The “A City in Crisis” documentary gets second place award for reporting on underserved communities

This Is Reno’s 10-part report into Reno City Council member spending received on Saturday the first-place investigative reporting award from the Nevada Press Association for urban publications. The investigation, “Reno council members spend big on travel and conferences, likely violating city policies,” found that Reno’s former City Manager signed off on extravagant travel, expenses that appeared to blatantly violate city spending and travel policies. 

“One of the media’s roles is to serve as a check on government actions, reporting on activities that may go on behind the scenes but are still memorialized in public records,” This Is Reno Editor and the series’ author Kristen Hackbarth said. “Following the paper trail can sometimes reveal just what we found—abuse of taxpayer funds and unethical behaviors. This type of investigative reporting is vital to ensuring people know how taxpayer resources are being used. By not answering questions for this report, city officials appear to want this information to stay in the dark.”

The series also documented how City Council members receive campaign donations from people associated with nonprofit organizations that received donations from those council members, often without any public disclosure.

After the series was published, the city’s financial advisory board approved an audit of travel spending policies at the request of its volunteer members. Council member Miguel Martinez also paid the city back nearly $2,000 after it was reported he was reimbursed for expenses he didn’t pay for, stayed in $900/night hotel rooms and added days to his city-funded trips to go sightseeing with his family. City Manager Doug Thornley resigned weeks after the series was published for undisclosed reasons. 

Council member Devon Reese was found to have used a major portion of his discretionary funds on himself—to attend a $21,000 training at Harvard Leadership in Boston. He also booked first-class flights, added days onto city-funded trips to go sightseeing, and rented a car for a conference—racking up more than 340 miles—despite staying at a hotel next to where the conference was.

In a discussion about the series with Nevada Press Association members on Saturday, Hackbarth said the project took more than six months to investigate. Most of that time was spent combing through hundreds of public records, revealing sloppy paperwork, accounting oversights and no apparent enforcement of city policies.

“Government business generates a voluminous amount of records, which can be difficult to obtain and laborious to comb through,” Hackbarth said. “Work on this story began with a simple observation from a This Is Reno reader and led to months of research using city and state records, social media content and hours of research. It was like piecing together a puzzle, unfortunately with some of the pieces missing, to understand the story of just a sliver of Reno’s city council operations.”

Thornley was shown to have approved travel expenses for the council members to whom he reported outside of federally established guidelines without the documentation required by city policy. He also signed off on travel requests well after trips were completed, also in violation of the city’s policy.

“The city’s refusal to answer dozens of basic questions about how the city is managing its finances and its obligations to follow basic government accounting standards is remarkable and disturbing,” This Is Reno’s Bob Conrad said. “The elected officials pointing fingers and blaming city staff for their misuse of funds is also the kind of gaslighting citizens have increasingly come to expect from those in charge at City Hall. Such a culture is emblematic of why the community is frequently appalled by their local politicians.”

Newsletter, documentary on homelessness also get top awards

This Is Reno’s newsletter for subscribers received a third-place award for editorial writing. Edited by Darcy Lenardson, This subscriber-only weekly newsletter opines on the news of the week. With animated gifs, editorial memes and snark, subscribers have said the digital publication is fresh, honest, funny and relatable.

“A City in Crisis,” This Is Reno’s feature-length documentary on how the region has grappled with homelessness, earned a second-place award for reporting on underserved communities. Though focused and primarily shot during the global pandemic, the footage goes back from 2010 through early 2024. The documentary reveals how the number of people without shelter who have died each year skyrocketed from 2016 to the present. Despite a massive infusion of government dollars invested into the problem, many say the housing and homeless crisis has only gotten worse.

The film has earned several awards in the U.S. and abroad. It won a best documentary feature award from the “Remember the Future World Film Festival” in Cannes, France. It is also an official selection at the Arpa Film Festival in Los Angeles. 

This Is Reno has been recognized with dozens of top reporting awards from the National Press Club, Nevada Press Association, Society for Professional Journalists, LION Publishers, National Association of Black Journalists, Radio Television Digital News Association and the Sierra Nevada Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America.