BEATTY — Ed Ringle has big ideas for the small enclave of Beatty. He also has the land and water to see those ideas to fruition — a rarity in the driest state in the nation with the least percentage of private land.

The 73-year-old is perhaps most recognizable as the baby face and namesake of the EddieWorld gas station in Beatty and Yermo, California, halfway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Memorials to, or reminders of, Ringle’s big ideas can be found throughout the town of Beatty, from the unfinished steampunk Exchange Club casino to a sign for “El Sueño,” or “The Dream” in Spanish — another casino he never got around to building.

But one recent construction project has caught the attention of state regulators and ruffled more than a few feathers in the community, which is at the headwaters of the little-known Amargosa River system.

“Think of a Summerlin, and a beautiful shopping center right here,” Ringle says, driving his ATV from the Stagecoach Casino to show off the newly finished, sprawling 5.5-acre pond. “We think we have a very magical ingredient here, and we wanted to share that with Nevada. Can you imagine sitting by a lake in the morning having coffee, looking at the beautiful mountains?”

As Ringle impounded the rare Revert Springs spring system on his property to fill up the pond in hopes of attracting developer interest, Beatty residents took note of declined flows that seem to have been slow to recover. In a town with a decent slew of private landowners, environmentalists say the fickle watershed is hypersensitive to the smallest of changes.

The Amargosa lifeline

It was Beatty resident Autumn Arroyo who first raised questions about areas around town where the Amargosa River had completely dried up in May. She posted on the Beatty Townsite News Facebook group: “I’m absolutely appalled. Where did all the water go?”

The Amargosa River provides drinking water for thousands of desert dwellers, flowing through small Nevada and California towns into Badwater Basin at Death Valley National Park. It is also habitat for the rare Amargosa toad and Oasis Valley speckled dace, some of which died when sections of the river ran dry this summer.

Summer is tadpole season in Beatty, offering a recreational activity and teachable moments for Arroyo’s two children. This year, most of the tadpoles her children saw around town were dead.

“I used to work at Family Dollar, and when you walk out when it’s closing time you can hear the chorus of frogs just chirping away,” Arroyo said in a recent interview. “This summer hasn’t been like that. There’s a total void of those creatures.”

After hearing from environmentalists and locals, the Nevada Division of Water Resources and Nevada Department of Wildlife have been separately investigating whether the pond could require intervention.

Arroyo was involved in the campaign last year to keep lithium mining exploration out of Amargosa Valley, an unincorporated town closer to Las Vegas that petitioned the Bureau of Land Management for a moratorium on new mining claims.

In the ‘90s, the town of Beatty — nestled in deep-red Nye County — embraced efforts to conserve the declining Amargosa toad. So much so that environmentalists felt comfortable dropping it from consideration for protection under the federal Endangered Species Act.

The story is memorialized today in a torn-up sign outside Apfel Park, crediting habitat restoration to local landowners and the town. That culture of stewardship has since soured, at least where Ringle is concerned, and advocates filed a new petition seeking federal protection for the toads last year because of proposed gold mines in the area.

Disagreement among landowners

The other major landowner in town has a much different vision for Beatty than Ringle does.

The Nature Conservancy, a global nonprofit, has turned ranches into nature preserves. Its latest acquistion was in 2019, putting the group among the largest private landowners in Nye County.

Ringle maintains he was unaware of any opposition to his project from the conservancy or others, especially because he built a similar pond about two years ago right upstream of the new one, and no one in the town had complained about it.

His second-in-command is Frank Jarvis, an ex-cop who chairs the Beatty Water and Sanitation District.

Ringle splits his time between Beatty and Costa Rica, and he was out of the country for the majority of the period when the pond was being built. He had been arrested at the airport in April and charged by Costan Rican authorities with human trafficking for sexual exploitation and gender-based violence, according to a Costa Rican news report.

One of his employees at a casino in San Jose alleged that he had sexually abused her since 2018 and withheld pay, the news outlet reported.

Ringle denies the allegations and provided a July court order in which a judge declared that the employee “may be manipulating the judicial system to her advantage,” pointing out holes in what she had told investigators. The judge cleared him to leave the country and nullified a previous no-contact order, according to that document.

The conservancy’s external affairs director, Jaina Moan, said in an interview that Beatty staff had many direct conversations with Ringle and his employees about the pond, where concerns were dismissed.

Investigations ongoing

Moan and her staff elevated their observations to state water regulators in a letter sent in July.

“I think it’s so significant what happened here because it demonstrates how these seemingly small changes in river flow can have huge impacts on the life downstream, which has ripple effects for everything else,” Moan said.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Nevada Division of Water Resources said regulators began hearing from concerned residents in July. Since then, division staff have discussed the purpose of the project and whether a water rights change application could be necessary, the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson confirmed that Ringle’s company owns the rights to pump 540 acre-feet of water annually, for the purposes of irrigation. An acre-foot of water is roughly enough to sustain two single-family households for a year.

Another watchdog environmental group, the Center for Biological Diversity, sent a letter to wildlife regulators, who conducted an investigation and determined that water was flowing again out of Revert Springs in August. When the department visited the site in May, no water was flowing out from the springs, according to an investigative summary shared with the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The conservancy intends to send another letter to the wildlife department to spark further investigation, Moan said.

A new Nevada mining sector?

For a short period in the early 1900s, Beatty was the largest town in the larger Bullfrog Mining District, which included Goldfield and the two Nye County ghost towns of Rhyolite and Bullfrog. Though the gold mine went bust by 1914, a handful of companies have renewed interest in establishing new mines in and around Beatty.

The one with a project that’s underway in getting permits is AngloGold Ashanti, which has plans to build two gold mines in the area. The first will be the North Bullfrog Mine northwest of town, which will have a life of about 13 years and could add up to 283 people to the town of 673, according to a forthcoming economic analysis from the University of Nevada, Reno Extension office.

A team deduced that the North Bullfrog Mine will provide roughly $25 million annually to its employees, said Joe Lednicky, an economist with UNR Extension. Should employees of that mine reside in the region, he said, about 116 new homes are needed to accommodate new families.

Prior to the mine getting its record of decision from the Bureau of Land Management that is expected at the end of 2026, AngloGold Ashanti has been proactive about community investment.

It created the Beatty Foundation nonprofit to improve the economy in town, committing to a scholarship program for Beatty High School students, providing $15,000 in improvements for a Beatty health clinic, and updating one of the Beatty Water and Sanitation District’s groundwater wells.

Rick Curtsinger, a spokesman for AngloGold Ashanti, said in an interview that the company is excited by the prospect of helping to revitalize both the town and the defunct mining sector. He didn’t answer questions about the source of the project’s water, but he said the company will work with the BLM to mitigate impacts and pointed to extensive groundwater monitoring it’s already doing.

“We’re absolutely committed to those projects that will continue to have meaningful impact, help Beatty draw on its strong heritage and plan for the future,” Curtsinger said.

To Ringle, the gold mines are the ticket to seeing his dreams for Beatty come true, whether that’s a master-planned community, more casinos or a new commercial strip mall.

“If the gold mines come calling, I’ll answer,” Ringle said in a follow-up phone call after showing off the pond. “I’m like a rat on a wheel.”

Contact Alan Halaly at ahalaly@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AlanHalaly on X.