As Nevada regulators continue to investigate safety episodes that have occurred in the tunnels Boring Company is digging below Las Vegas, two Nevada legislators have written a letter to Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, demanding a “comprehensive plan” to address concerns of “structural failures” in the state’s oversight of Elon Musk’s tunneling startup.
The letter, which was shown to Fortune, described “significant concerns about record integrity, administrative accountability, and structural failures within Nevada’s workplace safety system,” and said that “these issues remain unresolved and require clear action from the Executive Branch.” The letter was sent to the Governor’s Chief of Staff, Ryan Cherry, on Wednesday morning. Assemblymember Howard Watts and Senator Rochelle Nguyen, two Democrats who lead the state’s Assembly Committee on Growth and Infrastructure, signed and sent the letter.
The letter demanded that Gov.Lombardo and his administration conduct an independent review of an incident revealed by Fortune in which a public record had been altered that was part of an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) investigation, and commit to making those findings publicly available. The legislators describe the act of altering or concealing public records in the letter as a “serious matter that may constitute a violation of Nevada law and potentially rise to the level of a Class C felony.” The letter also demanded a plan to address year-long backlogs in OSHA cases waiting to be heard by the OSHA Review Board, a Governor-appointed body that hears safety cases employers have contested with Nevada OSHA.
“Questions surrounding withdrawn citations, altered records, and delays in adjudication have created the perception that Nevada’s enforcement system is not operating independently or transparently,” the letter reads, pointing out that “there still remain a number of unanswered questions and outstanding issues regarding The Boring Company and the health and safety of Nevada workers.”
The demand letter follows a legislative hearing in early February, in which state officials testified before Nevada legislators about their oversight of the Boring Company. Representatives from Boring Company and the Governor’s Office declined to attend the hearing. Boring Company, which was founded and is owned by Elon Musk, has been digging an underground public transportation system of ride-hail Tesla vehicles that is intended to eventually go below the entire city of Las Vegas. While its tunneling to date has taken place in the broader County, the company recently received approvals to start digging below the City of Las Vegas proper.
Projects riddled with safety issues
Since construction began, the project has been riddled with safety issues, including employees getting burned by chemicals in the tunnels, employees digging too close to the Las Vegas monorail, a worker getting crushed and another getting shocked, and illegal wastewater dumping—much of which was first reported by Fortune. KTNV, an ABC affiliate television station in Las Vegas, recently reported that OSHA had completed its investigation regarding the employee who had been shocked, and found that the injured employee had been fired for allegedly demonstrating a “a serious lapse in judgement on more than one occasion,” according to the Boring Company.
There are at least three more pending investigations that are still outstanding, according to OSHA’s website, and Boring Company is currently contesting eight citations it was issued regarding chemical burns in 2024. The Review Board has repeatedly pushed back the hearing on those citations, including most recently in February because Boring Company’s lawyer had a conflict, OSHA officials have said.
The latest injury, the one involving the employee who was shocked, “just points to the fact that we need to ensure that our OSHA process is functioning properly—to hold this and other companies accountable, to provide a safe working environment for people in our community,” Assemblymember Watts said in an interview with Fortune. He pointed out that “these tremendous backlogs” are allowing companies to contest citations for over a year and delay addressing the underlying problems.
In November, a Fortune investigation found that OSHA had issued three citations against the Boring Company after firefighters were burned by chemicals in the tunnels, then withdrew them within 24 hours after Boring Company president Steve Davis reached out to a representative in the Governor’s Office. Federal OSHA, which oversees the state plan, later received a complaint about the matter and opened a federal investigation, which ultimately determined that the allegations were substantiated, and that case file documentation was altered, missing, “and/or removed” from the case file and that the citations had been withdrawn after issuance. Federal OSHA said in its findings that it believed Nevada OSHA “had reasonable justification to withdraw the issued willful citations” and that the legal elements needed to support the “willful” designation had not been met.
Governor Lombardo recently said in an interview with staff at the Nevada Independent that his office had tried to determine who had deleted a line item in the document in the OSHA file, but that the inquiry had apparently been thwarted by a cyberattack against the state that took place several months beforehand in August.
In that recent interview, Governor Lombardo said that “in the long run,” he believed Boring Company would be “very beneficial” to Las Vegas.
“Do I like them in their tactics and how they do business? No,” he said.
The legislators’ letter demanded that Governor Lombardo’s administration submit a written plan that would “detail concrete actions, responsible officials, and implementation timelines” to start the independent investigation and address safety case backlogs by April 17.
The Governor’s Office did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
