Nevada

Trump administration changes derail Nevada’s $416 million rural internet program

Published

1 year ago

June 6, 2025

Trump administration changes derail Nevada’s 6 million rural internet program

The Trump administration announced new guidelines on June 6 for a national internet program that scuttles $416 million already approved for Nevada.

As part of the Biden administration’s infrastructure act, $42.5 billion had been allocated for the Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment program to expand high-speed internet in rural areas.

Nevada, one of the few states to jump through the hoops to qualify, had hoped to break ground in summer 2025. But in April, the U.S. Commerce Department put the program under a 90-day review. That review is now over.

“Today we proudly announce a new direction for the BEAD program that will deliver high-speed internet access efficiently on a technology-neutral basis, and at the right price,” said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in a statement.

The marquee changes are removing diversity requirements in hiring and eliminating “extraneous and burdensome obligations to conduct climate analyses,” according to a factsheet released by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, part of the Commerce Department that oversees internet projects.

Now, Nevada must reapply for the BEAD funds. States were given 90 days to comply with the new guidelines.

In response, Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Nevada Democrat, vowed to put a hold on all nominations for Commerce Department positions related to broadband policy until Nevada gets its BEAD funding.

“I’m beyond outraged that the Trump administration has moved the goal post yet again and rescinded Nevada’s approval to get the BEAD funding I secured to connect the hardest-to-reach communities in our state to high-speed internet,” she said in a statement.

“This decision will put Nevada’s broadband funding in jeopardy, and it’s a slap in the face to rural communities that need access to high-speed internet.”

The broadband team with the Nevada Governor’s Office of Science, Innovation and Technology told the Reno Gazette Journal it was still digesting the news.

“Our office is still reviewing the updated guidance from NTIA and does not have further comment at this time,” a spokesperson said.

Mark Robison is the state politics reporter for the Reno Gazette Journal, with occasional forays into other topics. Email comments to mrobison@rgj.com or comment on Mark’s Greater Reno Facebook page.

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Nevada

11 Nevada Towns With A Slower Pace Of Life

Published

4 hours ago

July 5, 2026

Press Room

11 Nevada Towns With A Slower Pace Of Life

Genoa was a Mormon trading post in 1851, a decade before Nevada was a state, and it has never been in a hurry since. Up and down the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada and out across the Great Basin, the towns that grew up around silver strikes, railroad water stops, and dam construction camps mostly emptied out when the work ran dry, and what stayed behind is a string of places where the clock loosened its grip. Opera houses still host the occasional show. Saloons still pour for whoever walks in. The eleven towns below trade Nevada’s neon for porch time, dark skies, and roads with almost nothing on them.

Genoa

Mormon Station State Historic Park in Genoa, Nevada. Image credit Ritu Manoj Jethani via Shutterstock

The Genoa Bar and Saloon has been pouring drinks since 1853, which makes it the oldest bar in the state, and most of its counter and fixtures date to the 1860s. That is the pace of the place in one building. Genoa itself is Nevada’s oldest permanent settlement, and Mormon Station State Historic Park preserves a reconstructed log trading post on the site of the original 1851 station, with a small museum and grounds that fill up for community events through the summer. Genoa Town Park carries the warm-month concert schedule. When the afternoon calls for it, David Walley’s Resort sits a short walk off, with mineral hot springs that have drawn soakers to this corner of the Carson Valley for well over a century.

Ely

At the Nevada Northern Railway Museum, the locomotives are not models behind glass; the collection is one of the most complete original short-line operations left in the country, and the steam excursions run on the same track the copper trains used. That is Ely’s main event, and it sets the tempo. The Ward Charcoal Ovens State Historic Park, just outside town, preserves six beehive-shaped stone kilns that fed the smelters during the mining boom, close enough to reach for an afternoon. The White Pine Public Museum fills in the rest, with mining, ranching, and Native history. Back on Aultman Street, the Hotel Nevada and Gambling Hall has anchored downtown since it opened in 1929, when it was briefly the tallest building in the state, and it still pours a cold one for anyone coming in off Highway 50.

Tonopah

On a clear, moonless night at the Clair Blackburn Memorial Stargazing Park, you can pick out more than 7,000 stars with your eyes alone. Most cities show you 25 or 50. The park, off Highway 95 with concrete pads laid out for telescopes, is reason enough to time a visit around the new moon. By day, the Tonopah Historic Mining Park spreads across 100 acres of the original silver works, with tunnels and headframes from the boom that built the town. The Mizpah Hotel, restored and operating since its 1907 opening, holds the Pittman Café for breakfast and the Jack Dempsey Room for a sit-down dinner, named for the heavyweight champion who once worked the hotel as a bouncer.

