PAHRUMP, NEVADA GETS A NEW PARI-MUTUAL HARNESS RACING FACILITY

AND THE CROWD GOES WILD!

Greetings sports fans of all flavors, and children of all ages. Welcome back my friends to the column that never ends, Vegas Valley Sports Beat. That daring little darling of Ethical Internet Sports Journalism you either love to hate or hate to love. Either way, there is no denying it. You can’t put it down. Okay, so maybe you can put it down if you put your mind to it, but hopefully, we’ll be able to grab your attention and hold onto it for a few minutes more.

Just long enough for me to tell you the wonderful news, and for you to get all excited about it. And awayyyyyy we go.

Yes, my dear friends, you did read the headlines right. Yes, Pahrump, Nevada that shining little ghost town that refuses to give up the ghost and dissolve quietly into the desert sands like every other boomtown that came before it, is going to be building a harness racing facility right here in the very unlikely town of Pahrump. My jaw is still on the floor where it fell when I read the news myself.

Just to get a harness racing track would be awesome, but this is reportedly going to be a mega-project that may include a waterpark, stables, theater, and of course the centerpiece a new resort casino. As if that isn’t reason enough to say holy cow, it is going to be built very close to home for me.

This project, be it a mega-project or not is going to mean a great deal to the people that live n the area as it brings in new construction jobs and revenues, and then once it opens to the public the facility will provide many more people with gainful employment in the form of management, general staffing, and supporting role type jobs.

That is incredible news to me, as I’m sure it must be incredible news to many other people in Pahrump and Nye County. This is indeed a most welcome shot in the arm for our local economy. I personally love harness racing and having a water park as well as a new casino to give the local monopoly a run for their money is like pennies from Heaven only better.

The resort casino would be 40,000 square feet and it will be focused around the racetrack which will cover 7/8ths of a mile and stables that will hold as many as 280 racehorses at a time. The planners speculate that there would eventually be restaurants, shops, batting cages, a theater, a waterpark, and a campground that will have room for up to 2,500 vehicles and as many as 200 RVs at a time.

Tim Bohannon, the president of the Nevada Standardbred Association Inc., was the one that pitched the project to Nye County Commissioners last week. “It’s forward-looking and may be subject to change.” He told the Pahrump Valley Times. The Nevada Standardbred Association was founded several years ago by a group of locals who have an interest in bringing the thrill of harness racing to Nevada and base it here in Pahrump.

Nevada offers nearly every type of legal gambling you can name, but horse racing is scarcely found in the state, and there are no major facilities such as the one proposed by Tim Bohannon’s group. As of now, there is no set price tag for the project, but Bohannon says the Western Saddlebred Association is going to raise a large portion of that funding on their own initiative as Nye county commissioners reacted favorably to the initial pitch and it was eagerly cosigned by Commissioner Leo Blundo, and Bruce Jabbour, while Commissioner Debra Strickland told developers last week that she was sure they will… “find support from within our commissioners.”

“This is very exciting, I’m in favor of it. Commissioner Jabbour reportedly told reporters.

The proposed racing season will run from the end of October through the end of May if it gets conditional approval from the Nevada Racing Commission. There would be two race days every week and each day will feature 12 live harness races throughout the season, and the races could be simulcast across the globe from Pahrump, Nevada. This would effectively bring neighbors closer to us all from all over the world and I can only see this as a very good thing for all of Nye County and Nevada as a whole. I would love to work at this track with the horses or in maintenance perhaps, but if I do nothing else I hope to infect some of you with enthusiasm and moral support for this project.

I have no stake in this whatsoever, my interest is for the sake of the people of Nye County, Nevada, and the USA in that order and equally even if it might mean more flies during the Summer months. It’s not like all the raw trash piled up in the town dump causes any fewer flies. Given also that BLM can round up 1000 wild horses from our backyard every 2-3 years tells me that any argument spoken in that vein would be a load of road apples. The difference between how much manure a wild horse excretes compared to a racehorse is like comparing light to dark. Wild horses drop some huge piles.

To that end, the developers are forward-thinking in their approach to the issues of water conservation, reclamation, and flies. A high-tech reclamation process will be designed for that purpose. Meanwhile, a manure processing facility will help deter a lot of the flies. They say that it will tend to make the project more sustainable for the future.

There’s no question that raw fertilizer is going to come in handy in the coming days, but this is the perfect time for a project like this for Pahrump and I hope the Commissioners will agree as one. Our economy is based upon the confidence of the American consumer and confidence remains high in spite of the destructive economic disaster called the DNC.

But I digress. Feel free to prove me wrong anyway. Meanwhile, back to business.

