Freeway is a railroad through

In 1908, Nevada Gov. John Sparks, who had just used federal troops to break the mining unions at Goldfield, called the Nevada Legislature into special session to form a state police force to keep the unions down. (President Theodore Roosevelt, who had learned how he had been used by Sparks and the mine owners, was pulling the troops out.)

In 1920, Gov. James Scrugham called the legislature into special session to accommodate the construction of a hotel in Las Vegas that was never built.

In 1984 Gov. Richard Bryan called the legislature into special session to enact some legal changes to allow Citibank to build a credit card processing center in Clark County. (When the place was built, Citibank avoided association with Las Vegas by creating a postal address for "The Lakes, Nevada" that appeared on all those credit card bills.)

In 2014 Gov. Brian Sandoval called the legislature into special session to bestow the largest known package of corporate welfare in human history on Tesla, a package so big the state ended up giving Tesla more than it requested.

Now, with the Tesla precedent in place, it appears another car maker, Faraday Future, will come calling for its bundle of corporate welfare and Sandoval has indicated his willingness to call the legislature into special session again – this in a state that was once known for sharply limiting its use of corporate incentives.

Over the years, when governors were called on to bring the lawmakers into special sessions to deal with human needs, from schools to mental health, they have rejected those calls. But when business makes demands, governors have as little ability to say no as hormone-driven teen boys.

We saw another instance of the easy virtue of our state's politicians with Interstate 11. Last week they were crowing over Congress's decision to extend the road through Nevada, a decision that was made with little input from the people of the state. Interstate 11 is a Mexico-to-Canada freeway that businesspeople say is badly needed and others say is not. Politicians have kept the project mostly quiet until they have reasons to brag, as Nevada's Sen. Dean Heller and Rep. Cresent Hardy did last week over passage of congressional legislation to accommodate the project through Nevada. Hardy even made clear he approached the project not as a representative but as a businessperson: "I was a contractor for decades in my professional life," he said.

Neither Heller or Hardy approached the project with the skepticism the public has a right to expect from their officials. They embraced it from the beginning, offered no process for independent assessments, held no public hearings, and declared victory when their bill got through Congress (without funding, as it happens).

Advocates of the freeway claim it will relieve traffic congestion. It may actually increase traffic congestion. New highways have a habit of doing just that. It's called "generated traffic" or "induced demand." The problem is that those who are in charge of assessing whether a new road will induce more traffic are the same highway officials who depend on road building to keep their agencies funded. It's a classic conflict of interest.

At the components of the project have moved north from Mexico, local residents have offered opposition. "It would create new areas of population, destroying wild areas that don't need to be developed at this point," Sierra Club Rincon Group spokesperson Russell Lowes told a hearing in Tucson.

The few who learned of it in Nevada were alarmed. In southern Nevada, resident Chuck Booker called it a "boneheaded attempt to destroy our pastoral way of life." In northern Nevada, Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada director Bob Fulkerson said, "Just mow over anything in the way of the highway, destroy anything else for the sake of the dollar bill. This looks like a freaking disaster in the making."

But these are folks without chamber of commerce memberships whose campaign contributions, if they make them at all, are not in four digits and above.

The likelihood is that this freeway will plow through the Great Basin free of any substantive study, independent scrutiny, or public input.

Dennis Myers is an award winning journalist who has reported on Nevada's capital, government and politics for several decades. He has also served as Nevada's chief deputy secretary of state.