Virginia City

The Comstock Lode silver strike of 1859 turned Virginia City into one of the richest mining centers in the West almost overnight, and the wooden boardwalks and stacked 19th-century storefronts climbing the hillside are what the money left behind. The Virginia and Truckee Railroad runs short excursions along the old mining route, and the Chollar Mine tour takes you underground into the works themselves. The Bucket of Blood Saloon has been serving since 1876, built on the footprint of an earlier saloon right after the Great Fire of 1875 cleared the block. It is an easy place to lose a slow afternoon over a beer.

Boulder City

Gambling is illegal here by city ordinance, one of only two Nevada towns where that is true, a rule that traces straight back to why the town exists. The federal government built Boulder City in the early 1930s to house the workers raising Hoover Dam, laying out organized streets and civic buildings, and the planned layout still shapes a walkable downtown. The dam itself draws most visitors, best taken in without rushing. The Boulder City-Hoover Dam Museum, inside the historic Boulder Dam Hotel, tells the Depression-era construction story, and the Coffee Cup Café is the institution where locals linger over breakfast. At Hemenway Park, desert bighorn sheep come down to graze against the backdrop of Lake Mead country.

Caliente

The Caliente Railroad Depot, a restored Mission Revival building from the Union Pacific era, now does double duty as the town’s visitor center and the anchor of its main street. The name comes from the hot springs that first drew settlers, and cottonwoods shade a town that sits well off the southern Nevada rush. Two miles south, Kershaw-Ryan State Park tucks shaded picnic areas, spring-fed wading pools, and trails beneath steep canyon walls. The Barnes Canyon trail network gives mountain bikers and hikers desert terrain to work through at their own speed, and Meadow Valley Wash supports cottonwood stands and wildlife unusual for country this dry.

Eureka

Sixteen smelters once belched enough smoke over Eureka to earn it the nickname “Pittsburgh of the West,” back when 9,000 people and a hundred-odd saloons crowded the canyon. About 600 people live here now, and the boom-era buildings have the streets mostly to themselves. The Eureka Opera House, built in 1880 on a block cleared by the previous year’s fire, still stages performances under its restored interior. The Eureka Sentinel Museum occupies the original 1879 newspaper building, presses and type cases left where they sat. The Jackson House Hotel has put up guests since the 19th century, and the Owl Club Bar and Steakhouse feeds travelers and locals along Highway 50, the stretch a magazine once branded the Loneliest Road in America.

Gardnerville

Basque sheepherders settled the Carson Valley, and their cooking is still the reason to plan dinner in Gardnerville, served family-style at long tables in the valley’s old boarding-house tradition. The town grew as a ranching center under the Sierra Nevada, and the Carson Valley Museum and Cultural Center, housed in a former high school, lays out that agricultural and pioneer history. Lampe Park gives the community its gathering ground, with a quiet stream and walking paths and a calendar of seasonal events. Jobs Peak rises over the whole valley, a granite wall that turns gold at the end of the day.

Wells

The Angel Lake Scenic Byway climbs out of the desert flats into the East Humboldt Range, ending at a glacial lake cupped high against the peaks, good for a morning of fishing or a slow walk along the alpine shore. Wells grew up as a railroad town, and the Front Street Historic District still shows the bones of that era, when this was a working junction on the transcontinental line. The Trail of the 49ers Interpretive Center on 6th Street covers the emigrant routes that funneled through here on the way west, the California Trail travelers who passed through long before the rails did.

Winnemucca

The Humboldt River made Winnemucca a crossing long before the railroad came through, and the Humboldt Museum tells that regional story through Native, ranching, and transportation exhibits. The town’s other inheritance is Basque: sheepherders settled here in numbers, and the dining room at the Martin Hotel still serves the lamb and the family-style spread that the town celebrates each summer at its Basque Festival. The Winnemucca Sand Dunes draw the off-road and open-desert crowd just outside town. For something quieter, Water Canyon climbs along a running stream into terrain more rugged than the valley floor lets on.

Lovelock

The Pershing County Courthouse is round, one of the few circular courthouses still in use anywhere in the country, and it sits at the center of town with its early-20th-century architecture intact. Behind it, Lovers Lock Plaza invites visitors to clip a padlock to a chain as a token of commitment, a small local tradition that has become the town’s signature stop. The deeper history is just outside town at Lovelock Cave, where excavations turned up evidence of human use going back thousands of years. Rye Patch State Recreation Area, along the reservoir on the Humboldt River, handles the boating, fishing, and lakeside afternoons.

