ELKO — The plight of stakeholders after the Range 2 Fire in Lamoille Canyon piqued the interest of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who toured the burn area during a visit to rural Nevada this week.
“I’ve been monitoring the fires and talking to people — all the fires that have been happening,” Cortez Masto said Oct. 29 during a meet-and-greet at Duncan LittleCreek Gallery. “Then I saw the Lamoille Canyon fire, and I thought while I have the chance, I need to come out and talk to some of the people about what’s happening out here.”
She said it was a bipartisan priority when making the Congressional budget to ensure that firefighting services and fuel suppression efforts have funding. Previously, the senator urged the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reconsider the state’s application for emergency funding for communities affected by the South Sugarloaf Fire.
Cortez Masto, a senator since 2016 who previously served as the state’s attorney general, said she has been coming to the Elko area from her home in Las Vegas since she was a teenager. She described how photos of the Ruby Mountains and surrounding rural areas now line the walls of her Washington, D.C., office. She said visiting Northeastern Nevada reminds her of growing up in Southern Nevada before it was the booming metropolis that it is today.
Although she said she tries to continue to visit rural Nevada each August, Cortez Masto did not make it earlier this year because Congress worked through the summer. Instead, she used the approximately week-long break before elections to visit her home state.
“Really what drives me is your voices, because I am your voice in Washington,” she said at the standing-room only DLC event, organized by the Elko County Democratic Central Committee. “So I need to know what the heck’s going on and what we need to be fighting for in D.C.”
While in northeastern Nevada, Cortez Masto also hosted a wildfire and conservation roundtable to discuss fires and energy leases, visited Maggie Creek Ranch to learn about fuel management, and toured West Wendover with Mayor Daniel Corona after asking Amtrak in a recent letter to expand service on the California Zephyr rail line to the Nevada-Utah border town.
“Those are questions that we are going to continue to make sure that that service is coming through our rural communities, knowing that Greyhound no longer provides service to many of our communities,” said Cortez Masto, who serves on the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and five other committees.
Her itinerary also included a meeting with Nevada ranchers, a roundtable discussion on getting broadband internet to rural areas, and talks with survivors of domestic violence.
“My goal has been to get around to talk to a lot of people,” Cortez Masto said. “… I want to make sure that we talk to Nevada, that we are all in agreement on what’s moving forward and everyone has had a say before we try and do something and move it forward.”
In the capital, however, she said she faces the challenges of getting federal agencies to cooperate and the Trump administration “zeroing out all the budgets every time they come from all of the agencies that we work with. … The good news is that the money that gets zeroed out when the administration recommends it, in a bipartisan way, we all put it back in in the Senate because we realize the importance of the programs and the funding to our states that it provides.”
The senator said she would always advocate for funding to return to Nevada. In a handout of priorities for rural communities, Cortez Masto listed protecting access to programs for opioid abuse treatment, by advocating for more than $270 million in funding; extending Medicare payment programs and using Medicare funds to finance residency programs; expanding rural broadband access; ensuring emergency and prevention funding for wildfires and droughts; supporting lands bills; and securing grant funding for rural Nevada.
“The fight has been, ‘Let’s get the funding for our rural communities and then let’s make sure it goes where it’s needed,’ ” Cortez Masto said.
The senator concluded her brief presentation then continued to shake hands and visit with constituents and patrons as they milled around the gallery and bar.
“It seems like she’s got it all together,” said Lisa Eriksen, a local yoga instructor.