America's First Legal Brothel Ordinance Was Passed in Storey County in 1971

In 1971, Mustang Ranch owner Joe Conforte had a problem: his brothel could be shut down at any time as a public nuisance. His solution changed American law. Conforte persuaded the Storey County commissioners to pass the nation's first brothel-licensing ordinance — if the county licensed the business, it couldn't very well abate it as a nuisance. That single vote, in a rural county of roughly 700 people, is the origin point of legal prostitution in the United States.

The ordinance survives today as Storey County Code Chapter 5.16, 'Brothels.' More importantly, it created the template: the county-option system later blessed by NRS 244.345, under which Nevada's smaller counties may license brothels while the statute forbids it in any county of 700,000 or more — which means Clark County, and Las Vegas. Legal brothels eventually operated in roughly 10 of Nevada's 17 counties, every one of them downstream of Storey County's 1971 experiment.

The Mustang Ranch itself supplied the strangest coda. In 1999 the IRS seized the brothel, meaning the famous house was, for a time, literally owned and auctioned by the federal government of the United States. The licensing ordinance it inspired outlived it, still on the books and still enforced — unlicensed operation remains a misdemeanor subject to nuisance abatement, the very fate the ordinance was invented to avoid.