Editor’s note: It’s become our annual custom to spotlight our top stories and photos as the year draws to a close. It’s also time for us to discuss how we feel about these reports.
In the last days of 2023, we’re spotlighting the top reader opinions, our favorite photos of the year, the communicator of the year, and, lastly, our top-10 stories in 2023. For the first time this year, we have also added what we consider to be the most underreported stories in 2023. These articles are being published daily in the remainder of 2023 as we take some desperately needed time off.
Lastly, in some of these stories, we note our region’s lack of adequate news coverage. If you can, please consider donating to support our reporting efforts, becoming a paying subscriber or choosing a digital advertising package to promote your brand or event.
Thank you for reading, and happy new year.
– Bob Conrad & Kristen Hackbarth
Health district employees speak up
Northern Nevada Public Health, formerly Washoe County Health District, pulled through the pandemic largely because of the hard work of its dedicated employees, who pivoted and pulled together to host testing sites, conduct contact tracing and promote vaccination clinics. With COVID-19 moving into the rearview mirror, health district employees—especially those in the environmental health division—are now speaking out about problems in the workplace.
In April, Environmental Health Specialist Kat Olson settled with NNPH for $71,000 after filing a harassment complaint against a coworker but then wound up being the one investigated—for discussing the harassment with other coworkers. Only after Olson left did health district staff admit they “had work to do.” They also had to get harassment training from Olson’s law firm.
By December, the EHS division was still struggling, but this time because of changes made to salaries following a study completed by an outside consultant. Employees with two or more years of tenure said they wound up with salaries lower than that of newer employees because of the timing of the changes. Leadership said some staff were just “unlucky,” but those staff say it’s more than bad luck—it’s demoralizing and will cost them thousands of dollars in pay they say they’re entitled to.
They have other complaints, but we are saving them for another day.
Sparks: A legal shitshow
The City of Sparks had a rough year, but it’s done a good job of keeping lawyers employed. We kicked off 2023 with Mark Maynard’s exceptional report on the volatility within the Sparks Fire Department, which revealed a combination of ethics violations, turnover at the top and chronic understaffing.
That was just the beginning.
In the following months, the city brought in attorneys to defend itself against its fire chief, who was fired after just days on the job in 2022. Sparks council members also extended its city manager’s contract after a not-so-great annual review. They then fired him and hired a separate attorney to represent the now-former city manager in the aforementioned fire chief lawsuit.
Another attorney was hired to address litigation related to firing the city manager.
The council also vowed to continue a legal battle with a (thankfully former) Sparks police officer, who was suspended for four days for a series of tweets many described as vile and threatening but claimed $1 million in emotional “harms.” Lastly, the council hired attorneys to represent a firefighter who dropped, face first, an 83-year-old woman feeding cats in an alleyway, rendering her unconscious.
We’ll just leave it at that.
UNR students demand change
Not to be outdone by the Rail City, the University of Nevada, Reno also kept attorneys busy. Multiple lawsuits were brought against the university with claims of discrimination, sexual harassment, a hostile work environment and sexual assault.
Things boiled over in October when dozens of students protested the university’s Title IX investigation and reporting practices at a groundbreaking ceremony attended by a bunch of hoity-toities, who awkwardly ignored the dozens of students surrounding them.
Mechanical engineering professor FeiFei Fan, who filed a lawsuit against UNR alleging she was the victim of years of sexual abuse, exploitation and systemic misconduct, quickly became a symbol for the students in their fight for justice. After her case was first reported by us, The Chronicle of Higher Education did a deep dive into this sad situation.
The New York Times even listed our reporting on UNR’s problems as “local journalism worth reading from 2023.”
Through it all, the students rose to the occasion in more ways than one. Statewide, higher education students openly supported fee increases that will directly and negatively impact them. Those increases are to cover the cost of faculty cost of living salary adjustments that were legislatively mandated but not adequately funded. That’s how important faculty members are to them, they told the higher ed regents.
We are tipping our hats to the students for showing up in 2023, being the adults and demanding what appears to be desperately needed change.
Police hostility toward transparency, accountability
Federal civil rights lawsuits, public records litigation, threatening to arrest journalists, arresting citizens for filming police and refusing to respond to simple questions that arise from their own press releases have us wondering if law enforcement leaders would prefer the region operate more like a banana republic with a secret police force.
We may not be far off.
Our local DA passes over questionable police claims to always rule police shootings as justified, even when clear evidence (that is actually publicly released) does not support police narratives. Kelsey Penrose’s eye-popping report on the Jacori Shaw killing details this exact phenomenon.
