Tom Heck, Republican candidate for Nevada governor, poses in Las Vegas Thursday, May 5, 2022. STEVE MARCUS
Monday, May 16, 2022 | 2 a.m.
With less than a month to go until the primary election, GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Heck is confident he’ll win the Republican nomination with Nevada’s military vote. But he isn’t listed as an option in many of the polls, and he hasn’t been invited to participate in many debates and forums.
Heck, an engineer in Reno, spent 22 years in the Air Force, working as a war planner and in recovery operations. He has experience as a director of buildings and grounds for the University of Southern California and as the deputy public works director for the city of Reno. With two graduate degrees and one postgraduate degree, Heck has also worked as a consultant for two cities in California and as a town manager for a small town in Florida.
He ran unsuccessfully in U.S. Senate primaries in 2016 and 2018, earning 3% and 19% of the vote, respectively.
Heck said he does not plan to “reinvent the wheel” if he gets elected and will follow in the footsteps of other Republican governors throughout the country, such as Texas’ Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis.
Heck has big plans for fixing education in Nevada. Like many other Republican candidates, he plans to split up the Clark County School District. When asked how, he said “that needs to be ... a more in-depth review.”
Filing lawsuits is a big part of his plans. For instance, he wants to sue California and force it to desalinate water instead of taking “our” water from the Colorado River. (Editor’s note: California already has 12 desalination plants.)
The Sun sat down with Heck to hear more about his campaign, his priorities and how he plans to win. Heck did give some false or misleading information, such as disproven claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. He also mentioned his plans to establish an office of the inspector general in Nevada if elected, noting that “most states have” one.
Here are the highlights of the conversation, edited for brevity and clarity, and including editor’s notes to clarify disproven claims:
What pushed you to run for governor?
I’m running because career politicians have failed us and people are fed up. People want something different and I’m offering them a conservative choice, a true conservative choice. And I’m beholden to no one. I don’t have special-interest money.
You are not listed as a candidate option for polls, and you haven’t been invited to many debates. How do you plan to get your name out there and get support?
I debated up in Reno.
One of the criteria is you have to open a field office. Not a lot of people open field offices, but it’s an eliminator based on money. A lot of the things that we’re doing now is a disservice to voters because we’re not allowing everybody to get their message out. The Republican Party is telling voters who they can vote for, and this is supposed to be a free country.
Four out of five people that go to my website will vote for me, and I plan on winning with a military vote. There’s about 231,000 retired military that are registered in Nevada. The events you go to are the people that have already decided, but it’s the people sitting at home, the people that are trying to raise a family.
Every Monday night at 7, we do a digital townhall on my website. People just go to my website and it’ll pop right up.
What are the three biggest priorities of your campaign?
Safety and security, which means supporting law enforcement and champion, strong DAs. And then of course education, which is absolutely critical. I’m going to have three political action committees: one for referendums, one for conservative candidate support, and one for my army of lawyers because I’m going to sue anybody that’s not complying with the constitution of Nevada.
And then the third pillar of what I’m about is creating a job-friendly environment. We’re going to cut taxes, a 10% budget cut. We’re going to stop going back to the taxpayer. We don’t need to grow government, we need less government. So that reduces the burden on the businesses, and oftentimes people don’t always understand that businesses don’t pay taxes, only people pay taxes. We make them pay but ultimately it’s a pass through to the voters.
What are your plans to fix education?
The problem is that the Department of Education of Nevada has abdicated the responsibility. The story I tell is very simple: you send your kid, if you have any, to the store. You give them some money, you give them a list, right? You don’t just say go buy whatever you want from the list and then when he goes back, you check what he got. You ask him what’s missing, and then you check for the change. Well, that’s not what our Department of Education does. They send the money out and wash their hands of it.
When I’m governor, we will partner with them and what they’re going to spend the money on, which must and will be tied to goals and objectives that they’re going to meet. And if it’s not tied to any goals and objectives, we’re not going to send the money. When you start doing cuts like that, you start forcing people to close out the programs that aren’t working.
The other piece of it is we’re going to take apart the Clark County district. It’s too big. It’s untenable. We’re going to do an executive order requiring lower-performing students in one group, middle-performing students in another group, and high-performing students in another group, and then we’re going to have those teachers teach to that level.
Right now we teach to the middle, so the lower students lose, the higher students lose, and then you’ve got the malcontents that the teachers are forced to deal with. Under my executive order, the malcontents will be removed from the classroom and placed in an in-school detention and taught separately.
What are your plans to fix the water crisis in Las Vegas and Nevada as a whole?
California has 17 dams approved in this study. They have funded two dams but they’ve never constructed them. That meant that 1 trillion gallons went into the Pacific (we couldn’t verify that number, but Heck is referring to rainwater that flows out into the Pacific Ocean instead of being retained for use. The LA Times reported in 2019 that about 18 trillion gallons of rain fell in one month in California, but most of it ended up in the Pacific).
Had they had those reservoirs, they would have saved a good portion of that, which would have carried them for five years. But right now they suck more water than their share out of the Colorado River. (This is false. California has not taken more than its allocation of water, and it has been reducing the amount of water it takes from the Colorado River). I’m going to sue California to put in (desalination) plants in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Those are the big three because they can take water out of the ocean (with) desalinization and support those cities. Their biggest water consumption is Los Angeles and San Diego, and we’re paying for them because they’re taking our water and we’re having less water.
