By Vernon Robison

Moapa Valley Progress

U.S. Congressman Joe Heck made a stop at Sugar’s Restaurant in Overton on Wednesday, August 31 to meet up with Moapa Valley residents and hear what they had to say. Heck said that he had been spending much of his time during the August recess of Congress travelling his district and listening to his constituents.

The Congressman was seated in a booth at Sugar’s and he devoted two hours for local residents to sit down with him face to face and voice their concerns.

“The community’s concerns haven’t changed much since I was here last, a few months ago,” Heck said in an interview following the visit.

The topics included public lands, economic development in the community and jobs, Heck said.

“It’s definitely nice to get out of the city and see the folks up here and touch base with them and their concerns,” he said.

During the visit a group of local residents spoke with Heck about the future of Gold Butte. The group included Elise McAllister of Partners in Conservation; Stan Hardy, a Clark County Desert Conservation Rural Representative; and Dustin Nelson founder and blogger of the SaveGoldButte.com website.

The three asked that the vast Gold Butte complex be left without further federal designations such as the National Conservation Area designation being sought by environmental groups.

Nelson stated that NCA designations historically meant more restrictions on public access and ever increasing boundaries of the area. In addition these designations usually meant greater public funding needed to keep them operational, Nelson said.

“Currently it is designated as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern,” said McAllister. “As such there is plenty of regulation on the land now as long as it is managed per the existing regulation.”

Also speaking to the Congressman were Moapa Valley Water District managers Joe Davis and Bryan Mortensen. They talked about federal mandates passed down in recent years that make it difficult and costly for a small rural water purveyor to serve its residents. They specifically mentioned various EPA regulations where the heavy cost of compliance must be passed to a relative few local ratepayers.

Sugar’s owner and Moapa Valley Town Board Chairman, Judy Metz, spoke to Heck about the struggling local business environment.

“Ever since (the Park Service) closed down Overton Beach business in this community has really dried up,” Metz said.

Metz stated that, even without water at Overton Beach, the trailer village and RV park in that area would have filled a regional demand for such services and kept business in the community.

Other individuals addressed concerns about the cost of health care and insurance on small business, veteran’s issues and a variety of other topics.

“The struggling economy is certainly a focus to a lot of people right now,” Heck said after the meetings. “And in a small town like this the economic downturn is felt more profoundly. Small economic changes have a big ripple effect in a small community.”

Heck said that he has been working in Washington to bring a “steady upward trajectory of economic recovery” both in large scale and smaller local scale areas.

“On the national level, we have passed 14 jobs bills in the house,” Heck said. “All but one of them are sitting in the Senate waiting for action.”

Another national focus was in loosening the regulatory and tax structure to help small business, as well as entities like MVWD, to have a better chance.

“I’ve heard time and time, even here today, small business people tell me that every time another government mandate comes down it has an impact on them in whether they will hire employees or make other investments in the business community,” Heck said.

On a more local level, the previous week Heck held a Las Vegas hearing of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, of which he is a member. Part of the discussion was, not just creating jobs, but also bringing the current workforce to the jobs that are available.

“We definitely have a problem of not enough jobs,” Heck said. “But there are some jobs out there. It is another issue altogether to make those jobs available to people who are out of work.”

He spoke specifically of how hard the construction industry has been hit in Southern Nevada.

“Experts have told us that this industry may never come back to where it was,” Heck said. “So the question is what jobs are out there that we can work towards training our out-of-work construction work force to be able to take those jobs. That’s something we are looking at.”