Economic Rift Follows the Utah-Nevada Border in Tiny Desert Town

Many people in this shabby town at the edge of Utah’s barren west desert have had just about enough of neglect.

They are talking, once again, about mounting a campaign to leave Utah and join West Wendover, Nev., the robust gambling side of what amounts to the same town.

Shifting the Nevada border to take in Wendover would require an act of Congress. But it would rid the bisected community of 5,000 people of silly duplication: two police departments, two fire departments, two post offices, two city halls and, most important, two high schools and--eventually--two elementary schools.

But it also might give the dusty outpost not far from the Bonneville Salt Flats something else: respect.

The town has long felt snubbed by the government entities holding the purse strings, Tooele County and the Tooele School District, both based 110 miles east across the desolate salt flats. The state capital, Salt Lake City, is 125 miles east.

The schools are the crux of Wendover’s discontent.

“They have screwed us over for years,” said Gertrude Tripp, who moved to Wendover not long after its isolation made it the perfect place to train pilots who dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

“They think we’re kind of illiterate people out here and wouldn’t be living out here if we weren’t.”

Robin Gierhart says students were always shortchanged when she attended Wendover High School. When another school, closer to the Tooele headquarters, burned down and was replaced, Gierhart said, “We got Grantsville’s burned books. We were like a stepchild.”

In fact, the American Civil Liberties Union is considering a lawsuit against the Tooele School District on behalf of schoolchildren in Wendover, 70% of whom are Latino.

“We’re trying to evaluate how much of this is just blatant discrimination,” said Carol Gnade, Utah’s ACLU director.

The talk about annexation stems from the impending split of the schools--Nevada children to stay in Nevada and Utah children in Utah.

“Nothing else is sparking it,” said Larry Herron, chief executive of the State Line and Silver Smith casinos and hotels.

Since the mid-1980s, all elementary school students have gone to school on the Nevada side. Junior high and high school students have gone to the Utah side. The school districts paid tuition to the other.

But as West Wendover, incorporated in 1991, grew flush with the rise of the gambling trade, it poured millions into streets and city services for the thousands of people who moved to the new town.

Flashy, floral-carpeted casinos now line Wendover Boulevard, two of the biggest just feet from the Utah border. They’re a beacon to gamblers from Utah’s population center two hours away and to job seekers from as far as Mexico.

With the new wealth, the Elko School District, headquartered 110 miles to the west, built a $9.9-million high school due to open this fall in West Wendover, not far from the 18-hole Toana Vista golf course ringed by upper-middle-class homes.

Elko and Tooele officials were 220 miles and thousands of dollars apart when it came time to talk about how much Tooele would pay to have West Wendover schools educate the Utah children. Elko spends more per student and Tooele said it couldn’t afford the price.

So, much to the chagrin of residents on both sides of the border, the schools are being severed.

“Even if we have an explosion of population, it still doesn’t justify having two school systems in a town this size,” said Herron, the casino executive.

Utah’s junior high and high school students will stay in the 50-year-old building surrounded by decades-old homes and haphazard trailers. The elementary school students will be housed in modular classrooms on a vacant lot while the Tooele School District asks voters to approve a $4.4-million bond issue for a new school.

Wendover residents fear that the school board will not promote the bond issue and that it will fail, leaving their children stuck in trailers. “It will be a school of the haves and a school of the have-nots,” Herron said.

Wendover Mayor Brenda Morgan is one of those talking about annexation as a solution, and most agree there is support for it on both sides of the border.

As West Wendover resident Norvin Kemp said, “If this were one town, we could accomplish so much more.”

But many are weary and wary of talking about it.

“There’s a hopelessness about it,” said Chris Lund, pastor of the Wendover Christian Fellowship. “It seems too far out of reach.”

In part, they know Nevada is not particularly interested in inheriting the poor town with big water and education needs. The Utah side has been losing population to Nevada, and now has about 1,400 residents to the Nevada side’s 3,600.

Even Gierhart, who grew up in Wendover but moved across the border when she married, is cool to the idea. “It’s nothing against the people,” she said. “We’d be willing to take over Wendover, Utah, if $10 million came with it.”

And many, like Tripp, suggest that all the talk of annexation will sabotage the bond election for a new Wendover school.

“As long as this annexation is hanging over our heads, Tooele County is not going to give us our school,” she said.

Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt dispatched an aide to Wendover for a town meeting recently, and the message on annexation was clear: If the inhabitants want it, Leavitt will work with Nevada Gov. Bob Miller toward that goal.

But Herron calls the idea “ludicrous.”

“If two governors can follow a preposterous plan of annexation--even if just talking about it preliminarily--common sense tells me they ought to be able to get together and solve the education problem in Wendover.”