In a few days, Gov. Steve Sisolak will deliver his State of the State address in a virtual event. 

There’s a lot to unpack in that one sentence. There’s the break in more than a century of precedent he’ll create by not delivering the speech directly to the Legislature. There’s also the threats to personal safety facing our elected officials in Carson City, both viral in the epidemiological sense and viral in the social media sense, which encouraged the governor to make that break in the first place. But there’s also the fact, as almost all of us have experienced firsthand, that we live in a world where we can meet virtually. Yes, the governor could always call a press conference, but the ability to routinely participate in remote video conversations was the stuff of pulp science fiction as recently as two decades ago. 

This year isn’t starting well, but we’ve started much worse with much less.

Even so, as I’ve pointed out once before, when the world sneezes, Nevada gets pneumonia. This was true in 1907, when the San Francisco earthquake led to the collapse of Nevada’s previously booming mining sector as regional capital was redirected from our mines to the rebuilding of the Bay Area. This was true at the start of the Great Depression, when Nevada, faced with a collapsing banking system, became the first state compelled to institute a bank holiday. And this was true during the Great Recession, which hit Nevada harder than any other state. 

Well, our nation is having a stroke and the world is having a heart attack — what is that doing to Nevada right now?

People worldwide are flying more than 70 percent fewer miles than they did a year ago. Even domestically, Americans are flying nearly 60 percent fewer miles than they did last year. Americans are driving their cars less, too — by at least 10 percent fewer miles, perhaps more. If people aren’t flying and they aren’t driving, they aren’t visiting — not us, not anywhere. If they’re not visiting us, they’re not going to our restaurants. They aren’t paying our hotel taxes. They aren’t shopping and paying our sales taxes. They aren’t gambling and paying our gaming taxes.

There is very little anyone in Carson City can do to meaningfully change this. There are a few policies and pieces of legislation which might make things a little worse. There are a few policies and pieces of legislation which might make things a little better. There is no policy nor piece of legislation available, however, which will make things normal — that is, like they were last January. No, not your preferred policy or legislation, nor mine, either. 

To move forward, we need to understand and acknowledge our limitations — and the limitations of our institutions in the here and now. 

The biggest limitation Nevada will need to overcome is that gaming isn’t coming back — not this year, anyway, and possibly never to quite where it was. Before he died, Sheldon Adelson made quite a bit of money pitching Las Vegas not as a family destination, as the MGM Grand tried and failed to do in the 1990s, but as a corporate destination. That made him and the Sands a lot of money. Over the past year, however, corporations and conventions spent a lot of time meeting remotely and saved a bundle on travel costs and unfortunate alcohol-fueled HR incidents as a result. Will most of them go back to in-person conventions? Of course — but not all of them.

Similar stories can and undoubtedly will be told about domestic and international visitors, too. Yes, there’s pent up demand to get rowdy and wild somewhere — but Australia has no COVID cases, no armed protests storming Canberra, and no shortage of places to get drunk. Macau is reopening. There are even casinos in Vietnam, a country which averages fewer daily reported infections than Lincoln County. In fact, more infections are reported each day in Clark County than have been reported in Vietnam since the pandemic started.

Vietnam’s population, for reference, is roughly 42 times larger than Clark County’s. 

Trouble is, our state government is intentionally dependent on gaming and entertainment taxes — in part because that dependence allows our casinos an outsized voice in the governance of our state, and in part because tourists don’t vote, so it’s politically easier to tax them for everything they’re worth than it is to expect Nevadans to pay for whatever public services we enjoy. Unfortunately, as Margaret Thatcher once noted, eventually you run out of other people’s money — or, in Nevada’s case, you just run out of other people entirely. 

Having said that, before the pandemic, people still gambled and stayed the night in Reno. Tourism is still an important part of the economy in Northern Nevada, and its absence in March and April was sorely felt in the region’s unemployment numbers, albeit not as sorely as its absence was felt in Clark County. A decimated (in the strictest sense of the word — a 10 percent reduction) tourist economy in Clark County would still bring in more than $30 billion in visitor spending, or more than $10,000 for each Clark County resident. The casinos, resorts, and The Strip aren’t going anywhere, nor are most of the jobs they bring. 

But they probably aren’t growing — not for awhile, at least.

That’s why this isn’t the end of our state. Northern Nevada already transitioned away from a tourism-oriented economy — not because of state-imposed capacity restrictions and lockdowns, nor because of chronic civil unrest, but because of decades of market pressure. Now the region enjoys an obnoxiously healthy regional housing market, at least if you’re a seller — the median price of a house in Reno now exceeds $500,000. This, in turn, has led to a remarkably resilient municipal tax base. Just last month, the City of Sparks decided to give its city manager, originally hired for the paltry annual salary of $223,100.80, not including benefits, a couple years ago, a raise and a cost of living adjustment.

This may not last, of course. We still don’t know what will happen to the housing market once the eviction moratorium is lifted and the market clears. We also don’t know what will happen to the thousands of families evicted en masse once landlords and banks are allowed to remove tenants for nonpayment. But we can make some educated guesses. Evicted families will require assistance to get back on their feet. Rents and home values are likely to decrease, at least in the short term, if a large well of inventory hits the market at the same time, just as they did in 2009. But, as long as Californians remain eager to leave their cities and pay cash up front for housing in Nevada, they probably won’t fall far — which means municipal budgets, at least, are unlikely to crash for the next couple of years.

