Carson City voters elect two new supervisors, rejects downtown library plans
Carson City voters soundly rejected a proposed quarter cent sales tax to support a downtown library and elected two new faces to the Board of Supervisors.
In a razor-thin decision of just 25 votes, Carson City cast its decision and picked Jim Shirk over incumbent Molly Walt for the Ward 4 seat. Shirk pulled in 10,335 votes, getting 50.06 percent of the vote to Walt's 10,310 votes or 49.94 percent of the vote.
"I look at this win as being that the citizens have made a decision to move forward in a different direction than from the present administration and it all goes back to Carson City Question 1. It was a directive from the citizens that said we don't want to go down this pathway," said Shirk.
The Ward 2 Supervisor race wasn't as narrow. Carson City Commercial Real Estate Broker Brad Bonkowski pulled in nearly 54 percent of the electorate earning 10,781 votes over Dennis Johnson's 46.1 percent or 9,221 votes.
"I'm glad we have a consensus now and we can start to heal the divisions within our city," Bonkowski said. "We can now move forward and start solving the issues that we face."
Meanwhile Carson City voters rejected plans to expand the library into an downtown civic center. The "No" vote was 15,622 or 68.23 percent to 7,274 or 31.77 percent in the "Yes" column. One of the more bitterly contested measures, the Carson City Center Project — aka Nugget Project — has been three years in the making and has undergone several incarnations before it wound up going to voters. The question asked voters to raise a quarter-cent sales tax to fund the project.