We keep saying, “conserve, conserve, conserve, conserve.” Well, we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve probably done as much as we can. One thing we can do that I’m a proponent of is the delivery systems for water. Most of them are not capped. If you put caps on them, the biggest loss for water is evaporation through many of the trenches and tunnels that deliver water from the Colorado River. We’re not going to siphon water off from one community’s aquifer to support another community. And if we get California out of taking water out of the Colorado River and force them to (use) their own surface water, we have probably a third or a little bit more than that. If California makes stupid decisions, I’m going to sue them and we’re going to continue to sue them to force them to do things that make sense and not impact Nevada. We’re going to work to increase (Nevada’s) allocation and decrease California’s, and let them rely on the Pacific Ocean.
What are your plans for improving the economy?
Well, economy is dependent on taxes and regulation. But when you shut down the state, which I consider unconstitutional, you’re basically taking people’s freedoms away. And I mean, that’s the biggest problem and now, because we spent trillions and trillions of dollars as an excuse for COVID, we’re gonna have inflation of 10 to 15% for the next 10 to 15 years.
How do you battle inflation? You’ve got to stop spending and putting all this money in the economy. You’ve got to free the businesses up, especially the small businesses, from burdensome regulation and taxes. Focus on taxes. Less taxes, less regulation. And common sense solutions that produce a successful outcome.
Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen? What proof is there that the election was stolen?
(Donald) Trump won the election. It’s clear now. There’s a (Dinesh) D’Souza documentary coming out that will prove once and for all how fraudulent the election was. (That documentary has been fact-checked by multiple sources and determined to be false.)
Wisconsin found 137,000 ballots. (An audit, recount and multiple lawsuits have upheld Wisconsin’s results.) They found printed ballots that had the same configuration in Georgia. (Like Wisconsin, claims of election fraud have been disproven in Georgia.) And every lawsuit that was brought for voter fraud was never judged on the merits of the case. In other words, they never reviewed the evidence and the facts were always thrown out for some particular reason. (This is false. More than 50 lawsuits have been presented across the country, and state and federal judges dismissed them.)
What kind of election reform do you think is necessary?
I’m going to champion a referendum for voter ID and vouchers, because 80% of Americans, including Democrats, support voter ID and vouchers.
We’re going to get rid of the machines. There’s an election integrity group. We’re basically going to follow their ideas. One was paper ballots that have watermarks and serial numbers. No mail-in ballots. I’m going to find a way to make sure Nevada starts electing their election supervisors because those people need to be beholden to the voters, not to bureaucrats in the various counties.
No ballot harvesting. Once you do voter ID, it changes the whole dynamics for everything else. And we’re going to do that as quickly as possible. When the voters in a democracy lose faith in the election system, that’s a recipe for revolution and anarchy.
How would you address immigration?
Eliminate sanctuary cities. I’m going to take the lead from Gov. Abbott and Gov. DeSantis. I’m going to visit them for their great ideas because we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Gov. Abbott is busing their illegals to Washington, D.C. I’m going to have a convoy of buses to send ours to Delaware, where (President Joe) Biden’s from, and to D.C. And we’re going to get those people out of here and let them figure it out, because Nevada doesn’t have the resources to take care of illegals, and we shouldn’t be forced to.
Nevada has a front-row seat to climate change with wildfires, droughts and increasing temperature. What do you plan to do to combat climate change?
Well, everybody agrees that there’s climate change, but not in the vernacular that they’re using today. We had ice ages. We had glaciers in Arkansas, down that far into the United States. So what we really ought to be worried about is if we get global cooling. (Earth does go through cycles in which it experiences ice ages that are driven by periodic changes in its orbit. Scientists predict the next ice age has been delayed by 50,000 years due to human activity.)
We have an increase of 5% more production in our food, because you know vegetables grow based on CO2 and they release oxygen. (We couldn’t find the rate at which food production has increased, but it is accurate that food production has increased). So when you start cutting the CO2, you start reducing the productivity of our crops. (This is accurate, however, the beneficial effects of rising carbon dioxide levels on plant growth can be offset by extreme weather, drought or heat stress, according to Columbia. While CO2 can stimulate plant growth, it comes at the expense of protein, vitamin and mineral content). No one’s talking about that in this whole thing. Well, the other piece no one’s talking about, if we look at the fires we’re having now, who has a bigger interest in protecting forests than a lumber company? They’ve got to manage their forests better.
How do voters in Las Vegas know you won’t prioritize Northern Nevada over Southern Nevada?
As governor, you’re not about any particular city. It’s about making government work wherever it is. Why should the services in Las Vegas or Reno be any better than the services anywhere else? Why should the services in the big cities be any different than the rurals? Government just needs to work differently and out of the box to figure out how best to serve those other areas that may not be big cities.
It’s about making the government better for all Nevadans where they work, live and play, and not one over the other.
How big of a priority is abortion for your campaign? Would you try to limit abortion access in Nevada?
I am unapologetically 100% pro-life. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin was the expert in education. He provided bonuses to teachers and the quality of education increased significantly.
You’ve got Gov. DeSantis in Florida, who’s done similarly. And they’ve passed laws about abortion. Gov. Abbott and the governors in Alabama and Oklahoma. We’re going to follow right on. We’re not going to reinvent the wheel in Nevada. And we’re going to take those laws because life is sacred.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misstated that Nevada has an Office of the Inspector General. While Nevada's Department of Corrections has one, there is no office of the inspector general for all departments. | (May 18, 2022)
