By Mark Waite
County commissioners will discuss and deliberate on the location of the Nye County jail during a meeting at 10 a.m. Tuesday at the county commissioners’ chambers at 2100 Walt Williams Dr. on the Calvada Eye.
The meeting can be viewed by computer at www.nyecounty.net and clicking on public meeting videos.
The discussion is reportedly going to include whether to close the Tonopah jail and house prisoners entirely at the new Pahrump jail.
In other business, Sheriff Tony DeMeo is asking the county to purchase 10 patrol vehicles at a cost of $45,000 apiece. The sheriff says 55 vehicles have more than 100,000 miles.
A resolution to the Federal Aviation Administration regarding the Pahrump Airport project is up for approval.
Commissioners will discuss a master plan for the Calvada Eye.
A brief filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation on the Wayne Hage case will be discussed, which has been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
An agenda item to name two rooms at the Nye County Government Center for former Pahrump Regional Planning Commission members Charles Dupre and Sheldon Bass is up for approval and designating an area in the commissioners’ chambers for outstanding citizen recognitions.
The job descriptions for the county manager and assistant county manager would be revised to change the educational requirements, under another agenda item. Former county commissioner Joni Eastley was hired as assistant county manager, though she didn’t meet the educational requirements in the job description, she is being paid $45.36 per hour. The agenda item will also revise the assistant county manager’s reporting structure.
A public hearing is scheduled at 10:45 a.m. on an amendment to the Nye County Code governing the impoundment of animals for protective custody. Owners would have five business days to recover their animals, or they could be put up for auction, adoption or be destroyed.
Commissioners will consider filling a bailiff position for Fifth District Court Department 1 Judge Kimberly Wanker, using drug court funds.
Another 10:45 a.m. public hearing is scheduled on a nuisance at 3401 E. Savoy Blvd.
The public works director is asking to call $85,803 in bonds for street improvements made with the Stephen Rakower Trust for Barney Street and Thistle Lane, under a warranty agreement made on Feb. 21, 2007.
Among 17 items under consideration under the consent agenda is the termination of a tower rental agreement with Commnet of Nevada LLC, two agreements with Wave Direct for tower space rental for Nye County for radio frequency communication with wireless ISP services and the selection of Motorola Solutions for an Amargosa Valley base station radio.
Commissioners will be asked to increase the budget with Central Nevada GIS and Cartography by $100,000 for the documentation of minor county roads.
An amended contract with Great Basin Drilling for a monitoring well in Amargosa Valley, adding another $5,000, is also on the consent agenda.
The purchase of 12 Dell Latitude E6530 lap top computers for $14,168.10 is on the consent agenda.
Eastley is a very bright person, very able in many ways. However she sold out Pahrumnp when she railroaded through a contract with endless modifications that not even she and the rest of the commission had seen, entirely for the benefit of the Corrections Corporation of America. That sacrificed the interests of the community.
She had to have known that local supporters who expected to personally profit, such as Wulfenstein (who apparently actually got promised the only “local” work, for site prep), to the bozos at defunct ACE Hardware who were dumb enough to believe CCA would make major and regular purchases from them, had packed the Rudd Center main hearing room. That was so the opponents, who far outnumbered supporters, could not get in to listen or speak. Eastley even threatened one CCA whistleblower who had come all the way from Colorado, with prosecution, if the woman continued to testify about being ordered to falsify records. That was a stupid threat, because she hadn’t done anything illegal and even if she had, the statute of limitations would have precluded any prosecution.
Eastly chaired the county commission that removed the 9.5 mile restriction in which a prison could not be built in Pahrump, in order that CCA could drop it in the center of town and destroy the neighbors property values.
That county commission which she headed was corrupt, though we couldn’t expect DeMeo and Becker to do anything about it. That alone should bar Eastley from any public position of authority.
Funny, Joni was the only one who voted against that location.
I thought it was another sleaze, the later convicted Liakopolus, who cast the dissenting vote in 2007. In any case, if it was Eastley who voted against the waiver, it was an action wholly without any consequence, since it would have passed even in the presence of twice the opposition. What better cover for iniquity might one wish for?
