By Lisa J. Wolf

With Chairwoman Diana Kersey attending via telelink and County Commissioner Mike Schoenwald present via phone, Vice Chair Jeremy Rice called the Crescent Valley Town Advisory Board meeting to order on May 20.

Manager of the Red Barn Alana Hancock’s request that the Classic Car Show be posted on the town sign to let people know the car show is coming up on Father’s Day was approved.

Kim Sewell, chair of the Medical Services Advisory Committee, let everyone know that the first and third Monday of the month will see the Vitality Mobile Clinic present in the “parking lot between the town hall and the clinic from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.” and “they’ll be able to do drug assistance, mental health, behavioral health, primary care” in addition to “the current services we have at the clinic already.”

“They do have a grant that is open for all veterans, parents of veterans, spouses and children of veterans” for “opioid recovery assistance. You don’t have to be actively using. It can be a past addiction” and they “will help you” through “the mobile clinic,” Sewell explained. “There will be primary care; there will be a nurse practitioner there. It is all in person. It is not virtual,” and “they have the ability to do lab work.” Sewell advised, “If we get more people coming, they will extend it and give us an entire day. They need people to utilize this” so that the grant gets extended.

Board member Laura Shivers said, “I can see this being a real advantage for people who have to get their labs done once a month” and won’t “have to go in on the bus,” or “financially, it can be challenging for them to go into town to get it done.”

Sewell said, “This doesn’t cost the county anything,” and Vitality doesn’t “need anything from the clinic. The only thing that they will have to do in town is prescriptions.”

Sewell is “still waiting to hear back on the grant” for the CarePod. “Public Works is working on finding a location where we can set it up.”

Commissioner Mike Schoenwald, attending via phone, affirmed that “we are in no way, in any shape or form, getting rid of the clinic. That will stay. We need help for our residents.”

Chris Jim of Ormat came to “give an update on our Crescent Valley project.” Jim said, “We had a chance to do some short-term testing” and “are still in that gray area: We don’t have results bad enough to say there’s not a project, and we don’t have some that are good enough to say it’s a home run.” Starting in June, they are “getting all the prep ready to go for a long-term test. So, for us, this is like a really big benchmark. We’re going to go out there and put a couple of wells up and pull hot water out of one, test it and pump it into the others, and that gives us all the information we need to know,” including “how to engineer all of our equipment” and “whether we can move forward.”

Jim said, “We’re still tracking, depending on results,” for a “power plant end of ’28, end of ’29,” and “where we’re sending the power is kind of up in the air still.”

The Crescent Valley Town Advisory Board approved the minutes of May 6, 2026.