Wide Open Spaces And Unhurried Places

What these towns share is not scenery so much as arithmetic: the work that built them mostly left, and the people who stayed kept the opera houses, the saloons, and the depots running at a fraction of the old traffic. That is why a steam train in Ely or a 7,000-star sky over Tonopah feels unhurried in a way a manufactured attraction never quite manages. The pace was not designed. It is what is left when the boom moves on and the place decides to stay anyway.

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Nevada

Primm Valley Casino not open after recent ownership change

Published

14 hours ago

July 4, 2026

Press Room

Primm Valley Casino not open after recent ownership change

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Exposing officials and agencies keeping public records from the public.

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Senate leader and Nevada political titan

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Las Vegas visionary and Philanthropist.

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Ex-Zappos and Downtown Project CEO left a lasting impression on Las Vegas.

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Nevada

Exclusive | California’s illegal fireworks trade fueled by nefarious interstate pipeline

Published

24 hours ago

July 4, 2026

Press Room

Exclusive | California’s illegal fireworks trade fueled by nefarious interstate pipeline

California fireworks fans hungry for more high-powered pyrotechnics not sold in the state are heading for the Nevada border to get their illegal Fourth of July fix.

The Golden State only sells firecrackers that are certified “safe and sane” and sold by licensed sellers. But dozens of dealers in Nevada just miles from the California border have become a magnet for buyers looking for a bigger bang.

At Cosmic Boom Fireworks in Amargosa Valley, cashier Jovon Oseguera said business has picked up sharply among Californians.

“It’s making [us] busier, people from everywhere just come by in the past week or so with roughly 25 to 30% of customers in a day from California,” he said.

Oseguera said Californians are drawn to higher powered aerials “mostly mortar shells and fireworks cakes” they can’t buy in their own state.

At a Fourth of July party last year, a man lit an illegal $400 cake containing professional-grade explosives that malfunctioned and killed an 8-year-old girl.

“A lot of them ask if they can take the fireworks back across the state line, but I tell them there’s not much [they] could really take back, except… really small stuff,” Oseguera added.

While some Nevada stores require that customers fill out forms for their purchases, his shop only checks that buyers are over 18.

A worker at Blackjack Fireworks in Pahrump, Nevada, said that the shop attracts hundreds of buyers from outside Nevada, with a significant number arriving from California during the week of July 4.

“If you come to the store, there will be several hundred cars all year round,” said the employee, who declined to provide her name.

The staffer said some choose light the fireworks off near Walker Lake on the Nevada side, but the shop doesn’t keep track of where buyers go after their shopping sprees.

“I have no business asking where they are coming from or what their final destination will be, as it will be a violation of their rights,” the worker said.

According to the latest California Department of Public Health data from 2023, the state saw 200 nonfatal hospitalizations and 718 emergency department visits due to fireworks.

In 2024, Cal Fire reported over 1,200 illegal fireworks-related fires and hundreds of injuries.

“Each year, we continue to see illegal fireworks, particularly those purchased online or shipped into California from out of state, pose a significant threat to public safety, property, and our natural resources,” a Cal Fire spokesperson told The California Post.

While Cal Fire could not share details about sensitive operations ahead of July 4 or ongoing investigations, the department is “working in close partnership with local, state, federal, and out-of-state law enforcement agencies to investigate the illegal sale, distribution, and use of dangerous fireworks.”

Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan J. Hochman urged the residents to report illegal fireworks activity, saying that celebrations with illegal fireworks and explosives are not harmless entertainment.

“These devices can kill people, causing devastating injuries and destroying entire neighborhoods,” he said.

The DA is also currently investigating several cases of illegal fireworks possession.

East Los Angeles/Pico Rivera: Four individuals were charged after approximately 8,500 pounds of illegal fireworks and homemade explosive devices seized on June 22, 2026.
South Los Angeles: Over 37,000 pounds of fireworks were discovered at a residence on May 27, 2026, leading to charges against four p eople, including child abuse charges for two defendants due to a child living in the home.
6th Street Bridge: Three individuals face 21 felony counts each after the LAPD Bomb Squad recovered homemade explosives from a car on May 2, 2026.
Whittier: A seizure on January 13, 2026, uncovered over 24,000 pounds of fireworks and explosive-making materials in a storage unit near a preschool.

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