Nevada
On the Utah-Nevada border, a ‘swing city’ gears up for 2024
Straddling the border of Nevada and Utah, the community of Wendover is split in two. On the Nevada side, voters could help decide the next U.S. president. Across the street, in Utah, voters almost certainly won’t.
Thanks to the Electoral College system, the 2024 election will likely be determined by a handful of swing states. Utah, which has voted for the Republican nominee in every election since 1964, is not one of them. Nevada, which President Joe Biden won by two percentage points in 2020, is.
That has turned half of Wendover into a battleground. In West Wendover, Nevada, campaigns are already flooding residents with robocalls and texts messages, and super PACs are filling mailboxes with flyers. “We really get hit hard with that,” West Wendover Mayor Jasie Holm said. “It’s overwhelming. It’s a little bit much.”
Both candidates have taken notice. During the 2024 cycle, Biden has visited Nevada three times, and Donald Trump has visited four. Trump’s fifth visit will be this Sunday, when he rallies in Las Vegas.
Down the road, on the Utah side of the border, things are quiet. “They’re dynamic, and we’re not,” said Mayor Dennis Sweat of Wendover, Utah. “It’s really that simple.”
The two cities have long viewed themselves largely as one community. Efforts have been made to annex Wendover into Nevada and form a single city; the last push, in 2001, stalled in the U.S. Senate. West Wendover observes Mountain time zone, the only city in Nevada to do so, in a show of unity with its other half.
While business has boomed and the population has grown in West Wendover on the Nevada side, the sleepy town of Wendover hovers around a population of 1,000 people. Most of Wendover’s residents work in West Wendover, population 5,000, where the casinos — the city’s biggest employers — are legal.
Wendover’s annual city budget is less than $2 million; West Wendover’s is $16 million. A recent Las Vegas Journal-Review analysis found that public employees in West Wendover were paid much higher than their counterparts in Wendover. One of the Utah town’s biggest challenges is convincing city employees — from city managers to police — to stay. “This is one of the conundrums living next to West Wendover. They have money,” said Sweat. “You could live in the same home and make a whole lot more money, just working across the line.”
In an election year, that state line serves as a delineator for more than salaries.
Experts predict that Nevada — along with Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — are this year’s battleground states for the presidential election.
In past election cycles, Nevada has been a bellwether for the country. It has been a swing state in every election since 2008, and since 1976, the Republican and Democratic candidates have each won the state six times. In that span, the candidate who won Nevada went on to win the White House 10 of 12 times.
In 2020, Biden edged Trump in Nevada by two percentage points. But Biden’s approval rating in the state now hovers in the mid-30s, and polls show Trump with an edge, thanks to voters’ widespread discontentment with the economy. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll suggests that the economy is the top issue for Nevada voters, followed by immigration. Most Nevada voters (56%) rate the economy as “poor”; less than 20% rate it as “good” or “excellent.”
That discontent is reflected in voters’ opinions: 61% of Nevadans say they trust Trump to do a better job on the economy; 32% say they trust Biden.
“It is concerning to me when I keep seeing press come out of the White House where they keep saying the economy is good,” one Nevada voter told The New York Times when the polling data was released. “That’s really weird, because I’m paying more on taxes and more on groceries and more on housing and more on fuel. So that doesn’t feel good.”
In addition to determining the presidential race, Nevadans could help decide which party controls the U.S. Senate. The Nevada Senate race is one of the three “toss-up” elections, according to the Cook Political Report, that could determine whether Democrats maintain a slim majority or Republicans retake control of the upper chamber. The outcome will be crucial in determining how effective Biden or Trump are in carrying out their legislative agendas.
Of course, their battleground-state status does not make Nevada voters inherently better than Utahns — only more influential. “‘Swing’ or ‘battleground’ states are mere accidents of geography,” wrote Jack Rackove, emeritus professor of political science at Stanford University. “They do not matter because they have any special civic characteristics. They simply happen to be states that become competitive because of their demography, and which are readily identifiable as such because of the increasing sophistication of political polling.”
