Bullfrog County

If you want to commit a crime, Bullfrog County, Nevada, is the place to do it. It has no police force, no district attorney, no judge, no juries. But of course it's hard to imagine what kind of crime could be committed in 144 square miles of rock, gravel, and desert brush inhabited only by a few jack rabbits, rattlesnakes, and lizards.

Named for the greenish-yellow gold ore once mined there, Bullfrog County is the only county in the United States with a seat of government outside its boundaries. It is the only county in which commissioners are appointed by the governor rather than elected. But no residents are complaining.

Bullfrog County has no churches, no condos, no shopping malls. What it does have is high taxes. Incredibly high taxes. Five dollars per $100 of assessed value--the highest allowable under the Nevada constitution and more than triple the rate in neighboring Nye County. But there are no residents to fight it--a new twist on "taxation without representation."

Five months ago Bullfrog County didn't exist. It was created by an act of the Nevada legislature at about 3:45 a.m. on June 18--a county conjured up in the middle of the night.

I've been near Bullfrog County--before there was a Bullfrog County--when it was still part of Nye County. Half of the new county lies within the Nevada Test Site, where the U.S. government does all its underground nuclear testing. Some of us went there in August 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, to protest nuclear weapons testing.

When our vigil was over, my mission was to pick up friends who had been jailed for crossing the line onto the test site. It was an hour-and-a-half drive north to Beatty, where some of those arrested were on a work detail clearing sagebrush and tumbleweeds from the local cemetery. Two hours beyond that was the Tonopah jail, which took the overflow of protesters that the tiny Beatty jail couldn't hold.

The long drive was through vast, barren stretches of desert. The only interruptions to an empty horizon were occasional bars and brothels, advertised in large letters in this county where prostitution is legal. It's not the sort of place out of which you'd ordinarily choose to carve a new county.

BUT BULLFROG COUNTY was carved out of already existing Nye County for a reason. A huge slab of rock there, known as Yucca Mountain, is one of three spots in the United States being considered as a burial site for spent nuclear fuel and high-level military radioactive waste. Many Nevadans, who already have a test site that has blighted a chunk of their land the size of the state of Rhode Island, don't want it.

But some Nevada legislators pulled a fast one--while the rest of the state was sleeping. They set up a jurisdiction-Bullfrog County--with property taxes so high that, should the Department of Energy (DOE) choose Yucca Mountain as its waste dump, the federal government would be assessed payments to the tune of up to $25 million a year. A member of the state assembly explained that many Nevadans are opposed to the location of the site in their state, but "if we're going to get stuck with it, we also want to get every nickel we can."

Nevada legislature member Paul W. May Jr., a co-sponsor of the Bullfrog legislation, said, "At first glance, this might appear to have been written by the authors of The Wizard of Oz. But it took a great deal of valuable information and imagination to come up with this proposal, which I think is a good one that works."

One person who isn't pleased by the turn of events is Nye County District Attorney Philip H. Dunleavy, who has been instructed by the Nye County Commission to file suit contesting the legality of Bullfrog County. Dunleavy wonders what would happen if a person were charged with a serious crime committed in Bullfrog County: "All the person would have to do is say, 'I want a jury,' because the constitution in this state says a jury should be made up of residents of the county. Well, there are none."

The counterfeit county could, in fact, work to the advantage of protesters at the test site, who for many years have been trying to bring the nuclear testing issue to the awareness of the public. In the past, test site cases have gone to the small justice of the peace court in Beatty, which is in Nye County. The Nye County sheriffs department has said that, other than in life-threatening emergencies, they will not respond to any crime committed in Bullfrog County.

Should civil disobedience occur in the new county, the DOE plans to have its private security firm find the trespassers, make citizen's arrests, and then turn the protesters over to federal authorities in Las Vegas. Proceedings in the federal court of Las Vegas would likely gamer much more publicity for the peace activists than those that have been held in remote Beatty for many years.

The U.S. government has created a nuclear monster that most of us never asked for. If any crime is committed in Bullfrog County, it will be the crime of ignoring the wishes--and the right--of Nevadans to have a safe home. And when the case goes to court, the jury will be an increasingly anti-nuclear U.S. public.

Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.