Longtime Carson City public official Alan Glover dies

Alan Glover, longtime Carson City clerk and veteran Nevada political figure, died Monday of pneumonia caused by a COVID-19 infection.

His passing was confirmed Tuesday by his wife, Harle.

Glover was a Carson City native whose parents were both state officials. He was elected to the Nevada Assembly in 1972, the year he graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno.

He served 14 years in the Nevada Legislature, 10 in the Assembly and four in the Senate before leaving to run for Secretary of State. He lost that race but signed on as elections deputy for the city Clerk Recorder’s office, running for that position in 1994 when the incumbent retired.

He spent 20 years as Carson City’s Clerk Recorder, becoming the longest serving clerk in city history.

“I grew up in politics,” he said upon his retirement.

His father was head of the driver’s license division in the Highway Department and his mother a deputy state treasurer before being named head of General Services under Gov. Mike O’Callaghan, becoming the first woman to head a department in Nevada state government.

He said one of the accomplishments he is most proud of was his part in the reapportionment in 2011 after the Legislature failed to get the job done. Instead, they named District Judge Todd Russell to manage the reapportionment, He drafted Glover, former LCB Research Director Bob Erickson and attorney Tom Sheets to help.

Glover said not only did they get all four congressional districts within a percent of equal, for the first time in decades they “nested” two Assembly seats inside each state Senate district.

When he became clerk, he said the office was keeping records pretty much the same way it did in the 1800s.

“Mortgages, titles, land transactions and everything else was kept in huge leather-bound books that cost like $1,200 apiece and we needed 20 of them a year,” he said.

With the money saved by not buying those books, Glover said he bought the computers and other equipment needed to modernize record keeping and bring the office forward a full century.

Now all those records are digital including mortgage records back to 1864, recorder’s office documents, titles, debt records, marriage records and Carson City budgets. The electronic system also makes canvassing the results of elections much faster and easier.

He retired from that post in 2014.

Gov. Steve Sisolak described Glover as, “an exemplary Nevadan who had committed himself to a life of service leading to the improvement of his hometown of Carson City and to our great state of Nevada.”

“Kathy and I send our love and condolences to his wife Harle and the entire Glover family,” he said.