Building Trust in Government by Larry D Struve

Author:Larry D Struve
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: government, Richard Bryan, Nevada
Publisher: Keystone Canyon Press
Published: 2021-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

Bryan’s Support for Minorities and Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday

In 1983, the minority segment of Nevada’s total population of more than 800,000 persons was relatively small. Early in Governor Richard Bryan’s first term, it was estimated that the population of African American residents and that of Hispanic people each comprised about 7.5 percent of the state’s population. However, both groups were an important part of Bryan’s political base, and he paid close attention to their concerns.

To maintain the trust of the people who lived in these communities, as well as other locales in the rural parts of the state that were far removed from Carson City, Bryan often held town hall meetings to meet with leaders where they lived and to introduce them to members of his administration. In so doing, they could learn about the resources available from state government that could help their communities improve the quality of life for their citizens. Marlene Lockard, Bryan’s chief of staff, explained Bryan’s reasoning for holding these events and committing resources to ensure their success:

During the campaign [in 1982] as Dick Bryan covered the entire state of Nevada, he realized that very few people out in the rural counties and in other population centers far from Carson City knew about the resources Nevada State government could provide to help these people. So very early in his administration, he determined that he was going to take “state government” to the people. He held a series of town hall meetings in locations throughout the state—in rural Nevada and especially in Las Vegas, which was the population center of the state but where few state offices were located at the time. Ninety percent of all state department heads lived in Carson City, and Dick Bryan instructed all of them to go to Las Vegas. . . . He felt it was a negative for his administrators to be “cocooned” in Carson City and not know or understand the other parts of the state. So, he put together the traveling town hall series and took his administrators and department heads on the road and visited various locales to explain to them how state government could help, whether it be for aging services, programs for the disabled, economic development, etc. He explained there were government offices that could assist individuals personally as well as their communities. . . . It was very positive and wildly popular. It was the first time that some of these people had ever met state officials. And even many local government officials didn’t understand the resources that were available to them in their counties throughout the state. It was very well-received, and Dick Bryan got many accolades for doing that.

On a hot day in mid-July 1983, I was in the historic Westside neighborhood of Las Vegas, attending one of these local meetings as the state’s commerce director. Many African Americans lived in this neighborhood, and the meeting was in a large community church filled to capacity with people of all backgrounds.

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