By VERNON ROBISON
Recent news out of Reno has revealed an interesting commonality between the residents of our quiet, mainly conservative, towns in northeastern Clark County and a rather unlikely, left-leaning interest group: the attendees of the huge Burning Man Festival held in northern Nevada. Last week, the Reno Gazette Journal (RGJ) broke a story about some pretty outrageous demands being placed upon the festival’s organizers by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) during their permitting process. And it brought back echoes of similar BLM behavior experienced last year by our rural communities.
For those not familiar, Burning Man is a week-long event which takes place annually during the last week of August. It began in the San Francisco area in 1986 and quickly caught fire, as it were. In the early 1990s the festival migrated out into the middle of the remote Black Rock desert of northern Nevada. The event, which takes its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy at the festival’s finale, is described as an experiment in community, art, radical self-expression and self-reliance.
Over the years, this festival has really resonated among those colorful Bay area types, and attendance has skyrocketed. Last year nearly 66,000 people attended Burning Man. This year the organizers are expecting to break the 70,000 barrier.
But as attendance has gone up, so have the permit fees being charged by the BLM to hold the event on public land. Last year, Burning Man reportedly paid out more than $4 million for their special recreation permit. And last week’s RGJ story revealed that this year’s cost is about to be much higher.
In addition to last year’s fees, the BLM is now demanding that the festival organizers provide a large VIP compound for its top level staff and special guests. This compound must be equipped by comforts like flushing toilets to be cleaned daily by Burning Man staff, a laundry facility with washers and dryers, on-demand hot water, air conditioning, vanity mirrors, refrigerators and couches. Modern dwellings out in the middle of the desert that are fit for a sultan!
And while they are at it, the BLM officials are also demanding a long list of food items that must be provided by the festival to its staff throughout the weeklong event. These include frozen treats like Choco Tacos, Drumsticks, individual served ice cream in an assortment of flavors, popsicles and ice cream sandwiches. And of course, these items require the freezers to keep them cold in the remote desert location. The BLM food list also demands a wide variety of menu items on a daily basis including different types of meats, breads, snacks and drinks; all listed in specific detail. The full list is posted on the RGJ website and it truly does go on and on.
Of course, the flustered event organizers point out that the whole point of the Burning Man event, all these years, has been an emphasis on self-reliance in harsh conditions. As such, only very basic amenities; like nonflushable portable toilets; are available to ticketed attendees.
But BLM officials argue that their staff can no longer stay in the primitive conditions on the playa; or even those that are available in the small town of Gerlach, about 20 minutes from the event location. Plus, they are apparently expecting some ‘big wigs’ to fly in from Washington to see how things are going out there in the desert. We can’t have the head BLM honchos using porta-johns, can we?
With all of these extras, festival organizers are estimating the cost of the event to increase this year by more than $1 million. That will bring the 2015 permit fees for Burning Man up to around $5 million.
Even Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) felt that this was excessive. He sent a letter on Friday to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell which was also released to the media. In it, he writes that “providing outlandishly unnecessary facilities for the BLM and its guests should be beyond the scope of the permitting requirements.” He then adds that “flush toilets and laundry facilities can be found about ten miles away in Gerlach, Nevada, if BLM’s employees need such amenities.”
In reading about the BLM’s unreasonable and puerile treatment of this matter, I couldn’t help but recall certain similar character traits which were exhibited by the same agency toward the residents of our own region during the spring of 2014.
Now I won’t enter into the old circular debate about whether Bunkerville rancher Cliven Bundy was right or wrong in his standoff with the feds last year. That has been argued ad nauseum already without resolution. And it doesn’t really matter.
The fact is, to the 25,000 residents of rural northeast Clark County, Bundy was beside the point. The abuses that occurred last year in our neighborhood were far beyond Cliven or his animals.
To the local residents it was more about the irrational and excessive overreaction of a federal agency in handling a relatively small and simple matter.
To us, it was about the unwarranted and unnecessary lock-up of over 1,300 square miles of public land upon which our local economies largely depend.
It was about the intimidation of the general, peaceful public with a heavily armed occupying force of inadequately trained and over-exuberant federal officers.
It was about the forced containment of our Constitutional rights into a small, fenced-in “free speech zone,” far distant from where the federal forces were doing their dirty work.
For the us regular folks here in this region, those volatile days were about so much more than just Cliven Bundy and his trespassing cattle.
And, in that respect, we now arrive at this bizarre association with our peculiar California comrades, the 70,000-strong group of attendees for the upcoming Burning Man. This huge group of artsy, free-living, radically self-reliant, commune dwelling, city slickers; from San Francisco of all places; actually do have something in common with our cowboy hat-wearing, freedom-loving, Constitution-carrying, gun-toting, pick-up truck-driving, rural folks from northeastern Clark County. All of us have been the targets of an unreasonable, irrational and autocratic overreach of a federal bureaucracy that is out of control.
As a side issue, one notable difference between us is that these San Francisco cohorts have had our own Senator Harry Reid to stand up for them and their rights against the federal bureaucracy. Sadly, last year the local folks received no such fearless and indignant representation from our high-ranking elected official in defense of our trampled rights. Instead, he amazingly took the side of the bureaucracy! Of course, noting the political leanings of most northeast Clark County residents as compared with that of the Burning Man crowd, I suppose this should come as no surprise.
At any rate, back to the subject at hand, I doubt that many of our local folks will be travelling to that dusty Black Rock desert playa in August to stand shoulder to shoulder and show defiant solidarity with our Burning Man brethren. Equally doubtful is how welcome they would be if they did go.
But whether we ever stand arm in arm with them to sing a rousing revolutionary anthem or not, we are still locked in the common struggle of facing down an excessive federal influence in our every day lives. And whether we agree with the Burning Man crowd on nothing else, in that common struggle at least, we can salute them.
