Nevadans are too smart to allow a revival of company towns here
In abandoning its effort to create what it called a “smart city” in Nevada, the cryptocurrency firm Blockchains LLC griped that it couldn’t find a champion for the project in the Silver State. Well excuse us, Blockchains, but Nevadans know a bad idea when they see one. And this was not just a bad idea, but a dangerous one.
The proposal, which had been kicking around state government since early this year, would have allowed Blockchains to set up an independent, free-standing governmental body with the same authority as a county government in Nevada.
This didn’t look like a “smart city” to Nevadans. It looked more like a 21st-century version of a company town, where workers were enslaved for all practical purposes through such practices as forcing them to live in fenced-in areas (under the guise of “protecting” them) and paying them in scrip redeemable only at company-owned stores.
Gov. Steve Sisolak was as close as Blockchains got to a champion for the idea, introducing legislation to enable corporations to establish governments in what were termed Innovation Zones.
But when the proposal got a chilly welcome from county officials, the public and lawmakers, including some of Sisolak’s fellow Democrats, he withdrew the legislation and instead steered the issue to a joint committee for study. Beyond philosophical concerns, the project drew complaints about its water impact, given that Blockchain’s plans called for construction of 15,000 homes and 33 million square feet of commercial and industrial space. Storey County, the proposed home of the site, strongly objected to yielding part of its territory — along with its taxing authority — to the new corporate government.
In a letter last week to Sisolak, Blockchains CEO Jeffrey Berns gave the governor a thinly veiled slap over his handling of the proposal.
“Given the personal and public assurances you made regarding your commitment to this project, you can imagine how greatly disappointed we are in the effort put forth,” Berns wrote.
Sisolak would have been better off never bringing the project to the table, but he definitely did the right thing for Nevada by backing off of it.
In introducing the legislation, Sisolak said his motivation was to diversify and spur Nevada’s economy through new ideas.
That’s a commendable goal, and lawmakers should embrace it — only not with so-called Innovation Zones.
Diversifying Nevada’s economy with bad ideas discarded in the early part of the last century in West Virginia’s coal mines isn’t encouraging “new ideas.” And pandering to egomaniacal tech leaders determined to run their own governments while launching themselves into space isn’t a new idea either: That’s well-traveled territory in dystopian science fiction for a couple of decades now.
Let’s talk about some better ideas to carry Nevada forward.
The state should work to elevate our primary, secondary and higher education systems to a world-class level, build a 21st-century transportation system, improve the quality of our health care system and invest in areas such as outdoor recreation and fine arts that enhance quality of life. Another must-have element is a greater supply of affordable housing in a state where rapid growth and high demand for properties has left too many of our working-class residents overburdened in rent or mortgage payments.
With these elements in place, our state’s visibility will rise among companies seeking a place for relocation or expansion. Those will be companies that want to join our communities, not set up their own monstrous little city-states.
Nevada’s economy must be diversified — that’s undebatable. As we learned during the pandemic, and during the recession, and throughout our boom-and-bust history, the state suffers from overreliance on tourism (or in earlier times, mining) every time there’s a significant downturn in the economy.
We’ve made advancements in recent years, but we have yet to build up any sector of our economy to the point where it could help us ride out a loss of tourism. If Nevada were a home, the Strip would be our electrical system and we wouldn’t have a backup generator.
Improving our infrastructure, our education system, etc., is the way to attract the businesses that will diversify our economy, not letting corporations experiment with new forms of company towns.