This gives the state some breathing room. We need it. Nevada has a more immediate problem we need to do our part to resolve, anyway. 

***

The pandemic needs to end as soon as possible. 

It’s brought the relationship between our local governments and the state government to the breaking point, as illustrated most recently by Elko County’s challenge against statewide COVID restrictions, which follows in the vein of a similar challenge issued by White Pine County in December. To be fair to Gov. Sisolak, these challenges probably have just as much to do with him being a Democrat as they do with any actual substance or effect of the state’s pandemic restrictions — there have been several recall drives organized against Sisolak since the day he was elected, after all. Even so, Nevada’s county governments are some of the strongest in the country — if the state wants to get anything done, it’ll have to find some way to work with them, whether it really wants to or not. 

There are two good places to start. 

First, we need to recognize that vaccines aren’t food and consequently don’t need to be rationed over a broad period of time. When you have a limited amount of bread, it makes sense to spread out its distribution so everyone has just enough bread each week. Vaccines, however, are different. The faster vaccines are put into arms, the harder it will be for COVID-19 to spread. It’s better to dump 100,000 vaccines into 100,000 arms in an afternoon than it is to spread the same 100,000 vaccines out over a few weeks until the next batch comes in because, by spreading them out, it increases the chance those vaccinated will both contract and spread the virus before they get their vaccine. 

Second, we need to be honest with ourselves about what our “statewide pause” and other, similar emergency regulations are supposed to accomplish. Part of it is to buy time for widespread vaccination — a task which is beginning in earnest and which will hopefully accelerate over the coming months. At this, at least, they have been somewhat disappointing. Another often missed part, however, is that they provide legal cover for Nevada’s businesses to keep their workers and patrons safe from those who insist on putting them at danger. 

A good example of this made the social media rounds recently when a woman in Florida loudly asserted her “constitutional rights” were being violated because store staff and management demanded she wear a mask. Empowered by state-issued mask mandates, store management was able to call the police and remove her for trespassing. A less positive example, meanwhile, occurred in Southern California a couple weeks ago when anti-mask protesters stormed into a mall and attempted to break into employee-defended shops. In one clip from the protest, a store employee put his body on the line and barricaded the door while protesters shoved against him.

At this point, it’s clear many local jurisdictions in this state are unwilling to reliably and equitably enforce the governor’s various capacity restrictions. We saw this during Trump’s campaign visits to the state, we saw this during New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas, and we’re seeing this in the halls of Nevada’s county commissions today. Laws and regulations which won’t be enforced should not be on the books — those laws and regulations which remain under such circumstances are always applied, when they’re applied, to only the weakest of us. We saw this during the Drug War and we’re seeing it now.

However, in order to build political support for eliminating the state’s pandemic regulations, store owners and employees need to know that law enforcement will protect their property rights. They need to know that, if they privately decide to restrict capacity, require masks, or otherwise take any measures deemed necessary and prudent to protect their employees and patrons, law enforcement and the judicial system will firmly and equitably protect their right to do so. 

The right to refuse service, enshrined and protected by law, is the alternative to unevenly applied capacity mandates issued from Carson City. If county commissions and sheriffs issue resolutions supporting those rights as a useful alternative to state-issued pandemic regulations, this may provide a constructive path forward.

***

Once the pandemic is over, or at least trending in the direction of being over, we’ll be able to better identify what our state’s assets and liabilities will be going into the new decade. Trying to do so now, with a pandemic and increasingly chronic civil unrest in the foreground, is like trying to plan in the middle of an air raid or an artillery strike. We can guess and hope about what will be left to work with in the future, but, at least for now, that’s all we’ll be doing — guessing and hoping. 

The good news is that things could be much worse. The world’s troubles, for once, have not doomed Nevadans to face a years-long future of catastrophe, penury, and misery.

Many of our local governments, at least so far, appear to be surprisingly fiscally sound. Meanwhile, the past two decades produced technological advances which Nevadans, both rich and poor, both rural and urban, are leveraging today to keep themselves comparatively safe while remaining in touch with the world than they used to be able to. The universal need to leverage those advances, meanwhile, has produced investment in distribution of internet-enabled technologies to households and parts of the state which previously enjoyed far less access to such technologies. These investments may produce unseen benefits and opportunities for us in a few years.

Our state government, on the other hand, has its work cut out for it. Its usual shortcut for paying its bills — gambling on our tourist economy — is clearly reaching its end of life. We will now need to decide what we want our state government to do, exactly, and how we, as Nevadans, are willing to pay for that. No matter which direction that decision ultimately takes, it will take a while to get there.

As for our businesses, our residents, and ourselves, most of us will muddle through, but not all of us. Many businesses will close, if they haven’t already. A lot of residents will be evicted, if they haven’t been already. A lot of landlords and banks won’t get paid, if they’re getting paid to begin with. Opportunities will be created but it will take time for them to develop — until they do, Nevadans will still need to keep roofs over their heads and food on their tables. A lot of our friends, families and neighbors will need help. It will be up to those of us who don’t to help those who do.

But we’ve been through this before and we’ve been through worse. We’ll get through it again. There’s always a tomorrow.

David Colborne has been active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he has blogged intermittently on his personal blog, as well as the Libertarian Party of Nevada blog, and ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate. He serves on the Executive Committee for both his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is the father of two sons and an IT professional. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].