The May 19, 2026 Technical Review Meeting of the City of Mesquite, Nevada, centered on a large-scale animal hoarding investigation, with public comments addressing the case and a previous council meeting incident. No formal votes were taken; the meeting focused on updates and next steps.
All right, welcome everybody to the Tuesday, May 19th, 2026 technical review meeting for the city of Mesquite. We're gonna start with opening public comment. I'm I was just gonna get up and kind of give you a heads up on our dog problem. So we've had this ongoing investigation with a local guy. Um for a for a few months. Um we knew we had a lot of dogs, but they were always inside the house. We never could tell how many. Um we've give me a minute. It's gonna blow your mind. And so we we've been working on this case for quite a while, trying to get a warrant, trying to get our PC together so we could get inside the house. We just haven't had it because we couldn't see inside, right? Curt age and laws and whatever restrictions. Anyway, he got evicted from his home, goes into a motor home. We see him passing quite a few dogs into this motor home. We don't know exactly how many, but where he's saying I'm I've I'm he said that he was going to a sanctuary and going to take these dogs out of state, and you know, he was taking them somewhere, and we were like, okay, well, if you're doing that, then we we can probably you know facilitate that. And we were looking and they looked at the dogs, they were energetic, they were dirty, but they were energetic and didn't seem unhealthy or anything at the time. Well, last week we ended up having to interject ourselves because they'd become another problem inside town. They've been over in Arizona, Arizona said, told them that if they left Arizona and came back to Mesquite, they wouldn't do anything. That was that was the rumor. Don't know that from that don't know that one for gospel. But county tried to get involved because they were up Line Kiln. Um we didn't get that wasn't that wasn't effective either. They ended up at Walmart. So when we originally removed the dogs from the from the motor home, we um removed 77. So that was Thursday, I think, right? Friday. Yeah, they'd hit a rock over to Walmart, and there's a little problem anyway. We removed 77. The following night, one of them had puppies, had four puppies, so we were up to 81. Um, we took those dogs um to the one of the vets. The vet hasn't has since evaluated some of them and gave us the necessary information that we needed to go to elevate our crime to charge it a different class. So we go back, we find that we had we ended up finding the guy again today, and I don't know where he had the other 30 dogs, but he had another 30 dogs in his motorhome today. So currently I'm up to 114 in the pound um that were housing relevant to this case. So it's been ongoing. It's just it's one of those things like you know, invasion of privacy. We can't just run inside and get the PC we need all the time. So it's been kind of an ongoing thing, and finally it's a it's got to the point where we have the ability to take care of it and we're gonna get it done. But we're gonna have a little bit of a problem with holding 114 dogs until the case um till they're not evidence. It takes a per it takes a particular amount of time that to go through the court or whatever. We can work, we'll work with the courts, we'll figure something out. But it's gonna be a it's gonna be a problem for a minute. And we're but we're working through it. We've had a lot of requests, a lot of information. We're trying to do as many press releases as we can. All this stuff's already out that I'm telling you. Um, but I just wanted to look at you guys and tell you what was going on. If you had any questions, I'm glad to answer them. Councilwoman Gella. First of all, I just want to say thank you. Um I want to thank Joe Mesillas, Walter Esteban Silvano, and Alex to watch them running around the Walmart parking lot trying, and you'd get they'd get just close enough to the dog and it would take off.