We’re also following other cases where police statements to courts have been contradicted and even noted by judges. In one case, it led to a criminal being set free, only to commit violent crimes again.
Nevada is one of the 23 states in the country where it is illegal to release police personnel files that would highlight misconduct. Such information is important to determine if law enforcement agencies operate like the Catholic Church and shuffle perpetrators off to other locales to continue to victimize people while the public is none the wiser.
We rarely are informed about whether officer misconduct is ever dealt with, and considering some of the worst offenders we’ve witnessed appear to still be employed, we can only assume there is little to no accountability for misbehavior among local law enforcement. (Dennis Carry retired from the sheriff’s office with a nice state pension while under investigation for multiple felonies. Whether he actually serves time in prison remains to be seen.) We would sincerely love to be proven wrong here.
Law enforcement now—thanks to what we consider to be an inappropriate ruling by the Nevada Supreme Court as a result of our public records lawsuit—gets to redact officer faces from all body cam footage released to the public. We don’t know exactly which officers are doing what in the community due to government-approved censorship. This phenomenon of body cams having the exact opposite effect on transparency than originally promised has become a nationwide problem.
Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin had a history of dropping his knee on the necks of suspects, but his practices and behaviors were never revealed until after he murdered George Floyd.
“If that blue wall of silence had crumbled before this trial, George Floyd and many other people would still be alive,” the Montana Innocence Project noted during Chauvin’s trial.
Transparency, in other words, saves lives.
For all the highfalutin commentary online by police proxy trolls—their spouses, BFFs, retired cops—who protest when there’s even a whiff of skepticism about police narratives, we’re surprised to see claims about serving one’s community with honor and integrity. Since following basic laws and being responsive appears not to be a forte among some (most?) in local law enforcement, we suspect their definitions of those words may be different from Webster’s.
Court documents are fortunately where verifiable and reliable information emerges about law enforcement activities that are rarely publicized. That’s why Washoe County Sheriff’s Office detectives Apryl McElroy and Jessica Troup should be applauded for what they did this year.
We’re not fond of epithets or criticisms that castigate an entire group of people, such as the acronym “ACAB” (all cops are bastards). The term revolves around the blue wall of silence, a legitimate and concerning phenomenon where good cops won’t speak up about bad cops. But it’s not always the case that good cops protect the bad ones.
McElroy and Troup bravely went public when they alleged in federal court a Reno Police sergeant sexually harassed them and subjected them to hostile working conditions as part of their work on a regional narcotics task force. Granted, they work for the sheriff, not RPD, but their case contains allegations apparently worthy enough for a lawsuit. Rather than addressing the issue—and what they called long-standing, problematic behavior by the cop—the plaintiffs allege Reno Police officials let the sergeant have a lucrative disability retirement instead.
We will continue to watch this case, and others, in 2024.
Ducking the situation
The Nevada Humane Society’s annual Duck Race this year may have been its last. “Some ducks”—the floating rubber type—escaped the fencing meant to signal the end of their race down the Truckee River and adventured through downtown Reno and all the way through Sparks.
“It’s hard to estimate how many escaped, but the majority have been collected,” Taylor Todd, the nonprofit’s events manager, told This Is Reno the day after the ducks escaped.
Hmm. Ever the skeptics, we investigated for ourselves and documented hundreds, if not thousands, of ducks littering the river, decorating homeless encampments and being stuck on rocks and river debris.
Volunteers ranging from fly fishermen and the Sheriff’s HASTY team spent days cleaning up the mess. The silver lining to the situation was that Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful—which appeared to take the lead on the cleanup once it was clear how extensive the litter was—had its massive river cleanup just a few weeks later and likely took care of the problem.
The Humane Society also took heat this year—78 pages of complaints to be exact—for alleged mismanagement, a CEO resignation, a new CEO hiring process, punishing and firing staff for speaking out, staff mistreatment, employee turnover, executive raises, low adoption rates, lack of transparency (we second this complaint), a recalcitrant board, a board of questionable provenance and failing basic animal care responsibilities.
There’s even a website that documented the myriad problems.
The organization vowed to make changes in May, but the mayor is still upset by the whole situation. The Humane Society resorted to a gaslighting response, replete with strange typos, to Mayor Hillary Schieve’s call for an investigation in November. They said Joe Hart’s reporting of Schieve’s call for an investigation amounted to “harmful rhetoric.” The cheap retort was intended to shame the messengers and take attention away from the numerous harms caused by the nonprofit in the first place.
Gross.
