She gets herself going every morning at 7 o'clock, Boulder City does, right when Mel's Diner opens up; and she passes the day 2,500 feet above sea level sitting placid like a tideless lake until about 10 o'clock in the evening, when the movers and shakers of town depart Milo's Wine Cellar and walk home. In the meantime, under the surface, folks get to talking, stirring about. Because that's what people do in this town: They talk. Ask Councilman Mike Pacini, a Boulder City native 39 years old now, and he'll tell you: "It's always been like that—and sometimes it's a great thing, sometimes it's a hurtful thing." The rumors delivered across Mel's tables, the opinions that flow with the wine at Milo's, the gossip spread in the Grace Community Church, the discussions within the Boulder City Republican Women's club, the hearsay that passes in and out of houses along the intimate town like hot summer gusts—they all thread this town together, keeping people informed, turning morning secrets into common knowledge by lunch, and without variance they all wind toward the political issues of the day. Local politics above all. Those four councilpersons and the mayor: the ubiquitous They.
Boulder City is a town that got to talking on the night of June 27, during its bimonthly meeting, after the city council moved to grant representatives from Hawthorne Hotel, of the Hyatt company, a lease on four acres of land next to the Boulder Creek golf course. It's part of an ongoing effort by the city council to save face, for in 2003 they borrowed money from outside sources and their own utility fund to build 27 new holes and a plush clubhouse on the corner of Adams Boulevard and Veterans Memorial Drive—against, as everyone knows, the general sentiment of the people—and so far the course has done nothing except purge the city's coffers. Not only does the course fail to earn its own operating costs, falling short by hundreds of thousands a year, but the city has been forced to dig into its general fund to cover debt accrued on the monies borrowed to build the $22-million course. And it's been left with a mountainous water bill each month.
"Boulder City really is a great place to live—we just have some economic problems now," says Bill Smith, an octogenarian who ran against Boulder City Mayor Bob Ferraro in 2003, losing by a mere handful of votes in a race that centered on Boulder Creek, to which Mr. Smith has been opposed since Day 1. "Boulder City wasn't in debt before the golf course; now they want to use the Hawthorne Hotel as a Band-Aid."
Leaders from the Hawthorne group had approached the council and laid out their cards, promising to bring the golf course more players and the town's economy more business, claiming full financial responsibility if they were to fail. But it was neither Hawthorne nor their hotel that stirred turmoil in the small town; it was the underlying issues.
On the surface she's just a small town, much older than her years—75—embedded in pure, endless desert: dirt, and dust, and shrubs, and Joshua trees, and hard, barren mountains, and a dry climate that'll bake your boogers, chap your lips, and give remedy to your arthritis. Roadrunners scurry about the Starbucks parking lot and coyotes slip through neighborhood streets on the prowl for cats during the summer months, when the heat becomes so hellish that longtime residents like Albert Wengert stand on their mobile home patios and complain about it as if it were a daily surprise. She's a quiet and conservative town liberated from easy vices—sex, booze, gambling—where old people say they feel neither ignored nor overwhelmed, and where, according to Dennis McBride, one of the stellar historians of our region, there abides among the citizenry a living memory of the times and pioneers that engendered Boulder City, a federal government camp that wasn't suppose to endure beyond the completion of the Hoover Dam.
But on the inside she, Boulder City, like so many others, harbors a certain dissonance, struggling to define exactly who she is. You see, she's a town very conscious of her self-image, and she's been fighting to maintain her identity as a small town since 1979, when folks slammed their fists on City Hall's tables, shouting with resolve, "Damnit: We ain't no big town, and we never will be!," enacting a slow-growth ordinance that would keep the town's growth rate under 3 percent each year. In fact, she's been like that since '58, when Boulder City became its own municipality, autonomous from the federal government, and then consecrated for herself a charter that reserved for the people not ownership but power over the city's land. Just to ensure that she would never become a big town. But since then, the forces of modernity and development, manifested on a large, bright scale just over the mountain in the Las Vegas Valley, have never ceased to encroach.
"So the problem is," McBride says, his voice soft and serene with the authority of his 18 years as curator at the Boulder City Museum, "we're defined less for what we are than what we are not.
"People in Boulder City just don't want it to be anything like Las Vegas."
Several people in Boulder City fear that, while the Hawthorne hotel may not resemble a resort in the fashion of Las Vegas, it still will be a gateway to more Vegas-like growth. Of greater importance, however, folks have an unresolved gripe with the city leasing land to developers. Boulder City is unique in that she owns her land—a little more than 200 square miles, more than any other city in Nevada—and according to the special charter of 1958, the people must vote on sales of any land larger than an acre. This was created for the same reason Boulder City annexed more land than the small town would ever need: to provide fortification against development.
"But they found a way to circumvent the charter, by giving themselves the ability to lease land to developers without having to get the support of the people," says Mr. Wengert, who uses the energy afforded him in retirement to write letters to the editor like a possessed activist, on the yellow legal pads of another time, even though most of the regional papers have declined to publish his messages. "When they make up their mind—that's that. They've rendered the charter a worthless piece of paper!"
Back at the turn of the millennium, the city leased out, without any ballot measures, land to developers for the Cascata golf course, a paradise where men richer than you play among themselves. The lease is good for 50 years, with options for renewal, and it's led folks to suspect more development is ahead.
"Leasing does kind of defeat the point of the charter," says Mr. McBride.
