(Sig and Lori Rogich) – Nevada just got a new state park.
It protects 4.5 miles of the Carson River – land that once carried the Pony Express and, decades later, hosted one of Nevada's old six-week divorce ranches.
Now the state wants help naming it. There's a survey, open through July 15, a shortlist after that, then the public votes in August.
Let’s save everybody some time. Name it after Kenny Guinn.
Kenny ran Nevada from 1999 to 2007. He never held elected office before that. He didn't need to.
He'd already run the Clark County School District, run Southwest Gas, and gotten called in to steady UNLV when the university needed it.
He took that UNLV job for a salary of one dollar.
By the time he ran for governor, he'd spent his whole career fixing institutions instead of campaigning for them.
Voters noticed. He won his first race with 52% of the vote, becoming the first Republican elected governor of Nevada in two decades.
He won reelection with 68%.
Time magazine later named him one of the five best governors in the country.
What many remember him for is the Millennium Scholarship.
Kenny built it in his first year in office, paid for through the tobacco settlement instead of a new tax, and it's still sending Nevada kids to college more than twenty years later.
Tens of thousands of students have gone through it. The program is still doing its job, long after the man who built it left.
Kenny never spent his career chasing credit. He spent it fixing things that were broken and then moving on to the next one.
That's a fitting spirit for a piece of land Nevada is trying to protect for generations to come, not just through the next election cycle.
Nevada's state parks are mostly named for the landscape. Rivers. Mountains. Trails.
Nothing wrong with that. But Nevada doesn't have many parks named after the people who actually built the state we live in today.
Kenny built a good chunk of it. He's earned a spot on the map.
When Kenny passed away in 2010, the tributes came in from every direction, and they all said roughly the same thing.
Democrat Harry Reid called him a truly great man. Republican Bill Raggio said Nevada had lost one of the best governors it ever had.
People who disagreed with him plenty over the years still respected how he ran the place. That's rare in politics.
Nevada is about to spend the next six weeks deciding what to call this stretch of land along the Carson River. There will be names nobody remembers by September.
Or the state could name it after a former governor who ran Nevada like he actually cared whether it worked.
Submit your suggestion before July 15 at parks.nv.gov. Tell them Kenny Guinn.
Sig Rogich is president of The Rogich Communications Group and a former U.S. ambassador to Iceland. A longtime Nevada businessman and political adviser, he has helped guide campaigns and causes at the local, state, and national levels for decades. Lori Rogich is a Nevada state senator (District 11) and the founder of Rogich Law Firm, where she practices education and regulatory law.
