, and a couple of new hotel-casinos soon could be. There is even talk, as befits any U.S. town flirting with boom status, that Wal-Mart might move in.

Yet looking around Pahrump, at its burgeoning population, widening tax base and inviting business climate, there's a sense that something is out of place. Or, rather, not in place: the county seat.

That designation still belongs to Tonopah, 160 miles north of Pahrump and a full 180 degrees away in its prospects.

The mining outpost of 3,300 people has seen sunnier days. Money woes could force the county hospital in Tonopah to shut its doors within the next two months, and a hotel that closed temporarily for remodeling may just stay that way. The only good news of late was the town's qualifying for a $40,000 federal grant to study how to revive downtown -- which has been formally designated a blight area.

As Tonopah ebbs and Pahrump flows, it's no surprise that the on-again, off-again debate over relocating the county seat has bobbed to the surface in recent months. It's also no surprise that consensus is harder to find than in the U.S. Senate.

Pushing one opinion are county officials and residents who contend that shifting the county seat to Pahrump, now Nye's defacto hub, would save millions of dollars in the long run. Others counter that such a move would upset the fragile economic balance of Nye County, the nation's third-largest county in terms of land mass and the address of the Nevada Test Site and Toiyabe National Forest.

Further gumming up the debate is a morass of rural pride, politics and economics, not to mention even stickier questions about whether to redraw Nye County's boundaries.

And people think Las Vegas has growing pains.

Balance of power

Pahrump residents know better than to sign for certified mail if the return ZIP code is 89049. Odds are good that the letter is a summons for jury duty, i.e., a three-hour drive to the Nye County courthouse in Tonopah and the loss of at least a day's pay. Too much of a hassle, in other words.

The county decided to construct the $15 million courthouse in the early 1990s, the tail end of a period of relative prosperity for Tonopah. A few years earlier a military contractor had moved into town, providing hundreds of new jobs for residents -- and potential jurors for the county.

By the time the courthouse opened four years ago, the contractor had bugged out for New Mexico, taking Tonopah's immediate fortunes with it, while Pahrump was starting to flourish as a bedroom community for Las Vegas. Today, most of the jurors in Nye County cases are Pahrump residents, requiring the county to shell out thousands of dollars a year for mileage reimbursement and lodging.

"If you had the courthouse down here, you wouldn't have to have people driving that distance," Michele Worden said. The 26-year-old insurance agent recently reported for jury duty on a stolen-property case. Out of 150 people summoned, 25 showed; more than half of them lived in Pahrump. "It just seems like a waste of money."

The same argument applies to the county hospital, built more than a quarter-century ago when Tonopah had a stronger pulse. As the town withered, the Nye County Commission continued to pump money into the facility. But instead of heading to Tonopah, most Pahrump residents now opt for treatment at the town's urgent-care center or a Las Vegas clinic. The county hospital, as a result, has slid into insolvency.

"All of our money's going up there, and we get nothing out of it," Carol Rogers, 53, a waitress at the Saddle West hotel-casino, said. When her husband, Carl, visited the Tonopah facility recently to learn the cause of his persistent nose bleeds, he was turned away for unexplained reasons. "Why pay for a hospital that we don't even get to use?"

The couple moved to town five years ago seeking peace and quiet, not inconvenience. As such, they contend that bringing the county seat to Pahrump would trim Nye's expenses and boost services for residents living in the county's southernmost corner. Besides that, Carol Rogers said, it just makes sense.

"Everybody wants the county (seat) down here. They want to see our money stay in Pahrump and not go somewhere else," she said.

Ron Murphy, owner of a Pahrump construction company, seconded the sentiment even though he realizes relocating the county seat could mean building another courthouse, jail and hospital. While covering the cost of construction and transfer of services might spell a bump in taxes, Murphy said that remains a cheaper option than incorporating the town.

In Murphy's view, with county government centered in Pahrump, residents would reap greater benefits from its medical, legal, law enforcement and other services. The improved access would diminish the need to incorporate Pahrump, where demand for services only will grow as the town keeps soaking up Las Vegas' population runoff.

