36 years ago this month

Large-scale open pit mining of iron ore by Standard-Slagg is expected to get under way in July or August in the Kingston Mountains about 19 miles south of Tecopa.

Construction of roads and a huge processing facility are reported on schedule by Cliff McLaughlin, assistant to Superintendent R.W. "Rusty" Bick.

Pahrump Realty -- Pre-Developed Land!!! 5 acres (full city block) -- $595 per acre. $2,975 cash price, or deferred payment plan -- $75 down, $49.45 per month, six years, 7 percent annual percentage rate, for total of $3,635.40, including all finance, escrow and collection charges. -- Ad in the July 1971 edition of the PVT.

30 years ago this week

V.R. Johnson Construction Co. has put up an $8,000 deposit for the right of first refusal on 16 lanes of bowling alley equipment which the company hopes to install in Pahrump Valley. Bruce Edenfield, general manager of the company, is scheduled to examine the almost-new equipment tomorrow in Phoenix.

If the equipment meets advertised quality standards, a purchase agreement is expected over the weekend. Johnson Construction is now negotiating for purchase of 30 acres for use as the bowling alley site.

Ray Wulfenstein plans to open the Starlite Motel and a car wash facility on Highway 160 within the next six weeks. The nine-unit motel will be leased to a private operator. The building has been in place just north of the Charlotta Inn for several months and will include rooms available on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

The do-it-yourself car wash will be located just south of the Wulfenstein office building.

20 years ago this week

Another push for Yucca Mountain as the country's first high-level nuclear waste repository was made Wednesday. A bill requiring not three but only one site, Yucca Mountain, to be studied for a repository was passed 17-1 by the Senate Energy Committee. It now goes to the Senate.

The idea is to save money, according to the bill's sponsor. It will cost about $1 billion to conduct the study for each site. Not performing studies on the other two locations, Hanford, Wash., and Deaf Smith County, Texas, will save $2 billion in tax dollars.

Nye County Veterinary Hospital has opened in Pahrump Valley. The new full-service, fully staffed animal hospital is located in the former Ken Gager Building along Highway 160. Colleagues in the hospital are Dr. Roger Mauer and Dr. Dondi Biermeyer. Both men are veterinarians who treat all animals, large and small.

They are planning an open house in about one month so the public can see their facilities. The facility opened July 16.

The Pahrump Town Board Tuesday approved construction of a recreational vehicle dump station to be built on town property just north of the rodeo arena and west of the main fire station. The vote in favor of the proposal was 4-1, with board member Chuck Connely voting against the dump station.

Several people in the audience voiced support for this idea. A dump station was proposed recently after complaints that some RV users had been dumping their sewage along public roads.

10 years ago this week

It's not a rumor anymore. It's a sign.

Lucky Supermarket and Sav-on Drug Store are coming to town, and those responsible for organizing the deal have officially memorialized it with a large sign on the site at Basin Avenue and Highway 160.

There has been much speculation in recent months about which major chain grocery store would be the next to open its doors in Pahrump. Officials of World Premier Investments brought the suspense to an end last week as they posted the sign announcing their plans to build the shopping center.

The recently formed Pahrump Valley Contractors Industry Association has come to two conclusions.

One is that Nye County will soon have to establish a building department for Pahrump or have the state establish one for it. The other is the possibility that any government-administered building department will likely evolve into another lead-weighted bureaucracy.

In an effort to avoid the latter, a group of local contractors headed by business-owner Carl Moore are working hand in hand with the Regional Planning Commission to promote a private industry building department firm that would oversee local contractors.

According to Nye County Sheriff Wade Lieseke, the jails are overcrowded and understaffed, and he's looking hard at a wide variety of ways to ease conditions without letting dangerous criminals loose.

Some of those ideas are founded on tried and true methods such as finding a way to beef up police presence and response time, a tactic believed to lower crime rates around the country. Lieseke is also willing to test the waters of experimental programs such as the bare-bones Tent City jail in Phoenix, Ariz.