Mostly thanks to my big mouth and only partly due to some of my professional abilities I serve on a city committee for the restoration of our historic City Hall.
Part of what the committee does is search and apply for grant funds for the building's renovation. Most of my work at the railroad doing restorations is grant funded, but I'm rarely or ever involved in the grant getting process. I'll supply supporting technical info and budgets for the grants, but my primary job is just spending the money. Not this time. In the State of Nevada the Commission on Cultural Affairs hands out money to historic preservation projects within the state every year or so and part of the application is going to Carson City to defend your application in front of the commission. It was a fun process and I got to go see Carson City again which I haven't honestly done in probably 15-20 years. (for all of those interested my presentation went well and we were awarded our grant)
As I prepared for this presentation and as I wandered around the state capitol and participated in the meetings I was able to solidify a thought that's been bumping around my head for a while regarding the culture of my state. Nevada is not a community minded state. Nevadans are friendly enough but we aren't hear to join your HOA or participate in your community whatever. We want to do our thing and be left alone. You can do you're thing as longs it isn't in my face or bothering my thing and we'll be just fine. For example, I was sitting in a room where a board was handing out $1,000,000 in grant funds for historic preservation project. There were only about only about 10 applicants from around the state. Sure, they did receive more applications than they had money and it's a WONDERFUL program , but given what some state spend on historic preservation this wasn't a huge showing from the application side. I wandered around Carson City and it is such a quaint, typical Nevada town. I love it. Our state capitol building is small, simple (elegant, but simple), not really like anything else you'll find in another state across the country, and we've been a state longer than most western states. No one was really interested in building a huge, domed state capitol up on a prominent hill somewhere.
The governor's mansion sits on a very normal street with very ordinary homes and no HOA.
One part of my presentation pointed out the fact that in all of Nevada there are less than 20 incorporated cities. (to contrast, Wyoming has 99) Our largest county, which is bigger than a good number of states, does not have one single incorporated city in it despite having at least one community with a population near 40,000. My parents have lived in the same house since 1992 and would be hard pressed to pick most of their neighbors out of a line up. Not that they aren't friendly to their neighbors or vise versa, but waving in our neighborhoods is rarely a thing. The point made for my presentation that with so few organized cities in the state and fewer still that managed to get together and construct a substantial city hall that is still in use today the Ely City Hall is a pretty rare building within our state.
I feel like this has become a little rambling: My point being that while I can appreciate these cultural tendencies in my state as well as myself, as I've worked for some community building and public works project that require community buy-in and involvement I've realized that this intrinsically Nevada mentality does have it's drawbacks.
I think this mindset is one of the core things that make Nevada what it is. While I don't think it should be changed I think it could be tempered a bit for the sake of getting a thing or two accomplished. Maybe that would ruin everything, or maybe I'm off my rocker on my whole theory. Any thoughts?
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