Southern burn put out
A proposal for a sort of Burning Man South has come to nothing.
The Pahrump Town Board had approved the May event for the town's fairgrounds. But organizer Dirk Schmidhofer said that late in the game officials brought two Nye County ordinances to his attention that caused his organization to pull the plug. The ordinances dealt with dust abatement, requiring the applicant to either pave parking areas or lay down two inches of gravel at the fairgrounds.
Schmidhofer expressed regret. “It would have worked for us, for what we call a regional burn, which is a small burn,” he told Selwyn Harris of the Pahrump Valley Times.
Another factor exacerbating feelings was nasty online material posted about the event, prompting local resident John Pawlak to say, “It seems ironic that certain individuals in this town can demonize and prejudge the folks at the regional Burning Man group who were asked to come to our town at our request and then define them as homosexuals, nudists, drug addicts, hedonists and so forth.”