Nevada is the driest state in the country. The person who decides who gets to pump how much water out of the ground is called the state engineer. It is one of the most consequential jobs in state government, and it is almost never a political job — before December 2025, no Nevada state engineer had been fired since 1981.

Then Adam Sullivan was.

Here is the sequence, as documented by The Nevada Independent's review of nearly 200 emails, letters, attachments, and meetings.

November 12: "It's coercion masked as collaboration"

Sullivan had drafted an order to reduce groundwater pumping in the Humboldt River Basin — an over-appropriated watershed in Northern Nevada where Nevada Gold Mines, a joint venture of Barrick and Newmont, runs 22 mines.

On November 12, a lobbyist for the company emailed Ryan Cherry, Governor Joe Lombardo's chief of staff:

"It's coercion masked as collaboration. Barrick/NGM has not only actively participated in all discussions, they have offered bona fide solutions to the problem of down basin surface flow reductions only to be ignored by the agency. This style of coercion, whether intended or not, affects capital markets in a significant way."

Cherry forwarded it up the chain with two words: "See below."

In December, Sullivan was gone.

To be fair about what the record shows: none of the emails The Indy reviewed directly asked the governor to remove Sullivan. But some records were withheld — including the details of a meeting between Lombardo himself and representatives of Nevada Gold Mines, and emails about canceled water rights permits.

March 5: $500,000

On March 5, three months after the firing, Nevada Gold Mines gave $500,000 to a PAC supporting Lombardo. That brought the company's cumulative giving to that PAC to $1 million — more than it has given to any other Nevada politician. (For comparison: Democrat Steve Sisolak's PAC got $750,000 from the company, and Republican Brian Sandoval $175,000.)

Asked about the donation, Lombardo's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Ken Miller, a political science professor at UNLV, made a point worth quoting in full, because it's more careful than a partisan attack and lands harder for it. Mining money going to Nevada governors, he said, is normal — "It's hospitality and resource management — that's the Nevada economy. That's where you expect the political money to come from." The company gives to whoever is in office, regardless of party.

So the donation isn't the strange part:

"The weird timing might be when the Lombardo administration acted on the water engineer. Why did they make that decision when they made it? Because it appears Nevada Gold Mines is doing what they always do."

That's the question. The check was routine. The firing wasn't.

The man who fired him wasn't qualified to second-guess the science

Sullivan was fired by James Settelmeyer, Lombardo's appointee running the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. In a March 30 deposition in an unrelated case, Settelmeyer explained his reasoning:

"It all coalesced and the continued desire to push forth a draft curtailment order which was based on what I considered to not necessarily be the strongest science."

In the same deposition, Settelmeyer acknowledged that he has no experience or training with water modeling, is not a hydrologist, and does not know how to read a model.

He also acknowledged where his scientific skepticism came from. The hydrologists he had spoken to had been hired by the mining companies.

So a political appointee who cannot read a groundwater model overruled the state's chief water scientist on the strength of advice from scientists paid by the industry being regulated. That is the whole decision, in one sentence.

Sullivan, for his part, told The Nevada Independent he had "faced pressure to rescind decisions or accelerate decisions, or withhold decisions, or to not attend public meetings."

This is the operation, not an exception

Nevada Gold Mines is one donor among many, and the pattern holds across Lombardo's whole fundraising machine.

Of the $4.3 million his campaign raised in 2025, about $1.9 million — 44 percent — came through "bundling," the practice of routing money through affiliated companies to get around Nevada's $10,000 limit on individual contributions. Hotel magnate Robert Bigelow gave $220,000 through 22 different companies, all tied to a single address, all on the same day. Gambler and developer Billy Walters, convicted of insider trading in 2017, gave $200,000 through 20 entities.

In the second quarter of 2026 alone, the Lombardo-affiliated Better Nevada PAC raised $12 million. Over that same quarter, Lombardo collected $9,400 from Nevadans giving $100 or less.

Nine thousand dollars from regular Nevadans. Twelve million from everyone else.

Lombardo's campaign says "there is nothing unusual or improper about the makeup of the Governor's donor base." Aaron McKean of the Campaign Legal Center put the problem plainly: "It's always going to raise that question for regular folks — what is this person buying? … it does … undermine the confidence that the public has in our elected officials."

What it costs

We've documented Lombardo saying he doesn't "get paid very much" while drawing a governor's salary and a $199,175 police pension at the same time, and name-dropping himself out of a traffic ticket in about 15 seconds.

This one is bigger than either. Water in Nevada isn't a perk. The Humboldt River Basin is over-appropriated, which means more water is spoken for on paper than actually exists. Somebody has to decide who gives some back. That decision was headed toward the mines, and then the person making it was fired by someone who can't read the science, after a lobbyist wrote a heated email to the governor's chief of staff.

Three months later the company wrote a check for half a million dollars.

We deserve better.

Source

"Mining industry privately griped to Lombardo about top Nevada water regulator before firing" and "Why is Nevada Gold Mines one of Lombardo's top donors in governor's race?," Eric Neugeboren and Tabitha Mueller, The Nevada Independent, 2026. Photo: The Nevada Independent.