Hello, Term Sheeters. It’s Jessica Mathews, filling in for Allie this morning and giving you a little update on the latest happenings in Las Vegas.
A few weeks ago, I filled you in on our latest reporting on Elon Musk’s $5.6 billion tunneling startup, the Boring Company. You may recall that Nevada’s state safety regulator had issued three “willful” citations against Boring Company, after a training drill during which two firefighters suffered burns at a Boring site. The citations prompted Boring Co. President Steve Davis to call up a former Tesla policy guy who now works in Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo’s office. Within 24 hours of that phone call, Boring executives had set up a meeting with senior regulators in the state, and the citations had been withdrawn.
The withdrawal of the citations (which Nevada OSHA maintains was due to the violations not meeting legal requirements) was never documented in OSHA’s case file, and a public record that had referenced the meeting was altered. (State officials and regulators say that no supervisor ever gave direction to delete the record of the meeting.)
A few weeks after all that transpired, Boring Company was caught illegally dumping wastewater into manholes around Las Vegas. One Boring manager was specifically called out in documents, as he apparently “feigned compliance” with county inspectors, only to start dumping the waste again as soon as he thought inspectors had left the site.
Both of these stories have caused somewhat of an uproar in Las Vegas. Residents have been asking their representatives about it at town halls and meetings. And Nevada Congresswoman Dina Titus sent a demand letter to Governor Lombardo, urging him to hold Elon Musk’s tunneling company accountable, make the company’s meetings with Nevada OSHA public, and answer a series of questions about how the investigation was handled.
Now, as I reported this week, federal OSHA has opened an investigation into Nevada’s state OSHA plan. Federal OSHA received what’s called a “CASPA” complaint, a Complaint About State Plan Administration, after our story, and the agency decided it warranted a federal review.
These investigations are a big deal and are meant to evaluate whether a state plan is at least as effective as federal OSHA—a requirement under U.S. law. The last time Nevada OSHA received this level of federal (and public) scrutiny was in 2008, when the Las Vegas Sun reported on the high death rate among construction workers at the Las Vegas Strip amid lax enforcement of regulations at Nevada OSHA. Federal regulators launched a “special study” into Nevada OSHA the following year, which found “a number of serious concerns” in the program and led to corrections in oversight and changes to its program.
We’ll be closely tracking the findings of this investigation once federal OSHA finishes its review.
Until then, thanks for following along.
Jessica Mathews X: @jessicakmathews Email: [email protected]
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The post A federal investigation is underway after Nevada’s safety regulator suddenly dropped violations against Boring Company appeared first on Fortune.