That accident is fortuitous for those who live on the west side of the Nevada-Utah border. Elko County, Nevada, is usually red, but West Wendover leans more blue — “that makes us a swing city in a swing state,” Holm said. During the 2020 cycle, West Wendover got a visit from a Democratic presidential candidate, Julian Castro. The town’s last mayor, Daniel Corona, is now a deputy political director on the Biden campaign. There is chatter of a prominent Biden surrogate, perhaps first gentleman Doug Emhoff, making a visit to the town before November. (Holm, for her part, likes the idea. “I would be honored to meet the president,” she said, grinning.)
Meanwhile, Wendover has never, in its 116-year history, welcomed a presidential candidate to town. Utah hasn’t been a swing state since the 1940s, and the Republican candidate has won every election by at least 15 percentage points in 14 straight election cycles. In Wendover, the reality of a single-party state — mixed with small-town priorities — leads to something like ambivalence. “Nobody really cares about national politics all that much here,” said Sweat. “You just go to work, do your eight hours, go home and live your life.”
Ahead of November’s election, Holm, the mayor of West Wendover, expects things to get chaotic. “It’s brewing up,” she said. “I think we’re going to get hit hard with signs and calls and people getting their opinion out.” She doesn’t plan on making an endorsement, but she has an elaborate plan to encourage her city to vote: “I will tell them where to vote, how to vote, all the voting information that they need: mail-in vote, come up to City Hall and vote,” she said.
Across town, in Wendover, things are much more quiet. “We usually run a newspaper ad, encouraging residents to vote,” Sweat said. “But that’s about as much effort as we put into it.”
LAS VEGAS (FOX5) — Caltech researchers are preparing to build a radio telescope that will be the most sensitive ever constructed and survey the sky 100 times faster than any other radio telescope worldwide.
Schmidt Sciences has greenlit construction of the Deep Synoptic Array after the project completed its final design review. The milestone paves the way for construction to begin on the telescope, which is planned for a remote valley in Nevada.
MORE ON FOX5: Conservation groups oppose potential sale of federal lands highlighted in land mapping tool
The array will consist of 1,650 radio dishes, each slightly more than 6 meters in diameter. The array will span an area of about 20 by 16 kilometers. The team plans to build the telescope by 2029, with science operations commencing soon after.
Survey capabilities
“The DSA will survey the entire visible sky several times in its first five years at unprecedented speeds,” said Gregg Hallinan, principal investigator of DSA, professor of astronomy at Caltech, and director of Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory. “While all other radio telescopes combined have so far found about 20 million radio sources, the DSA will match that in the first day of operations. By the end of its initial survey, it will have discovered about 1 billion new radio sources.”
The telescope will discover radio emission from millions of stars, galaxies, and other cosmic objects. It will address the mysteries of black holes, pulsars and fast radio bursts. It will also probe the physics of dark matter and gravity, and it will measure the structure and expansion of the universe.
“Radio astronomy is about to go from sketch to photograph,” said Vikram Ravi, the co-principal investigator of the DSA and a professor of astronomy at Caltech. “The DSA is looking at a far larger volume of the universe far more often than any other telescope.”
Real-time imaging
The DSA will be capable of making images in real time. The numerous radio dishes will feed into a supercomputer that creates images instantly. The images will be immediately accessible to the worldwide astronomical community.
“Without the radio camera, we would have to store 100 exabytes of data to complete our survey,” Hallinan said. “This would require 5 million hard drives in a multi-billion-dollar facility the size of multiple football fields. The radio camera solves this problem.”
The DSA’s radio camera will convert the raw data to images in real time with the help of an off-site supercomputer built from Graphics Processing Units built by Nvidia. The radio camera images will be given freely to the public with no proprietary period.
“We want the whole world to also have access to the data just as quickly as we do,” said Katie Jameson, the DSA lead project manager.
The DSA will have the ability to detect more than 100,000 intensely powerful flashes of radio light from fast radio bursts and to localize them to their home galaxies. The DSA will also reveal more than 20,000 new pulsars.
“The science that can be done is endless,” Hallinan said. “There will be enough discoveries to occupy every radio astronomer on the planet.”