The new multi-use facility would also have an education and training center that could be utilized for activities held by the FFA (Future Farmers of America) 4H groups, and it could play host to other community-driven events such as weddings, graduations, and the like. Just as Jeff Zidek, a consultant associated with the project said, “There is a major opportunity here. The western part of the country has very few tracks.” Indeed so. It’s about the community.” he added

No doubt about that in my mind. The project’s plans call for no fewer than 96 dormitories to be built on-site to house the workers. The developers say the Pahrump Valley Equine Performance Center of Excellence is going to draw thousands of visitors to Pahrump’s new hotels, restaurants nightlife, and shopping choices and Nye County can expect to see some fresh new revenue from the $39,000,000,000 industry that employs approximately 1,.4 million people in countless full-time jobs.

The main concerns of everyone involved in this historic project are many, but the group has taken a lot of comprehensive, and innovative new approaches to those concerns, and by George, I think they’ve got it!

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STOP BALLOT HARVESTING IN NEVADA NOW!

By Ronna McDaniel | Fox News

RNC Chair McDaniel: Democrats use coronavirus as excuse to try eliminating safeguards against election fraud – Ronna McDaniel

Imagine an election where a ballot is sent to a person regardless of eligibility, signed by someone else, picked up and delivered by a campaign operative, and still counted. If Democrats got their way, that is what would happen in Nevada this June, and nationwide in November. Democrats have sued Nevada in an attempt to block the state from enforcing election laws on the books in their upcoming primary.  Their demands? Nevada must suspend its prosecution of ballot harvesters, where the practice is illegal, and refuse to allow election officials to verify signatures on ballots, contrary to state law. They claim this basic check to see whether a ballot is from the same voter who signed up to vote is “not needed to ensure the integrity of the election.” This is the Democrats’ standard for “integrity” in elections. The first red flag should have been that it is Marc Elias and Perkins Coie who are doing the suing. If you need a refresher, Perkins Coie is the Democratic law firm, paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign, that hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Donald Trump in 2016. They failed, but still compiled a dossier full of foreign-solicited lies about Trump and Russia, which was leaked by Obama intelligence officials to try to sabotage the new president’s administration, sow doubt in his election victory, and invalidate the votes of 63 million Americans. Not the best track record on “integrity.” But why wait to sow confusion and doubt after an election when Democrats can do so before? That is their ongoing campaign to remove voting safeguards through the courts, and now using a pandemic to fundamentally upend the way we vote to further their political aims. Elias and Perkins Coie first threatened to sue Nevada unless the state breaks its own voting laws. You read that right. In a letter sent to the secretary of state, Elias demanded election officials throw out signature verification requirements. To Elias and the Democrats, it is OK if a signature on a ballot does not even remotely match a voter’s registration on file. They claim election officials do not have the “necessary expertise” to check, even though signature verification is already conducted on every voter registration in Nevada and checked for every voter who shows up at the polls. Voters also have the chance to contact election officials in the event of a mistake. While they tried and failed to allow people to vote a full week after Election Day in Wisconsin, Democrats are still committed to expanding ballot harvesting and weakening ballot security. Democrats also want ballots sent to “all registered voters in Nevada,” regardless of whether the voter has moved away. This would increase the number of ballots in circulation far beyond those eligible to vote. For its primary, Nevada is providing mail-in ballots to active voters, but not inactive ones. Registrations are marked “inactive” only after officials have received reliable information such as from the U.S. Postal Service that the voter has moved and fails to respond to a mailing asking the voter to confirm his or her address. It is critical that mail-in voting has these safeguards, given fraud is easier by mail, and states are known to have millions of dead and ineligible voters on their rolls. STOP BALLOT HARVESTING IN NEVADA >> In 2018 there were over 239,000 inactive voters in Nevada, meaning Democrats want roughly a quarter-million extra ballots floating around during the primary. This would be convenient for their “voter assistance” plans, the Democrats’ euphemistic go-around for ballot harvesting in states where it is banned. Democrats are using “social distancing” as an excuse to allow campaign operatives to traffic in ballots, and stop the enforcement of crucial voter integrity laws.  In Nevada, it is a felony for a person to handle a ballot other than their own. The law already has an exception for a voter to allow an authorized family member to return their ballot, making Democrats’ excuses ring hollow. It is not really about social distancing. If it were, Democrats would not want to put their campaign operatives at risk by sending them door-to-door to handle thousands of ballots.The only thing Democrats are consistent on is their mission to gut voting integrity. And their hypocrisy. STOP BALLOT HARVESTING IN NEVADA >>