Put another way, incorporation would coat Pahrumpians in an extra layer of bureaucracy, forcing them to foot the bill for a municipal police force and fire department, administrative services, elected officials and the like.

No thanks, said the 52-year-old Murphy, who fled Las Vegas in 1973 with his wife, Sally, for Pahrump and the simple life. He has watched happily as efforts to incorporate -- "to complicate things" -- have died, most recently when voters shot down a ballot initiative in 1995.

"If you get lawmakers, they make laws. One more law -- that's what we need, isn't it?" he said. "The county government can run the town as good as a city government could."

Murphy's confidence aside, Pahrump residents tend to offer a softer chorus of cheers for the county commission. That's because only two representatives on the five-member board, Pahrump's Cameron McRae and Ira Copass, hail from the county's southern district. The other three -- Chairman Dick Carver of Round Mountain, Tonopah's Bob Davis and Beatty's Bobby Revert -- represent its so-called "rural" districts.

The disparity has its roots in the 1990 Census. Back then, a larger percentage of Nye County's residents lived in the north than the south. Pahrump's helter-skelter growth has long since tipped the population numbers. But the county's power structure still tilts to the north, a contradiction the town has fought futilely to overturn in the courts and at the ballot box.

A lawsuit filed by Pahrump town officials last year to reverse the one-vote discrepancy to the south's favor quietly fizzled. Another blow came in November when Nye County residents voted to keep in place the commission's traditional district system, preventing any change in the board's geographical makeup.

Critics accuse the commission's northern bloc of protecting their interests at Pahrump's expense, citing the continued funding of the county hospital as one example. Exhibit B: Their lobbying of the Nevada Department of Transportation to pave roads in northern Nye County, leaving the south to cope with gravel roads better suited for covered wagons than cars.

"Are we getting our fair share?" Pahrump Town Board member Mary Wilson asked. "I don't know. The feeling here is we aren't."

The tension between Pahrump and the Nye County Commission resembles the hostility simmering between Las Vegas and the state Legislature. While Southern Nevada has the people, a handful of northern lawmakers, such as Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, and Assembly Speaker Joe Dini, D-Yerington, hold the power.

But unlike Las Vegas, Pahrump's plight should change with the 2000 Census, which will give the county's southern district three and possibly four seats on the commission. At that point, according to former Assemblyman Tim Hafen, a Pahrump resident since 1951, moving the county seat may become more than the stuff of cafe chatter and wishful thinking.

"I don't see it happening before then, but it wouldn't surprise me if something happened after the census. With three of four commissioners, they would have the power to do it if they wanted to," he said. "And it just might make some sense."

Learning to get along

McRae, a man as blunt as the day is long, doesn't hesitate to admit that territorial allegiances split the commission now and again. Its 3-2 vote along geographical lines in 1992 to build the county courthouse in Tonopah was an attempt to sustain the town, McRae said, "but it was also politics."

The three-term commissioner has heard his share of carping from Pahrump residents about the board's northern faction, as well as pleas to move the county power nexus down south. And no one would mistake McRae and Carver -- the iconoclast who has mentioned county realignment in passing at recent commission meetings -- for best pals, locking verbal horns as they have over the years.

All the same, McRae likes the county seat right where it is.

"How come you haven't moved the state capital? If you can justify moving the county seat just because of a town's population, then why don't we move the state capital to Las Vegas? The bottom line is, people have to stop thinking one part of the county is going to rape another part of the county," he said.

McRae can rattle off any number of reasons the status quo isn't that bad. When the $5 million satellite county complex in Pahrump is finished later this year, residents will no longer need to journey to Tonopah for jury duty. A new state law designed to ease the financial onus on rural counties allows for the adjudication of District Court cases at secondary facilities.

In addition, an assistant county manager now works out of Pahrump, McRae noted, relaying residents' concerns to officials in Tonopah. The county also has initiated regular joint meetings of town boards, helping to thaw the sometimes ice-encrusted lines of communication between north and south.

Given that kind of progress, McRae said, the debate over the county seat is nothing more than a playground shoving match. "I can't see one legitimate reason to move it. Who really cares? Only those people who believe that having the county seat is going to give you some mythical power. It's b.s."

