I will never forget the surreal night of March 11, 2020.
I was sitting at home watching TV when the news broke that Rudy Gobert, a center for the NBA’s Utah Jazz, had tested positive for COVID-19. The Jazz were on the road, getting ready to start their game against the Oklahoma City Thunder, when the teams got word of Gobert’s test result. At that point, the NBA decided to not to play the game—and to suspend their season, effective immediately.
Holy crap, I thought. Being in the news biz, I knew the SARS-CoV-2 was becoming an increasingly big deal, and in the United States, the crap was figuratively hitting the fan.
That same night, I was watching a Los Angeles Dodgers-Milwaukee Brewers spring training game. Later in the game, a reporter was interviewing that day’s Dodgers starting pitcher, Walker Buehler, and asking him about his preparation for the upcoming season. That wound up being the last Dodgers game until July 23, when MLB started a 60-game season, with no fans in the stands.
Also on March 11: The RN&R posted its first two stories ever including the word “COVID.” (We had used the word “coronavirus” several times previously, first in the Jan. 30 issue.) One of those first mentions was in the editorial for the issue dated March 12—and the editorial, headlined “Hazard a Guess,” didn’t actually have much to do with the burgeoning pandemic:
Buried among the past week’s increasingly frantic headlines about the spread of COVID-19 was a story about a perennial source of both local hope and, in this case, shame: Tesla. In the story by the Reno Gazette Journal’s Anjeanette Damon, the electric car company’s history of a lax safety record and copious Occupational Safety and Health Administration violations were revealed in greater detail, as were the political means the company used to flout penalty fines—including the observable stonewalling of OSHA officials carrying a warrant to inspect the premises, and a call to Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford in an attempt to help keep the inspectors off their backs.
According to an earlier report by Damon, Tesla has paid $26,900 in fines since 2017, the ones it couldn’t get lowered or make disappear, despite averaging at least three 911 calls per month. In a particularly grisly detail, the story reports that three of the four fines that Tesla has paid are the result of workplace amputations.
Tesla came to town in 2014 with a grand vision for spearheading Reno’s new tech-friendly economy—and Reno bought it big. After securing $1.3 billion in tax breaks, the company started work on the massive Gigafactory in Storey County, which now employs an estimated 7,000 workers—most of whom are Nevada residents, in agreement with legal conditions imposed by the state.
Since then, Tesla has walked a fine line of delivering the improvements it promised, while presenting unforeseen problems for the city. The company pays approximately $30 dollars an hour to its employees—an undoubtedly attractive offer that has been, by and large, one of the greatest strains on the city’s housing supply and transportation systems, as it attracts workers from surrounding cities and states.
Even Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla himself, has been unpredictable in his behavior—and hasn’t always inspired confidence. We didn’t like to see him smoking weed with Joe Rogan in 2018 while local employees are subject to drug testing—especially in a state where marijuana is legal. That same year, his Twitter antics led to charges by the Security and Exchange Commission, where his claim that he was going to take Tesla private resulted in a $20 million fine and his stepping down as chairman of his own company.
His misadventures with a submersible meant to help rescue the Thai boys soccer team trapped in a flooded cave, private space exploration company SpaceX, personal flamethrowers, Hyperloop transportation system and Boring Company (which was supposed to drill holes all over Los Angeles) make for an impressive resume, but for the inhabitants of a city whose financial future is so closely tied to Tesla’s success—he seems more than a little … distracted.
We’re happy to see Tesla paying high wages and investing in the community. What we don’t like is their hush-hush attitude about workplace safety, and our elected officials ready and willing to bail them out.
Six years have passed since. Today, using the phrase “has been unpredictable in his behavior” in reference to Elon Musk is a massively gross understatement.
In hindsight, we now know how quickly the pandemic set in, and how severe it got—but on March 11, 2020, we had no idea what was coming. That March 12 edition would be the next-to-last RN&R published before the owners laid off all employees and suspended publication. On March 17, Gov. Steve Sisolak ordered the closure of all non-essential businesses, including casinos.
Today, the effects of the pandemic and its resulting shutdowns continue to reverberate. The most recent mention of COVID in the RN&R, before this newsletter, came on March 3, in Kris Vagner’s Taste of the Town restaurant news column—when the owner of Prost Biergarten cited COVID as one of the reasons for the restaurant’s impending closure.
—Jimmy Boegle
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