Would you like to run Nevada’s second-largest school district? If so, you might be interested to learn that the shortest-serving superintendent in Washoe County School District history will be on medical leave until her resignation becomes official in February. Play your cards right and you can be on the short list to succeed her as the district’s sixth superintendent in 12 years.

Don’t worry, only two of those six were fired. 

If you’re hired, you’ll have an incredibly supportive board to look forward to — well, except for the sitting board member who’s currently suing the district.

Perhaps you’d rather manage a city? If so, Sparks is actively recruiting a new city manager after firing its city manager last year. All you need to do is avoid incurring civil liability against the city and refrain from using the city’s official public streaming channel to terminate employees.

If schools and city management aren’t where your passions lie, may I interest you in the ever-vacant position of Washoe County registrar? The most recent one resigned shortly before the presidential preference primary. 

Before you apply, I should warn you that the registrar’s job, along with every other job in the registrar’s office, comes with a relentless stream of death threats. That constant barrage of threats against personal safety pushed out the previous registrar after the 2022 primary and certainly did nothing to discourage a majority of county election officials in Nevada from resigning.

It’s also not helping anyone hire the poll workers needed to do the day-to-day work involved in running our elections.

If getting paid six figures to get doxxed by random constituents and screamed at during hourslong public comment sessions doesn’t strike your fancy, may I interest you in something a little quieter? The five-member Washoe County library board just had its fourth resignation over the past year. If there’s anything quieter than a public library, I can’t think of it. Perhaps this vacancy will be your cup of tea.

Oh. Right. If getting paid six figures to become a target of every angry crank in the county isn’t your jam, only getting paid up to $80 per month to get routinely heckled probably wouldn’t strike your fancy, either. 

Perhaps all of those jobs are a little too public-facing for your taste. Can I interest you, then, in becoming a snowplow driver? Preferably before the next storm? I’m asking because, as we just learned the hard way, people aren’t lining up to get paid by the government to do that, either.

It should probably be noted that the starting pay for the highway maintenance workers responsible for driving snowplows on state highways is $14.57 per hour. That, incidentally, is about where starting wages for school bus drivers were — and, for a few years, there was a serious shortage of them, too. When the school district raised the starting pay of bus drivers to $22.13 per hour, however, the shortage was resolved and service was expanded.

Thanks, capitalism.

Low starting wages are an oft-repeated reason for why local and state governments are failing to hire workers. As the differences in pay and vacancy rates between bus drivers and snowplow operators demonstrates, there’s undoubtedly a lot of truth to this argument.

That, however, can’t fully explain why so many top-level administrative positions in the county struggle to find and keep qualified staff. Superintendent Susan Enfield’s salary is over $350,000 per year. City Manager Neil Krutz was paid over $250,000 by the City of Sparks before he was fired. County registrars, at least in Washoe County, are paid anywhere from $140,000 to nearly $200,000 per year.

Those salaries, by any reasonable metric, are more than comfortable enough to live on, even in an area where gas is still well over $4 per gallon (gas is less than $3 per gallon in many states and less than $3.50 per gallon in Clark County) and the median selling price of a house is over $550,000. According to Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), wage earners who made over $244,025 in 2022 were in the top quintile — meaning everyone over that line made more than at least 80 percent of their fellow Americans. Krutz was just over that line. Enfield’s salary was another $100,000 more than that. Even if the next registrar starts at the bottom of the county’s salary scale, they will still make enough to place them among the top 40 percent of all wage earners.

Are there better paying jobs for highly educated and motivated administrators? Undoubtedly. Are local governments therefore obligated to place administrative leaders in the top quintile of all wage earners in the United States? Would it help?

Let’s hope not.

The life of a government employee is supposed to be a predictable one: Show up to work on a regular schedule, enjoy several weeks of paid time off each year, then enjoy a predictable pension-backed retirement after three decades or so. Get into government service early enough in your life and you can collect retirement while working another job — perhaps even another government job, where you can earn yet another pension.

The appeal of this predictability is admittedly lost on employees who aren’t making enough money to pay the bills. Being unable to get ahead or afford to buy a home for three decades is a raw deal. If basic needs can be met, however, driving a school bus (or, if sufficiently remunerated, a snowplow) isn’t a bad way to make a living.

The appeal of this predictability, however, should be obvious to those earning the sorts of incomes Washoe County reliably pays its top-level administrators. No, the pay isn’t high enough to attract the county’s best and brightest, but it should be substantial enough to attract and retain qualified and diligent candidates. So why is it so difficult to keep any of the good ones for more than a year or two? Why are some of the ones who stick around so obviously unqualified to work in any professional setting? 

The answer may lie in the library board — or, more accurately, the narrow but loud slice of the public’s treatment of it.

For over a year, a steady stream of angry commenters have shown up to library board meetings to harass and berate the lightly paid volunteers selected by the county commission to govern the local library system. Physical altercations, threats of violence, accusations of pedophilia and constant calls for endless investigations have grown commonplace. 

Unsurprisingly, the library board is now struggling to retain existing members and recruit new ones.

This behavior has not been unique to the library board, nor to Washoe County. A couple of years ago, one member of the county school board claimed he was nearly driven to suicide following months of harassment of school board staff and board members. More recently, a member of the Douglas County School Board resigned after facing harassment and threats.

Public meeting times, meanwhile, continue to drag. The library board’s meeting in September lasted only an hour and a half. In October, the board’s meeting took nearly three and a half hours to complete. In November, the board’s meeting took four and a half hours. The meeting in December, meanwhile, took over six hours to finish.

Criticizing highly paid professionals because their work may be unsatisfactory is one thing. This is something else.

Say what anyone might about the unpredictability of working in the private sector, but it’s rare for any position to require anyone, much less a senior level executive, to sit and listen to random strangers accuse them of supporting pedophilia for six hours straight. I wouldn’t put up with that for any amount of money. Would you?

If this continues, it’s only a matter of time before the only people left in senior positions of local and county government are those who can’t afford to go anywhere else — those whose sole qualification is a willingness to accept recurring death threats in exchange for a halfway decent standard of living. These will not be qualified, dedicated, effective public servants. 

No, not even for the bullies who want to fill the vacancies they helped create with their friends instead.

Once a bully is finished swinging in anger at whatever is in front of them, someone will still have to run our elections, our schools and our cities. If taxpayers are going to give those hired for that work six-figure salaries, it would be nice if that money not only went to someone with a clue but also to someone who wasn’t deathly afraid to stick around.

David Colborne ran for public 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 Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected].