State of the Counties: Economic development benefits all

By Scott Neuffer, Thursday, January 25, 2024

Storey County Manager Austin Osborne maintains that economic development benefits all counties in western Nevada wherever the development is occurring.

“When economic development happens in any of our counties, all the ships rise with it,” he said. “We all benefit one way or another, directly.”

Osborne was one of five speakers representing rural counties at the Northern Nevada Development Authority’s annual State of the Counties conference Wednesday. Managers of Carson, Storey, Lyon, Douglas and Mineral counties discussed economic strengths and weaknesses of their respective areas and described a common synergy.

Osborne pointed to the success of the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center (TRIC) in Storey County.

“The (Tesla) Gigafactory alone, when you look at the data, has generated $117 million in (tax) revenue to the Reno-Sparks-Storey County area and to the neighbors,” he said.

Construction for the Tesla factory began in 2014. Osborne said seven years before the arrival of Tesla, Washoe County’s budget was growing by $4.9 million. Seven years after Tesla’s arrival, it was growing by $113 million.

“That doesn’t mean every one of these dollars came from Tesla, but it means that there was economic growth in the area that caused other economic growth to occur,” he said.

With economic growth come challenges: infrastructure, capital improvement needs, workforce housing, transportation, water. For instance, Osborne said it’s difficult to find terrain in mountainous Storey County for housing, and commutes between TRIC and residential areas are long.

“We have retained RCG Economics, again, to perform a $150,000 housing needs assessment for Storey County,” he said, hoping the assessment creates an “overall picture” of where to put employees from TRIC.

The Painted Rock area near TRIC is one option.

“The county commissioners had approved 4,800 homes here in 2006, and since then the project has not quite gotten off the ground,” Osborne said. “And one of the reasons we believe is a major hurdle here — despite it being master planned for residential and zones set up — is water rights for this whole area have been stripped off in the 1990s and 2000s by developers and transferred to Sparks for development in that area, so whoever is showing interest in this area has to get through a hurdle of finding water rights and actual water to be able to serve this area.”

American Flat south of Virginia City, east of Carson City, is another area Storey County is considering for development…