A Nevada woman is feeling the heat after Nevada authorities hit her with fines for offering rides to Burning Man.
61-year-old Susie Holland recently shared her story with the Reno Gazette Journal. Holland says Nevada Transportation Authority agents swarmed her car when she arrived to pick up Burners making their way to Black Rock Desert. It turns out her Burners were undercover agents.
“When I pulled in … they just swooped up on me in three undercover Ford Explorers,” Holland told the RGJ. “They were coming at me so fast, so hard and so intensely, I was like, what is happening right now?”
Holland says agents searched her car before informing her she could face up to $30,000 in fines. The crime? Apparently, it’s illegal to give rides to Burning Man without a permit.
“We are seeing huge amounts of illegal activity. Most people don’t even know that they are operating illegally. But it is illegal to operate without a certificate of public convenience, a necessity that is administered and issued through the Nevada Transportation Authority,” Vaughn Hartung, the Chairman of NTA, said to KOLO-TV.
When Holland went to the impound lot to get her car, she says an attendant told her 18 other cars had been brought in for the same reason. The 61-year-old Reno resident ended up paying $1,500 to both the NTA and the impound lot to get her car back. Holland is still waiting to see how much her fine will be.
“This is (the NTA’s) hunting season. They’re not going to let us know that this is illegal. It doesn’t behoove them in any way,” Holland told the Reno Gazette Journal.