Sandra Reuther, who runs the Boulder City political forum on Yahoo, puts it this way: "It'll be here long after I'm gone, and probably after you're gone, too. So the land's as good as sold, to me."
At any rate, it's a new springboard into the same swampy argument: Folks feel a discord between themselves and their elected representatives.
"Just like with the Adams Boulevard extension a few years ago, when we the voters turned it down and they built it anyway, due to a loophole in the language of the ballot measure. The council keeps trying to go around the voter to develop," says Mr. Wengert, who'll also tell you he doesn't go to the council meetings to speak his mind anymore because "they only give you two minutes to talk, and, well, I'm old now and I can't even say my name in two minutes."
Boulder City is not a town where things go unnoticed. Ask Mimi Rodden, a woman erudite in the history of Boulder City. She lives in an historic double-brick home on historic Nevada Highway at the edge of the historic downtown district, and she'll tell you people are always watching. "Here," she says, "people look out for their neighbor, because we're all friends. In Las Vegas, a person comes home from work each day, drives straight into the garage, and never gets to know anyone outside of his house."
It's true: Folks here watch. Chief Thomas Finn, fresh from the East Brunswick police department in New Jersey, where he served for 25 years, seven of those as chief, says a good chunk of the daily calls his dispatch receives comes from folks who'd been peering out their window curtains and seen an unfamiliar man walking down the street, or had been on a twilight stroll through one of the Boulder City's 19 parks and saw a suspicious car they'd never before noticed in the 25 five years of walking about that park.
And above all they watch the issues. Mr. Wengert, a man from the old days, who, after a hip replacement, two knee surgeries, 54 years in Boulder City and more than 80 on Earth, says he has nothing better to do now than watch what's taking place in town. Says now he just watches in astonishment the errors and abominations committed by what he calls the worst local administration he has ever seen, at least since he moved to town from Mobile, Alabama, more than five decades ago. Go ahead and ask any of Boulder City's public servants, like City Attorney Dave Olsen, who had come from serving the 3,500 citizens in Ely, Nevada, to find that Boulder City, despite its 15,000 residents, is in many ways much smaller of a town, and he'll tell you:
"On the political side, you come under higher scrutiny in Boulder City than you could ever imagine."
Councilman Pacini says he understood scrutiny comes with the job when he had taken it a decade ago, and he states in no false modesty that sometimes the councilmen get it right, and sometimes they get it wrong.
"But I think—what I've found—is that most people are with us," he says, "Maybe ten percent are against us. But that, of course, is inevitable."
Boulder City is a town that was, by and large, divided on July 11, when, toward the end of a city council meeting, item No. 16 was read, an elegy on the petition initiated by Sherman Rattner that had garnered so much hoopla all around the nation. The petition that would have seen 107,000 vacant acres of Boulder City land sold, the profits from which—billions of dollars—would have been divvied between the town's residents. The petition that had been sent by the city's leaders on taxpayer money to court, and was there shot down by Judge Gerald Hardcastle, despite possessing more than 1,000 signatures of endorsement from Boulder City taxpayers—more than enough to meet the legal requirements to get the measure on the November ballot.
Boulder City is a town where, during the public comments session of that meeting, resident Travis Chandler stood before the city leaders and, disregarding the content of the petition and shooting straight for the principle, said: "The bottom line is, I feel you've taken away my right to vote. I've read the Nevada and U.S. Constitutions, and I think you all got it wrong."
Boulder City is a town whose economy is 60 or 70 percent tourist driven—for without visitors, economics states, a town must grow to survive—and so relies heavily on image to attract guests away from Las Vegas. "That initiative is not the kind of press we want," says Jill Rowland-Lagan, executive director of the Boulder City Chamber of Commerce. "Those dust-kickers only hurt us. It's very frustrating.
"We just want to go back to ‘Clean Green Boulder City.'"
Boulder City is a town that does possess her own homeless population, that does suffer a major methamphetamine pestilence (Chief Finn learned that in his first weeks here, now says there are some sections where you can throw a rock into any house you like and meth will start flowing out). But Boulder City is also a town that doesn't want, at any cost, to appear like Las Vegas. She, of course, would rather be Clean and Green. And so its homeless are kept invisible, and its pestilence under the rug.
"We have the Boulder City News, a public information officer, BC Magazine, a city website, the Review-Journal and the Sun," says Councilman Pacini, who works five days a week at Vons grocery store, where folks overrun his counter to ask a couple questions or chirp in a few opinions. "If someone tells you they can't find out information about the city—it's false." Yet resident Linda Schick, who had made her living as a journalist for various publications and who still retains the observational state of mind from her working days, echoes many of her peers' concerns when she says: "But there's nowhere to find the honest truth. It's always just ‘Clean Green Boulder City'—the image they want everyone to buy into."
She says it's common knowledge within Boulder City's boundaries that there are drug kingpins embedded in that solitary town whose news, perspectives and realities rarely travel the 20 miles separating Boulder City from the Las Vegas Valley, and when a woman was murdered a couple of months ago within Boulder City's jurisdiction, Ms. Schick had to do her own investigation to find out what had happened. Her point resonates. It doesn't take more than a week to see the local media is reluctant to question or criticize and has no qualms about publishing strictly amiable articles; that the public information officers and www.bcnv.org deliver information fed by the city; that the R-J and Sun, just like the television news reporters, don't head over the mountain all too often.
"And so you know what people do," Mrs. Schick says, "They talk. Talk, talk, talk."