ELECTION 2014: Borasky looks for third term as county commissioner

Nye County Commissioner Butch Borasky formerly ran an excavation business, which he sold to run for county commissioner in 2006.

A member of the Pahrump Regional Planning Commission at the time, he defeated Democrat Charlie Anzalone 1,538 votes to 959 to win his first term.

In the 2010 Republican primary, he tied with Carl Moore Sr. with 381 votes. Borasky drew a winning playing card to advance to the 2010 general election where he defeated Libertarian Sandra Darby 1,651 votes to 1,159.

The chairman of the county commission, Borasky also sits on the Nevada Workforce Development Board, the Quadstate County Government Coalition, the Central Nevada Regional Water Authority and a Tri-Party Working Group with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service. He also works with the NyE Communities Coalition as a private citizen.

Borasky spoke with the Pahrump Valley Times recently about his quest for reelection to a third term.

Why did you decide to run for re-election?

I had a lot of my constituents encourage me to do so and to continue on with what I’ve been doing.

Q: You really sought that position as county commission chairman.

A: The chairman position is picked every year by the board and there are others who have not had the turn either, so I would respect their wishes to take that role. I think everybody should have one chance while they’re in office of being chairperson.

It definitely gives you a job of signing an awful lot of paperwork, which is not really a plus. It just gives you the seniority and the authority to make a few minor decisions yourself, especially on liaison positions and things like that. But other than that, it’s just a title just to run the meeting.

The chairman is to run the meeting and keep it under control and I think I’ve done a good job at filling that role. Sometimes the crowd does get a little bit rowdy and I’ve been criticized by a town board member of not running the meeting well, but that’s his personal bias. I don’t disallow any commissioners items. For a while the staff was just loading it up, I had to change that, get more discussion on consent items, we got that down to a manageable level. There are certain items that would cause too much conflict to be on the agenda and they may not be on there.

Q: What have you accomplished in your two terms in office?

A: There’s quite a few things regarding county codes, zoning regulations, changing them, making them more convenient to the public, the 3-2-1 for the public works and planning that three weeks, two weeks and then one week to get a project through, then after that it’s automatically going to go in. That stops the backlog of constantly red lining things, it’s really harmful to the business people who want to come in and get started here.

Probably the One Stop Shop, that’s something I pushed for a long time now, now we’re actually going to have it on our own complex. That will save somewhere around $40,000 to $50,000 in travel and employee cost and benefits. I never did get my walking trails in, but I did get some park benches and tables through a grant at the (Calvada) Eye.

Q: You are a Republican who advocates low taxes, why did you change your mind during the second vote and support the half-cent sales tax increase?

A: Other than that issue, which was a ballot issue, taxes are lower. There’s less government now than when I took office. So I think I have fulfilled my part of that bargain. The sales tax issue was a ballot question, just like the town board dissolving. If that’s the will of the voters — you’ll never get a will of the people because there’s no way to reach out to all the people — but it was the will of the people regardless of the margin of the vote. I have to support it or why even put those things on the ballot?

Q: You asked to put the dissolution of the Pahrump town board on the ballot.

A: I just thought that some of the town board members were getting so discourteous to the public and basically just laughing at them, telling them they didn’t know anything. When you’re that way to the people you represent as far as I’m concerned you don’t belong in office any more, any office, all the way up to the president.

Q: How do you think the county takeover of the Pahrump town board will progress?

A: The town’s not really going to change that much, as far as whether it will be an advisory board or not, that will be up to my fellow commissioners, it’s not just my decision. I think there needs to be a (town) board regardless of the makeup and who’s there so there is some buffer between us and them. Being an advisory board we would have to make final decisions on funding but they will still appropriate everything and bring it forward. A lot of the town functions are regarding parks and recreation and stuff like that and town property and of course you have the fire department too.

If we put an advisory board in there we want to listen to them but that doesn’t mean we have to follow everything they want to do, we’ve done that with Beatty and Amargosa for a number of years.

Q: What do you want to do if you’re reelected?

A: Our budget is going to be number one. They tend to want go up every year. We have union employees and their salaries keep going up. Over the last few cycles we’ve been able to get them to agree with us on cuts that are needed, to continue to work with them, not let the budgets get out of control and just do the best we can with what we do. We all need to stay and live within our means and that means Nye County.

Q: You cast a controversial vote to ask the attorney general’s office to prosecute Sheriff Tony DeMeo for exceeding his budget.

A: We had to do something to get the sheriff’s attention and to make him understand that you can’t keep making excuses and again we’ve done our part to try to point out to them where they’re going over (the budget), why they’re going over. There was some previous negotiations that would give the sheriff’s deputies more money, unfortunately we agreed to it. I don’t think it was spelled out quite clearly in the budget, that caused an increase of $1 million per year.

Q: Former County Manager Rick Osborne announced last year he didn’t have the support of three commissioners and was resigning, he eventually received 17 months severance pay?

A: I thought my comment was quite plain when the whole deal happened. The whole deal stunk. I thought it was very unprofessional and I still feel the same way. If the man wasn’t doing his job right, we should fire him, it didn’t happen. I wasn’t part of that threesome, both Gary (Hollis) and I voted no on that. I had no knowledge of it, it hit me by surprise as well. I had no trouble working with Mr. Osborne.

Q: You recently said some citizens were concerned about nuclear waste, the county commission has always been pretty united in support of Yucca Mountain.

A: I think some of that was misinterpreted. My concerns were about that facility over in Beatty, U.S. Ecology.

On Yucca Mountain my position has always been the same: let’s see the science, then we’ll decide what to do after that. They won’t even let us see it.

Q: Water will be a big issue in the future, what should be done about it?

A: I’m very concerned about UICN (Utilities Inc. of Central Nevada) and them continuing to grow and control more and more of the water rights in the valley, their reluctance to work with the citizens to keep their office doors open and just ask for one increase after another and continue to fight with every lawyer they got and charge the consumers for it. (Commissioner) Frank (Carbone) and I have jointly asked for a board to be formed and work two meetings a month for a year and come up with solutions where we can keep this (water basin) out of a critical management area. If you look on the other side of the mountain in California there’s a critical management area there and all the millions and millions of dollars it takes to run it. We don’t need that here. We have sufficient water to supply everyone here. I believe the state engineer needs to correct the mistakes he made in the past by over appropriating water rights.

Q: Do you think the county should have tried to keep park easements on the former Willow Creek golf course as part of the original bankruptcy plan?

A: I think they should have. Unfortunately, Willow Creek does nothing, UICN does nothing, it keeps deteriorating. They keep saying they’re going to fix the ponds, they haven’t done nothing yet.

I do believe the county should’ve had a role in that, we at least would’ve had a way to keep some of those areas green and could qualify for grants to get that. That’s not possible now, so it’s all up to them to see if they want to offer anything to us to help them. Willow Creek just continues to deteriorate and it’s sad, its’ sad for all the homeowners over there.

Q: You wanted to acquire Pahrump Utility Company.

A: There was no second, so I ended the discussion. I’m still in favor of doing that because we’re already in the utility business all over Nye County and for us not to be in it here is foolish because there’s things we could do as an agency that the private utilities can’t do, which is push out infrastructure and qualify for grants. They have no way to do that and if we want to encourage economic development the south end of the valley it would be an excellent place to do that. The majority of the growth is going to be down there in the next 20 or 30 years.

Q: What do you think about the early retirement buyouts, did they save the county money?

A: It wasn’t something I really cared for, but I did support that, get the budgets under control and I believe it has worked. If we were still paying all those people and what not the big money that we were, we wouldn’t have been able to balance our budget in the last couple years.