The DSA is led by Caltech and funded by Schmidt Sciences. It is part of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System. Two pathfinder projects that led to the DSA, the DSA-110 and the OVRO Long Wavelength Array, were funded by the National Science Foundation.
Copyright 2026 KVVU. All rights reserved.
LAS VEGAS (FOX5) — Conservation groups are pushing back against a new state mapping tool that identifies federal lands potentially available for development in Nevada.
The governor’s office, in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management Nevada, unveiled the interactive map this week to make it easier to find federal land that may be available for development throughout the state and in the Las Vegas Valley.
“It is shocking to look at the map and see how many lands could potentially be sold off,” said Olivia Tanager, executive director of the Sierra Club Toiyabe Chapter.
Tanager said she was surprised at how many federal lands were identified for disposal when she first looked at the map.
“Places like Red Rock and Sloan Canyon in Southern Nevada are what draw people to live in Southern Nevada. We cannot continue to develop right up onto the boundaries or perhaps even in these precious places,” Tanager said.
The conservation group says the mapping tool is the latest effort to treat Nevada’s public lands as a real estate inventory rather than a shared public resource.
“We know that a lot of these areas are environmentally sensitive. We know that there are endangered species on these lands,” Tanager said.
MORE ON FOX5: Nevada unveils interactive tool mapping federal lands available for possible development, other uses
Housing concerns
Lawmakers have proposed using federal lands to create more affordable housing. Several areas at the edges of the Vegas Valley have been identified for potential development on the mapping tool. Tanager said she does not see that as a viable solution.
“The areas on the outskirts or far outside of existing urban areas are wholly inappropriate for affordable housing. Housing that is located that far away from services will never be truly affordable,” Tanager said. “As folks have to live further and further away from resources like schools and grocery stores, transportation costs go up substantially.”
The conservation group says the valley should fill in open lots and build upward within the existing urban core instead of building outward.
“We know that sprawl and developing on the outskirts of the valley worsens air quality as well from increased transportation,” Tanager said. “We know that sprawl is incredibly water-intensive. The further out you build, the harder it is to recapture that water.”
The Sierra Club Toiyabe Chapter says treating federal lands as disposable assets could set a dangerous precedent that accelerates privatization efforts and undermines the principle that public lands should remain in public hands for future generations.
Approximately 85% of Nevada’s total land area is owned by the federal government.
The state says the tool is designed to bolster information sharing about federal lands. The mapping tool is available here.
Copyright 2026 KVVU. All rights reserved.
LAS VEGAS (KSNV) — In the desert climate of Southern Nevada, WOW Carwash says it is working year-round to conserve water and reduce its environmental impact, using a combination of water-reclamation technology, biodegradable soaps and energy-efficient equipment.
The Las Vegas-born company says washing a car at home uses roughly 100 gallons of water. By comparison, WOW says it uses about 30 gallons per vehicle and reclaims up to 80% of the water.
WOW says its water-reclamation system exceeds typical local requirements. While local car washes are only required to have one sand and oil separator, WOW says it has four, along with a mud tank and UV filters designed to recycle water, reduce daily water use and ensure no solids are sent to the sewer system.
The company says all water from a WOW Carwash enters a 1,500-gallon mud tank underground at each location to begin separating soils from the water. From there, WOW says the water passes through a series of four sand and oil separators, where oils float to the surface, and soils sink to the bottom. WOW says the cleaned water is then pumped through UV and micron filters to remove remaining contaminants so it can be recycled and reused in the car wash.
WOW also says it repurposes the dirt washed off vehicles. The company says its water-reclamation tanks are pumped regularly by licensed vacuum trucks to maintain efficiency, and what is pumped out is then utilized as fertilizer.
WOW says all cleaning agents used in its tunnel wash process are environmentally safe and biodegradable, and that the soaps are safe to the human touch and for a vehicle’s paint while still being tough on dirt. The company says the cleaning agents break down naturally, reducing harmful runoff that could otherwise flow into storm drains and local waterways.
To reduce its carbon footprint, WOW says it uses energy-efficient equipment, including Variable Frequency Drives that allow electric motors to “ramp down” when demand is low to reduce electricity use during operations.
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