Esmeralda has few people, few worries

SILVER PEAK - When the clock hits 8:15, John Scates rings the morning bell and steps outside to watch his students raise the flag.

Silver Peak Elementary is the only school in the smallest town in Nevada's loneliest county, so taking attendance is a breeze. Scates counts eight faces where there should be 10.

"Where is everybody?" he asks.

It's a good question, and Scates isn't the only one asking.

According to latest state estimates, the Esmeralda County population slipped below 1,200 last year for the first time since 2004.

Leading the slide was tiny Silver Peak, which lost 41 residents after mine layoffs in 2009. That amounts to almost a quarter of the community's population, easily the largest decline by percentage of any city or town in the state.

County residents downplay the decrease. They say the population has bounced along at about 1,000 for decades.

Those passing through on U.S. Highway 95 are left with a different impression.

The main route from Las Vegas to Reno crosses 110 miles of Esmeralda, including Goldfield, a county seat that resembles an outdoor museum of the early 20th century.

"The first time I drove through here 40 some years ago, there was a house for sale, and I thought, 'Who would ever want to live in a place like this?'" laughs Juanita Colvin, a proud Goldfield resident since 1976. "You just never, never know."

Colvin has served as the county's only justice of the peace for almost 20 years. She has no staff, but she finds time to lead tours of Goldfield's historic courthouse.

The two-story stone fortress opened in 1908, and county business is still conducted there over the original furniture.

Back then, Colvin says, when the central Nevada gold rush was in full swing, the county had 28 different townships, none larger or more elaborate than Goldfield. With a population of about 20,000, it was Nevada's largest community from 1903 to 1910, and the railroad kept shops stocked with fresh flowers, fashionable clothes and other big-city niceties.

Eventually, though, the mines played out and the jobs dried up. By the end of World War II, Goldfield was all but gone. Colvin says she doesn't think it'll ever dwindle to nothing.

Esmeralda County's 3,589 square miles includes the highest point in Nevada, 13,140-foot Boundary Peak. Nearly everyone lives in the mining outpost of Silver Peak, the sprawling farm community of Fish Lake Valley or faded Goldfield.

Beneath this bleached expanse of dust and clay lies a deposit of lithium suspended in briny groundwater.

Mining began in the mid-1960s. Today, the playa is dotted with pumps and power lines and man-made ponds.

It is the only lithium mine in the nation.

The material has a wide variety of applications, from scrubbers that keep deadly gas from building up in space capsules to eyeglasses that tint when exposed to the sun. It is also used in lubricants, pharmaceuticals, countertops and lithium batteries.

Mine General Manager Joe Dunn hopes to see a surge in demand for battery products to keep the mine operating 24 hours a day. But orders have dropped during the worldwide economic downturn. That's what triggered last year's layoffs.

North Carolina-based Chemetall Foote Corp. now employs about 30 people at its Silver Peak plant, with plans to add eight more later this year.

Dunn says the mine has plenty of life left in it. Current projections call for operations to continue through 2020.

Talk of Esmeralda's population inevitably turns to questions about consolidation. To locals, that sounds more like "assimilation." Or maybe "death."

One advocate of redrawing the county lines is longtime Judge John Davis, whose Fifth Judicial District includes Esmeralda, Nye and Mineral counties.

Davis favors combining Esmeralda and northern Nye counties, and making the southern portion of Nye into its own county, with Pahrump as its seat.

"We're just so different," Davis says of central Nevada and the south.

As for Esmeralda County, the judge sees so few cases that he holds court in Goldfield about once a month. He can't remember a trial there in at least five years.

County Commissioner Bill Kirby disputes that Esmeralda is inefficient. He notes Esmeralda is one of the only Nevada counties with a budget in the black.

The county has a reserve that could cover its comparatively modest $4.5 million budget for more than a year with no outside revenue whatsoever.

Of course, the county's single largest source of revenue is consolidated tax money it gets from the state. The $1.4 million Esmeralda received last year represented about $1,160 for each of its 1,187 residents. Clark County got $795.6 million, or $408 per resident.

There is also history to consider.

"Eliminating Esmeralda County is about more than losing county offices and jobs, or even a county seat of government. It's about losing a political identity that goes back to the founding of Nevada Territory in 1861," says former State Archivist Guy Rocha. "Esmeralda is one of Nevada's original nine counties. In fact, the bill creating the territorial counties ... listed Esmeralda first."

Then there is this: If the county were to be dissolved, it could deal a death blow to an already shaky labor market, particularly in Goldfield.

With about 90 jobs, roughly half of them full time, county government is Esmeralda's single largest employer.

Even Esmeralda County Sheriff Ken Elgan doesn't keep a resident deputy in tiny Silver Peak anymore.

The department is stretched pretty thin, with just five officers patrolling an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island, combined.

Most of the action comes along U.S. 95, where Elgan and deputies race to accidents and stop speeders. They write roughly $500,000 worth of traffic citations each year - an important source of revenue but not enough to sustain the department.

Multitasking is also an important skill for employees in the county school district, which holds classes four days a week to save money.

Overcrowding isn't an issue. This past school year, there were 39 students in Fish Lake Valley, 18 in Goldfield, and Silver Peak had no students at all in three of its nine grades.

For high school students who spend as much as three hours a day riding to and from Tonopah, the district uses federal grant money to equip their bus with laptop computers and an onboard tutor.

The same grant also pays for a special activity bus so Esmeralda students can stay late and participate in extracurricular activities at their high school in Nye County.

"We have a lot of technology for a class this size," the second-year teacher says. "Being as poor as we are, people like to give us things, which is nice."