Walking into Reno City Hall these days must be a bit like walking in the Twilight Zone. We are blessed, however, to watch Reno City Council meetings online, which is an inadvertent self-care practice. That’s because council meetings comprise our local politicians—half of whom were not even originally elected to their seats—sniping, chastising, bickering and backbiting one another to accomplish, sometimes, the most mundane of matters.
It’s a regular performance no sentient beings should voluntarily subject themselves to. It’s enough to just watch online.
On Wednesday, council members spent an inordinate amount of time arguing over a motion about which measures the car-dealing Dolan family must take to build a 161-acre housing development in south Reno.
The discussion reached such a bizarre plateau that simply verbalizing a development’s approval was replete with a council member repeatedly talking over a developer’s representative in an attempt to insert protections for south Reno wild horses, horses that have been having a rough time of late.
A couple of dozen were recently rounded up and sent to prison in Carson City—horses, that is, not developers or elected officials. Their crime: crossing over into their usual territory that was being converted also into more south Reno homes. The Nevada Department of Agriculture announced this week that the horses would be spared the death penalty because they were adopted.
Alas, the horses didn’t get a win from Reno City Council this week either, and the development will proceed without much of what Council member Naomi Duerr wanted.
That’s not all.
At one point during the meeting, Mayor Hillary Schieve responded to somebody “screaming” at her when Duerr was speaking—Duerr was participating remotely after a rough first half of the meeting. Schieve said, though, it wasn’t Duerr screaming at her. Somebody else was.
Nobody else was talking. (Watch for yourself.)
That had us briefly consider whether the mayor was getting mystery cues from an ominous but invisible force. Such as through a Secret Service-style earpiece or Agent Smith in “The Matrix.”
It’s been said by council members themselves that council meetings have become political theater. We’d say it’s just plain theater. And it’s a good thing the tickets are free because what’s been billed as serious government business often feels like satire or “Real Housewives”-style catfights and drama.
Is it any surprise, then, that pressing issues get discussed for years without much action while problems in the city continue to fester and community voices are ignored?
-Bob Conrad & Kristen Hackbarth
