The story behind the drafting of AB273 seemed like the ultimate man-bites-dog story of the 2023 legislative session. Here was a bill that, if passed, would have allocated more than $65 million solely to the Owyhee Combined School, a school located in the Elko County portion of the Duck Valley Reservation — and it was drafted by Ira and Alexis Hansen, two of the most staunchly (and, in Ira’s case, notoriously) conservative Republicans in the state.

Republican state legislators trying to give tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to a single public school for Indigenous children? Who would have guessed?

It wasn’t that the school didn’t need the money — it absolutely did and still does. The Bureau of Indian Affairs had an automotive maintenance shop near the school that, for several decades, disposed of its waste oil and fuel by dumping it into a well.

Since what goes into a water table eventually comes out, the hydrocarbons from the maintenance shop are now leaching into the school’s water supply and giving generations of schoolchildren cancer. That, by itself, would be enough to justify allocating some resources to the school — to either provide a safer water supply for the school, or to move the school away from the hydrocarbon plume blooming underneath the children, or some combination of both.

But it gets worse. The school itself, which was built 70 years ago, is also hazardous. It’s right next to the highway, so it’s often mistaken for — or simply mistreated as — a rest stop by passing travelers. Bat feces drip from the ceilings. There’s no air-conditioning system installed at the school, nor are there any bug screens on the windows. The school’s boiler barely works — when it works, which isn’t often.

By all rights, then, the Hansens tried to do the right thing. They swam opposite the tide of partisan ideology and tried to assist constituents who were clearly in need.

In case you haven’t noticed the heavy use of conditionals up to this point — if passed, tried, and so on — something even more unlikely happened. 

The bill to give the Duck Valley Indian Reservation a new school, which was presented to a near-supermajority Democratic legislature, went absolutely nowhere.

This, believe it or not, wasn’t a product of partisan animus. If it was, Democratic leadership could have simply copied and pasted the Hansens’ bill into a separate bill sponsored by a couple of members of Team Blue, as they tried to do with Gov. Joe Lombardo’s school safety bill.

Instead, they — correctly — pointed out that the Owyhee Combined School belongs to the Elko County School District, which should have replaced the school itself. There are many economically immiserated rural communities in this country, but Elko County most certainly isn’t one of them. Elko County is a mining county, and, as a recent op-ed pointed out, mining jobs pay very, very well. 

How well, you ask? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average annual pay for an employee in Elko County was $63,436 in 2021 — nearly $10,000 higher than the average for the state as a whole.

Point being, the school district has the money to build a new school for 300 of its students — or, at least, it should.

It doesn’t, however, due to a combination of mismanagement and political malpractice. On the mismanagement side of the ledger, instead of allocating the necessary resources toward adequately maintaining the existing Owyhee Combined School so it wouldn’t be a chilly, guano-dripping mess, it instead put $16.5 million toward a new performing arts building for Elko High School.

Speaking as a former band kid who visited the old Elko High School band room a time or two, yes, it needed a replacement — but not as badly as the Owyhee Combined School needed clean water or a heater that worked.

On the political malpractice side of the ledger, meanwhile, Elko County School District used to have a dedicated property tax stream set aside for its “Pay-As-You-Go” Capital Projects Tax. From 1986 to 2020, that tax raised over $250 million — considerably more, by the way, than the $65 million or so the Hansens attempted to dedicate toward the replacement of the Owyhee Combined School, whose water was every bit as contaminated in 1986 as it is now.

Like I said before, the school district has the money. Or it should. 

The reason the past tense is used to describe this funding source, however, is because the voters, when faced with the proposition of renewing this funding stream, rejected its renewal — twice. Given a choice between renewing the school district’s capital improvement bond and just letting the tax money go straight into the county government’s budget instead — rejecting the bond won’t lower anyone’s property tax bill by a single red cent since the county and city simply raised their property taxes to match what used to go to the school district — Elko County’s voters resoundingly chose to deny their school district of the funds it should have used to replace the Owyhee Combined School in the first place.

To recap, the school district had enough money to replace the school but didn’t. Then the voters of Elko County, despite being prosperous enough to adequately fund their school district’s capital fund, voted against doing so.

Imagine, for a moment, if your child — counties and school districts are legally and constitutionally creations of the Legislature — asked you to pay to replace their roof, which has been leaking for years. Now further imagine that said child not only made more money than you did, they drove to your place to ask for your money in a brand-new, top-of-the-line pickup truck. 

Would you give them money for their roof? Or would you tell them to spend their own money on their own needs instead of blowing their money on their wants and coming to you for a handout?

Though it would undoubtedly be tempting to tell your prodigal child to do something anatomically improbable to themselves, it’s harder to tell them to take a well-deserved hike when the leak is over your grandchildren’s heads.

Similarly, the Democrats in the Legislature couldn’t just tell the Duck Valley Reservation’s families to lobby their recalcitrant county commission or school district one more time.

Even the Hansens, who are not exactly known for their taxpayer-funded generosity, couldn’t do that.

Instead, through AB519, the Legislature almost unanimously chose a clever solution — one that holds the local governments that failed to meet the needs of the citizens of Owyhee accountable while still immediately materially meeting the needs of Owyhee’s schoolchildren.

The Legislature, which approved the bill before sine die, will kick in to replace the Owyhee Combined School — but at a cost. Namely, the Elko County Commission — or, if you prefer, “the board of county commissioners of a county whose population is 52,500 or more and less than 57,500 (currently Elko County)” — has to either choose to return a portion of the tax revenue that was previously dedicated to the school district’s capital fund back to the school district or the county’s property taxes will statutorily increase.

Are Elko County’s commissioners thrilled about this proposed arrangement? In a word, no — but, thanks to the failure of the school district’s previous bond measures, the county government now gets to keep tax revenue it previously had to set aside for the school district. To paraphrase an old adage, it is difficult to get a commission to agree to something when their budget depends upon their rejection of it.

Other rural counties, however, are wholly on board. Elko County, after all, isn’t Nevada’s only rural county and many of them are actually every bit as strapped as Elko County pretends to be.

To help them get their schools in order, AB519 creates a pathway for other rural county commissions to help fund their local schools by dedicating existing county funds to their school district’s capital fund and permitting them to raise additional taxes, if needed, to further augment their school district’s capital fund. Additionally, the Legislature offers to kick in an additional $50 million of state money, of which $25 million is dedicated for capital projects on tribal land.

Oh, and if AB519 makes it past the governor’s desk without a veto, the Owyhee Combined School gets $64.5 million — not quite as much as was promised in AB273, but certainly enough to build a new school.

That “if,” however, is one more conditional between the students of the Owyhee Combined School — as well as the students of other rural schools — and acceptable school buildings. Hopefully it’ll be the last.

David Colborne ran for office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Twitter @DavidColborne, or email him at [email protected].