Civic engagement was in the water fountains at Elko High School

Even as the vice president of her senior class in Elko County, Nev., Mariluz Garcia didn’t consider herself to be tremendously civically engaged. 

In fact, despite having been voted into the kind of position that many students use as a springboard into a future in government, she took a decidedly contrary attitude. 

“It was a social outlet for me,” she said. “I didn’t want the responsibility of president.”

One of the boys she trained against while on the Elko High School basketball team was also pretty detached when it came to the political process.

“I was a transplant from Wyoming, I was just in town for my senior year because my dad’s job brought us to Elko,” said David Stout. “I also didn’t really think too much of elected officials.”

The two went their separate ways after graduation but caught up at their 10-year reunion in 2008. 

The next time they ran into each other, they were at the 2023 NACo Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C., thousands of miles away from where they met and even farther from the adopted homes where they were now county commissioners — Stout in El Paso County, Texas and Garcia in Washoe County, Nev. 

Add in Brad Jensen, who served for a few years as San Bernardino County, Calif. government and legislative affairs director, and the Elko High School Class of 1998 must have had the highest number of county officials per capita of any peer group. 

Stout’s journey started a year before graduation, when he spent 11th grade living on an avocado farm in Mexico, which spurred his interest in international affairs. 

At the University of New Mexico, he studied Latin American studies and Spanish and spent a semester in El Paso, before going into broadcast journalism in Albuquerque. His career also took him to Washington, D.C. and Oklahoma before returning to El Paso.

“I had always wanted to come back to the borderland,” he said. 

While covering local government in El Paso, he was recruited by a state senator to do bilingual outreach, and he then started seeing himself as member of the community, and focused his long-held interest in international affairs on how it affected his new home. And, he took more of an interest in domestic policy.

“I just started really paying close attention to who’s representing me at every level and there was a guy who was a county commissioner at that time who was just doing a terrible job — very antagonistic to a lot of good things that others were trying to do at the county level,” Stout said. 

“I started getting involved in local politics, something I couldn’t do as a journalist, and I noticed there weren’t a lot of young people in politics,” he noted. “One night I was lying in bed and decided I would challenge the commissioner.”

With a 37-vote margin, Stout won and is now in his 11th year on the Commissioner’s Court, and has served as chair of NACo’s Immigration Task Force, bringing two delegations of county officials to El Paso to understand the immigration system.

Garcia had the more direct route to county service, though it was far more of a stretch for her. The daughter of a Basque father and a Mexican mother, she never saw her background reflected in local leadership, but much like her student council ambitions, she didn’t think too much of that. 

After graduating from high school, she attended the University of Nevada, Reno, then stayed for a master’s degree, then a doctorate in education. 

She serves as executive director of the Dean’s Future Scholars program at the university. 

Her first exposure to Washoe County government came when she fostered, and later adopted, two children. 

Then, as a result of her involvement with her children’s school, she waded into civic involvement.

“People started tapping me on the shoulder for service on different nonprofit boards related to education or mental health — that’s kind of in my wheelhouse with the school counselor,” she said. 

Garcia has been on her county Board for some fractious debates about election administration, and Stout has seen immigration from Mexico take the spotlight in the past few years. 

Though neither spent their teenage years planning their resumes for a run for political office, Garcia traces their amiability to the experiences in Elko County, taking lessons they learned in their adolescence to their new counties, like seeds blown in the wind.

“When you grew up in a small town, you quickly learn that you’ve got to learn how to get along with everybody or you’re likely to get punched in the face at some point,” she said. 

“You’re going to keep seeing these folks, right? I didn’t know much when I got into office, but I knew I had to have that same kind of mindset if I wanted to get along with colleagues with different views or constituents.”