Columnist Susan Snyder: Grubb is good in Pahrump

Monday, Jan. 20, 2003 | 8:17 a.m.

Ken Grubb drove 20 miles through the desert for a Pahrump Town Board meeting one night last week.

He's used to the drive, and the town officials are used to him.

"If his lips are moving, he's lying," Town Board member Charlotte LeVar joked as she walked past the front row of folding chairs in the Bob Ruud Community Center.

Grubb lives in Johnnie, a tiny former mining settlement north of Pahrump off State Route 160. But he used to live on Las Vegas' east side, near the spot where Bonanza Road dead-ends at the mountains. He sold his land to the Mormon Church and moved to Nye County about 17 years ago, he said. But he already had lived in Nevada 20 years by then.

"I moved here (Nevada) because you can do more here than you can anywhere else," Grubb said. "It's free here."

Grubb wore a Confederate flag bandana around his neck and a Jarbidge Shovel Brigade baseball cap. He's a member of Pahrump's public lands advisory board and also a supporter of the "sagebrush rebellion" movement that seeks local control of federally managed land.

Nevada's metropolitan residents can easily forget that 87 percent of their state's land is federally managed, Grubb said. He arrived at Tuesday's meeting early carrying a newspaper clipping about the death of Dick Carver, leader of the sagebrush rebellion's second wave.

"I think we ought to at least give him 60 seconds of silence for all he's done," Grubb said. "I learned a lot from him."

The Pahrump Town Board agreed. Officials and residents were silent for a full minute, right after reciting of the "Pledge of Allegiance."

Carver, a former Nye County commissioner, carried the U.S. Constitution in his shirt pocket. He led many a protest against federal land regulation and was there in 2000 when Grubb and other residents protested the U.S. Forest Service closure of a forest road in Jarbidge that had been flooded out.

"I'm really going to miss him a lot," Grubb said. "He worked for the whole country, not just our state."

Carver leaves big shoes that need filling.

"I hope to replace him," Grubb added.

It's easy to snicker when you live in a city where the speed limit is determined by a road's dimensions, rather than whether or not it is paved. Some of our widest open spaces are shopping mall parking lots.

Did you ever stop to marvel that we have shopping mall parking lots?

Two casinos opened in Las Vegas this month, and each reportedly cost $100 million.

The Pahrump Town Board members on Tuesday approved payment of monthly bills amounting to $130,335 (not including employees' salaries). Pahrump could pay its bills for nearly 128 years on what it cost to build those two Las Vegas casinos.

Members also unanimously rescinded a measure passed by the outgoing board in December that would have paid them $100 a month. LeVar initiated the move.

"I knew this was a volunteer position," she said.

They addressed questions from the town staff and from the residents who packed the meeting hall before casting a vote on any issue. Took a powerful long time to get through that agenda, but it's like Grubb said: It's free here.