Washoe County’s Non-Strategic Plan
Washoe County’s Propaganda Team rolling out Commission Chair Alexis Hill for a Mental Health moment to be used at a future NACo meeting. From the county’s Facebook page.
Washoe County's January 28th Strategic Planning Meeting wasn't so much a planning session as it was a carefully orchestrated performance. County Manager Eric Brown paraded his loyal appointees before the commissioners in what amounted to an elaborate puppet show—department heads and direct reports dutifully describing a county running like clockwork under Brown's exceptional leadership and planning for the future.
The charade of commissioners directing the county's future course? Pure theater. At Washoe County, the ship sails only in the direction Brown charts, regardless of what elected officials might prefer. These are the same Brown-selected officials who crafted Commissioner Alexis Hill's presentation to the Nevada Legislature's Senate Committee on Government Affairs—the one where she boldly claimed a 40% reduction in homelessness, a figure so dubious it deserves its own category of creative accounting.
We're making the Strategic Planning Summary available because residents deserve to know what's happening behind the official narrative. Consider this document your decoder ring for the county's actions throughout 2025.
With the Nevada CARES Campus becoming an undeniable failure (despite the county's bizarre practice of investigating itself to "verify" its own claims), Brown has executed a classic bureaucratic pivot. Homelessness initiatives proving too messy? No problem. Mental health is the new frontier for taxpayer dollars in 2025, with Julie Ratti, Behavioral Health Administrator, and Judge Egan Walker (who desperately needs an electoral challenger in 2026 given his consistent pro-county bias) serving as Brown's reliable allies.
But even this pivot is already showing cracks. The county apparently couldn't be bothered to properly estimate rehabilitation costs for the West Hills facility before committing to the project. Now that the numbers have proven "egregious" (read: astronomically expensive), Brown deployed Commissioner Hill to casually mention at the meeting that the county has accepted $14.5 million from the State of Nevada for West Hills rehabilitation.
What Hill conveniently omitted: Washoe County taxpayers may need to sink an additional $25-50 million into the building. Remember the former Reno Gazette Journal building rehabilitation by the City of Reno? The one where costs kept mysteriously climbing until the true total became as obscure as the county's homelessness statistics? Expect a sequel with the West Hills project.
The strategic planning may be finished, but the strategy remains the same: spend first, ask questions never.