A trust fund jointly run by a union and the employers it bargains against has paid for Las Vegas hospitality workers’ health care since the 1960s, growing into one of Nevada’s largest health care purchasers along the way. Six decades later, some of the same workers the fund was built to serve are picketing the… Continue reading The Culinary Health Fund Began as a 1960s Taft-Hartley Trust for Las Vegas Hospitality Workers. Some of Those Workers Are Now Picketing Their Own Union’s Headquarters Over It.

Nevada’s gaming law has required anyone with a stake in a casino to disclose it to state regulators since the state began licensing casino owners at all. Two men ignored that requirement at the Frontier Hotel in the 1960s, and the federal case that followed still shapes how Nevada polices hidden casino ownership six decades… Continue reading Anthony Zerilli and Michael Polizzi Hid Their Stake in the Frontier Hotel in 1966. Nevada Still Enforces the Disclosure Law They Broke.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt set aside more than two million acres of Southern Nevada desert to save the region’s last desert bighorn sheep in 1936. Four years later, the War Department carved out more than a third of that land for bombing practice — land the Air Force is still using today, under a federal… Continue reading The War Department Carved a Bombing Range Out of Nevada’s Desert Game Range in 1940. The Desert National Wildlife Refuge Still Shares That Land With the Air Force Through 2046.

Archaeologists dug against a rising reservoir in the 1920s and 1930s to save what they could of an ancient pueblo complex in Nevada’s Moapa Valley before Lake Mead swallowed it. A century later, the federal government is working against a deadline of its own — one that opened this September — to send what those… Continue reading Archaeologists Named Nevada’s Flooded Pueblo Ruins ‘Pueblo Grande de Nevada’ in the 1920s. A Federal Notice Published This August Cleared the Way to Repatriate What They Found.

Nevada declared it the public policy of the state in 1961 to let every person seek housing without discrimination, then spent the next sixteen years deciding how, or whether, to enforce that policy. The gap between a declared right and an enforceable one is still the same gap a Las Vegas renter or home buyer… Continue reading Nevada Created Its Equal Rights Commission in 1961 to Guard Housing Rights. It Took 16 Years to Give the Commission Power to Investigate a Housing Complaint.

Clark County ran its sheriff’s department for eighteen years under one man, with no city government sharing his authority, no independent review board watching his conduct, and no check on the office beyond the same ballot that put him there. Nevada folded that arrangement into a single countywide police force in 1973, but the sheriff… Continue reading Nevada Appointed Ralph Lamb Clark County Sheriff in 1961. A Federal Indictment Cost Him the Job in 1978.

Nevada regulators drew the state’s first groundwater basin boundary in the Las Vegas Valley in 1941, seven years before anyone measured how far the valley floor beneath the pumps had already sunk. Eighty-five years later, the state is spending $62 million to build 93 new homes for a single North Las Vegas neighborhood that groundwater… Continue reading Groundwater Pumping Sank Parts of the Las Vegas Valley as Much as 6 Feet Starting in the 1930s. Nevada Is Now Spending $62 Million to Rebuild the Neighborhood It Broke.

Nevada recorded its first subdivision built by and for Black residents on May 17, 1954, when segregation confined most of Las Vegas’s Black population to the city’s Historic Westside. Seventy-two years later, Las Vegas ranks 43rd among the nation’s 50 largest metro areas for Black homeownership, and many of Berkley Square’s original 148 homes are… Continue reading Nevada Recorded Berkley Square, Its First Subdivision Built by and for Black Residents, on May 17, 1954. Las Vegas’s Black Homeownership Rate Still Ranks 43rd Among the Nation’s 50 Largest Metros.

A Las Vegas convention worker’s 2025 complaint against her own union rests on a law Nevada voters approved by barely a thousand votes seven decades earlier. The statute hasn’t moved since, but the fights over what it actually means keep landing in federal filings. The Nevada Legislature moved first. On March 14, 1951, lawmakers approved… Continue reading Nevada Voters Approved a Right-to-Work Law by 1,034 Votes on Nov. 4, 1952. A Convention Center Worker’s 2025 Complaint Tested What It Actually Bans.

Las Vegas police shot at fewer people in 2025 than in any of the previous five years, according to the department’s own count. That trajectory traces back to a federal review Las Vegas Metro accepted after a news investigation and a civil rights petition arrived within two months of each other in 2011 and 2012.… Continue reading A Federal Review of LVMPD Shootings Began in January 2012. Metro Just Reported Its Fewest Officer-Involved Shootings in at Least Five Years.