Meanwhile, Davis, the Tonopah resident who would seem the unlikeliest commissioner to support relocating the county seat, said it's a concept worth mulling -- after the 2000 Census.

Nearly four decades of enduring Tonopah's boom-bust cycle has taught Davis, 55, the true meaning of the phrase modest expectations. These days he has cautious hopes for his town, what with a copper mine due to open next spring and a military school scouting the area as a possible training site.

Tonopah's resilience may one day lead to a permanent resurgence. If Pahrump were to become the Nye County seat, Carver has suggested publicly in recent months that Tonopah could join neighboring Esmeralda County.

Nudging Tonopah into the cash-poor county of 1,400 people could prove an economic thunderclap, bolstering Esmeralda's industry base, tax rolls and services overnight. The town's courthouse, jail and hospital would regain their usefulness, regardless of whether Goldfield remained the Esmeralda County seat or Tonopah, 25 miles to the south, took over the title. Financial rejuvenation would blanket the region.

And then again, everything might get worse.

Tonopah entered fiscal year 1998-99 more than $80,000 in the hole, forcing it to slash residential services, a common quandary for Nevada's unincorporated towns. But at least Tonopah has Pahrump to fall back on in Nye County. If Tonopah collapsed as the county seat of Esmeralda, the town would have only itself to turn to for help.

An ugly prospect. Perhaps that's why the reaction among Esmeralda officials and residents to talk of redrawing county boundaries has been frostier than the recent weather, Davis said. Rural Nevadans cultivate a deep pride in taking care of themselves, and they get a little ornery when someone intimates that they need help.

"There's a 'Remember the Alamo, don't tread on me' mentality," McRae said.

As for Pahrump, amid the assumptions that it's ready to become a county seat, at least one red flag -- make that a green one -- stands in the way: money.

More precisely, a lack of it. Pahrump's rate of growth has surpassed the county tax assessor's ability to keep up with collections. As a result, while demand for services increases unabated, the revenue to pay for them isn't rolling in fast enough, according to Sandy Harmon, executive director of the economic development authority for Nye and Esmeralda counties.

The reason for the money pinch is simple enough. A shortage of county manpower has created a 12- to 18-month lag between purchase of property and assessment of taxes. Without that money stream, services remain in danger of drying up.

"Pahrump grew so fast, Nye had no way of dealing with it," Harmon said. "The county is all but broke."

Which should muffle discussion of jigsawing county boundaries, Gary Hollis said. Chairman of the Pahrump Town Board, he favors what might be described as a Beatlesesque approach to the county seat issue: Let it be.

"We've all lived together for years and years and years. When Tonopah was bigger, it helped out Pahrump. Now it's our turn to help. That's what towns do for one another," Hollis said.

Living the good life

Some observers maintain that Pahrump intends to hijack Nye County. Others say the influential Carver, who could not be reached for comment, wants to retain at least a fraction of power for northern Nye, historically the county's stronghold. But commissioners, town officials and residents can jaw all they want -- in the end, the Legislature sets county boundaries, making it a slow, uncertain process.

In the meantime, the pressing concern for Pahrump residents is nurturing the town's rural quality of life. Unlike Las Vegas, which has choked on its own growth, Pahrump has built-in features to prevent overcrowding and runaway development.

Although the town has no zoning code, Pahrump imposes a moratorium on subdivision of lots, which prohibits developers from mincing properties and building houses within an arm's length of each other. The absence of centralized water and sewer services also acts as a deterrent, since homeowners have to put in their own well and septic tank. Finally, the town's distance from Las Vegas convinces some prospective home buyers that the commute is a bit too far.

The Pahrump Valley's open spaces were what hooked Darrell and Angie Gardner, project managers for a Las Vegas architecture firm. The couple, expecting their first child, decided last year they wanted to design their own home -- without going broke.

So the Gardners looked to Pahrump, where they were greeted by affordable building costs -- their nearly-finished 2,400-square-foot dream home would have been nightmarishly expensive in Las Vegas -- and a quiet setting to raise a family. And, as a bonus, mountains in their backyard.

Yep, they got theirs.

"People aren't building on top of each other here," Angie Gardner said. "You can breathe here."

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