You need to ask yourself why she made certain the county would give away the store at the meeting in which dozens of verbally introduced and previously unseen contract modifications, all of which disproportionately favored CCA, were passed by the Commission.
I don’t like CCA anymore than the next person, but, the property values argument is asinine, across the street from CCA is the town dump, CCA did not lower property values anymore than the dump already has. Wouldn’t the town have to give NCSO the same 9.5 mile waiver when they constructed the new jail, which is closer to the center of town than CCA. The town as a whole got duped by CCA, but the things you are focusing on don’t make sense if you look at the big picture, you can’t blame one person or even just the county commission.
In Nye county ordinance 388 the 9.5 mile refers only to Prisons and private detention facilities.
You couldn’t be more illogical.
Landfills certainly have problems, especially in the manner in which they may be unprofessionally or corruptly operated. However, you can’t see the landfill from California at night, no one is going to escape from a landfill and harm locals while trying to make a getaway, and landfills don’t experience regular riots.
Landfills typically have estimated life spans measured in a couple of decades at the most. They have the responsibility of covering up their contents on a daily basis, so as not to attract nuisances or offend the senses.
Your statement that the prison will have no effect on property values is grossly uninformed. Talk to the Clendennons for instance, whose picture window looks out on an expanse of walls and wire. You could probably read a newspaper at night in their living room which is bathed in bright light from the prison.
Ask them about the immense bath they took when shortly after buying their home, the corrupt county government engaged in the 9.5 mile “bait and switch” and accepted a site that had barely been mentioned by supporters. The basis for that move by CCA and the county was to subvert the legitimacy of a NEPA assessment.
There were dozens of form letters of support for sites beyond the 9.5 mile limit toward I-95, but not a single one for the downtown location. You could look that up in the library but best guess is that a prison supporter stole the massive document that was there for the public to inspect and the government never provided a replacement.
Some landfills are corruptly and/or incompetently operated, no doubt, and have major negative impacts on the environment. However, all for-profit prisons are
run that way.
There was no legitimate reason for that prison to ever have been built. ICE didn’t need it. There was a steadily declining undocumented worker population in southern Nevada, one which was housed mainly and easily accommodated in Las Vegas Metro’s jail.
If the feds really needed a site, they could have leased for a small fraction of the cost, the rehabilitated but vacant prison at Jean, one which has not had a negative impact on a heavily populated area. There would have been no need for the immensely lucrative transportation contract given to CCA, that insures corporate profits into the hundreds of millions, to ferry prisoners back and forth from Vegas at close to the maximum (lucrative) RFP distance from downtown Vegas.
The only reasons CCA built the prison in Pahrump was to maximize their bilking of the federal taxpayers and the presence of a corrupt county government.
There is no contract with ICE for short (or long) term detainees, as had been promised to the gullible and/or greedy supporters of the prison. The contract is with the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee, engineered by for-profit prison advocate and contractor, former OFDT Trustee Stacia Hylton. It is full of US Marshals Service prisoners, a Division of Obama’s Department of “Justice.” Hylton was brought out of her brief “retirement” as a immensely compensated private prison “consultant” (a quid pro quo, one can safely assume) to head.
Her nomination for the post was approved by an almost empty Senate chamber in the last official afternoon of the 2010 post-Christmas session that was held to extend the Bush tax cuts. That Obama/Holder appointment should have been rejected by a quorum call, but virtually every Senator who had expressed reservations about the likely corruption involved, which was only mentioned in the Washington Times and nowhere else, had gone home to spend time with their families on New Year’s Eve.
Landfills end their useful lives when filled. Their sites are almost always reclaimed, so they are not a permanent blot on the landscape.
CCA’s monster prison (which they fully hope to expand at such time as they can get away with it in the future) will not be deservedly covered in a mountain of dirt when it is eventually emptied. It has a footprint twice the size that of the Great Pyramid of Giza. I don’t ever expect a stream of wealthy tourists to come to Pahrump to gaze in awe at that immense monument to modern stupidity and exploitation however, no matter how much it dominates the landscape.
Again, COUNTY corrupt actions versus a do-nothing town board not protecting the citizens of Pahrump.