Blue Collar Muse

Whether or not we label them as such, most of us have heroes. I do, at any rate, and so do most of the folks I run with, online and off. There are people whose commitment, character and contribution are so influential to my own commitment, character and contribution that I listen to them, study them and try to emulate them. Heroes need not be currently living. With today’s ability to touch people internationally via the Internet, heroes don’t have to be in your hometown or even personally connected to you. So it can be a rare treat to actually know or meet one of your heroes.

I have the privilege of knowing one of my heroes personally. His name is Chuck Muth. I even got to introduce him recently at a meeting in Chicago. Chuck works both behind the scenes and out front as well. Still, most people won’t know much about him. People connected to Nevada politics know who he is, however, and that seems to be the way Chuck likes it. I won’t go into the myriad reasons I want to be like Chuck when I grow up except to say he possesses a gift I greatly envy. Chuck can look at a situation or issue and immediately distill it to bare essentials, identifying the issues at work. Then he brings a devastating intellect to bear, either to shore up the right side or fillet or make mincemeat of the wrong side, depending on his mood d’jour, I suppose.

For those of you who like your news nicely packaged and broken down, Chuck publishes a great email newsletter, Muth’s Truth’s. You can sign up for Muth’s Truths at his blog by the same name. You won’t get spammed and, despite being filled with issues specific to Nevada, the insight Chuck brings to Nevada’s issues applies broadly to most anywhere.

So, what prompted this ode to all things Muth? Something small, really. I’m sitting in Midway Airport in Chicago on my way to points West. On my flight from Nashville to Chicago, I picked up a copy of Southwest Airlines’ in-house magazine, Spirit. In addition to a fabulous story on Nashville’s Country Music songwriters, Spirit’s June issue had a light hearted and entertaining piece, titled ‘Pink Gold’, about a pig farmer, of all things.

Not just any pig farmer, though. This pig farmer is 69 year young Bob Combs, owner of R. C. Farms. Combs is a 3rd generation pig farmer who started out in Prescott, AZ. In the early 60’s, he ended up in North Las Vegas, NV where he bought out the area’s pig farm which no longer had pigs due to a syphilis outbreak but which still had contracts with Vegas hotels to dispose of their food waste. The owner at the time was just burning the waste. Combs bought the place and started raising pigs again.

In 1963, just like today, R C Farms was 13 miles north of Vegas’ strip. But it was in the middle of nowhere. Combs describes the remoteness of the place then by saying, “I could shoot in any direction without concern about anybody”. But it’s 2008 now and things have changed. For one thing, he’s been offered as much as $70 million dollars for the place by developers. He calls them “tire kickers” and isn’t interested in selling. The biggest change is the expansion of Las Vegas to the north. The closer the city gets, the more pressure is put on Combs and his enterprise.

The fact there was a pig farm in the area didn’t stop developers from doing their thing. But when the sort of smell one normally associates with a pig farm started wafting across strip malls and subdivisions when the wind was right, the customers of those developers started complaining. In 2001, Clark County’s Air Quality Department started fining Combs for the smell with some of the fines in excess of $50,000! Never mind that Combs was there first and the nature of his business is well known to anyone doing research into the area for a considered development.

Combs didn’t scream or whine or complain. He worked with the government to reduce the smell. And, as you’d expect, with the reduced smell, development sprang up even closer. If Clark County succeeds in collecting the fines they’ve levied, it will help the Clark County School District fund building an elementary school that actually abuts Combs’ property! Still, Combs has no plans to sell and he isn’t changing his business model either.

Chuck came to mind in one of the closing quotes in the Spirit article. Combs was checking up on operations at one of the casinos that provides part of the 1,000 tons of food waste Combs takes in each month. He was having breakfast in Jerry’s Nugget, one of his very first customers and chatting with his waitress, Gracie. Gracie asks Combs,

“You ever gonna move your pig farm?”

“Oh, Honey,” he half-smiles, shaking his head.

“You just say, ‘I was here first,’ and let them keep smelling it,” says Gracie.

“That’s the smell of freedom,” Combs says.

Kelo v New London and Eminent Domain. The rights of the individual v the power of the state. Bob Combs v Clark County, NV. This is the sort of fight Chuck Muth has been fighting for years. He was doing it long before it was sexy. He was doing it because it is the right thing to do and because the Bob Combs of the world need all the help they can get to fight back against arrogant, out of control and powerful government. I have a new Nevada hero in Bob Combs. He fits nicely with my other Nevada hero, Chuck Muth, and other Silver State heroes like Richard Disney, Joe Enge and Eric Odom. They certainly remind me of one another. I’ll be seeing Chuck in Vegas in a couple of months. I just may make that 20 minute trip north to the Combs farm to shake Bob’s hand and tell him “Thanks!”

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Blogroll, Business, Constitution Issues, Eminent Domain, Environmental Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.